Drinks from the Garden: Alcoholic Drinks

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There's no feeling quite like cooking with home-grown carrots or grabbing a fresh handful of cilantro from your own yard. Well, unless you're growing fruits, vegetables, or grains for brewing that is. Gardening for the Homebrewer is an introduction to the wide variety of plants that you can use for fermentations or infusions. Learn how to tell if your yard is a perfect site for barley or whether it's better suited to a fragrant collection of herbs. Learn how to grow, dry, and store fresh hops. Or go off the beaten path and grow everything you need for your first gruit, cider, perry, or fruit wine. Have just a balcony or a windowsill? No problem! A variety of plant recommendations will suit gardeners of all types, even ones with limited space.

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This book will guide any prospective brew master through the process of growing their own brewing ingredients from inception to harvesting. You will learn all of the many advantages to growing your own beer materials, starting with the control you have over the maturity, strength, types, and volume of those materials. You will learn how to home grow your own hops, with detailed instructions and information about the taste and effect of more than a dozen different strains of hops. You will also learn which grains and malts are used in beer making and how you can start growing your own depending on your needs and your location. You will learn how to concoct your own brewing herbs and finally how to start combining everything into the ideal mixtures to form your own beer.

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The Organic Grain Grower is an invaluable resource for both home-scale and commercial producers interested in expanding their resiliency and drop diversity through growing their own grains.

Contents: Apple varieties A to Z -- The orchard primer -- Planning and designing an orchard -- Planting and cultural management -- Propagation -- Apple products -- Recommended uses of apple varieties.

Cider is the new thing in today’s drinking world, even though it’s been around for centuries. In spite of its long and colorful history, cider has remained relatively underappreciated by the American public. The purchase in 2012 of a Vermont-based cidermaker for over $300 million signaled that this is all likely to change very soon. Richly informative and entertaining, Cider, Hard and Sweet is your go-to source for everything related to apples, cider, and ciderm aking. It includes great information on apple varieties, cidermaking basics, barrel fermentation, and recipes for cooking with cider—with instructions for making boiled cider and cider jelly, and recipes for dishes with cider braises and marinades. It also teaches readers how to recognize a good cider and takes you from buying store-bought to making the genuine article at home.

Everyone--not just gardeners--will want to take a bite out of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's deliciously illustrated tribute to the luscious, healthful apple. Of course, there's plenty of information on cultivation, including the ABCs of growing the fruit at home and lots of expert tips. But foodies who love to eat and cook with apples will also find this guide useful and enjoyable. With an encyclopedia of 60 of America's best varieties, it's handy to take along when visiting farmer's markets and roadside stands, and will help buyers choose from the bounty of treasured heirloom breeds and tasty new types.

The book comprises eight narrative chapters and a directory to over 500 varieties of pear. The chapters follow the pear’s journey across continents and cultures, tracing its history and development. Each directory entry contains tasting notes, covers the variety’s origins and history, and includes full fruit descriptions for the purposes of identification, as well as details helpful to its cultivation.

You don't need to trek into the forest to forage edible plants. Ideal for first-time foragers, this book features 70 edible weeds, flowers, mushrooms, and ornamental plants typically found in urban or suburban neighborhoods. You'll be amazed by how many of the plants you see each day are actually nutritious edibles! Full-color photographs make identification easy, and tips on where certain plants are likely to be found, how to avoid pollution and pesticides, and how to recognize the plants you should never harvest make foraging as safe and simple as stepping into your own backyard.

Edible plants provide spring blossoms, colorful fruit and flowers, lush greenery, fall foliage, and beautiful structure, but they also offer fruits, nuts, and seeds that you can eat, cook with, and preserve. Eat Your Yard! includes ideas for creating the landscape as well as an overview and tips on canning, pickling, dehydrating, freezing, juicing, and fermenting.

Fermentation is what makes foods like beer, pickles, and sauerkraut delicious—and nutritious. Fermented foods are chock-full of probiotics that aid in digestive and overall health. In addition, the fermentation process also has been shown to add nutrients to food, making already nutritious food even better! Fermenting For Dummies provides step-by-step information for cooks, homesteaders, farmers, and food lovers of any kind who want to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for arguably the oldest form of food preservation.

Dinner under the stars in a formal garden, a tea amid the roses, rustic breakfast in an Adirondack camp, a harvest luncheon . . . these are parties that celebrate the best that nature has to offer, paired with food and drink perfect for the surroundings. You know how much enjoyment and relaxation your garden brings you—why not share it with friends and family? Throughout Garden Parties, Suzy Bales inspires fancifully fun parties that transform outdoor spaces into enchanting playgrounds for the senses—the plants, the decor, and the food intermingle to create truly memorable themes.

How to grow herbs and use them in cooking and teas.

The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners.

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet? In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries.

Also Available as an eBook!
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To access this eBook, click on book title and log on with PHS membership number.

To access this eBook, click on book title and log on with PHS membership number.

To access this eBook, click on book title and log on with PHS membership number.

To access this eBook, click on book title and log on with PHS membership number.

Matthews brings a scientist’s skepticism and scrutiny to widely held ideas and beliefs about viticulture--often promulgated by people who have not tried to grow grapes for a living--and subjects them to critical examination: Is terroir primarily a marketing ploy that obscures our understanding of which environments really produce the best wine? Can grapevines that yield a high berry crop generate wines of high quality? What does it mean to have vines that are balanced or grapes that are fully mature? Do biodynamic practices violate biological principles? These and other questions will be addressed in a book that could alternatively be titled (in homage to a PUP bestseller) On Wine Bullshit.

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In The Organic Backyard Vineyard expert Tom Powers walks the small grower through the entire process of growing grapes, with a month-by-month maintenance guide covering all regions of the U.S. and Canada. He explains everything a beginning grape grower needs to know: how to design and build a vineyard, how to select grapes for each region, how to maximize yield using organic maintenance techniques, how to build a trellis, how to harvest at peak flavor, and how to store grapes for winemaking.

Updated from his self-published version, this edition includes organic growing information and all new photography. The Organic Backyard Vineyard features everything a wine lover needs to build and care for a backyard vineyard.
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Uncorking the Past tells the compelling story of humanity's ingenious, intoxicating quest for the perfect drink. Following a tantalizing trail of archaeological, chemical, artistic, and textual clues, Patrick E. McGovern, the leading authority on ancient alcoholic beverages, brings us up to date on what we now know about how humans created and enjoyed fermented beverages across cultures.

The perfect drink, it turns out- may be fundamental to the human condition itself.

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