How to Brew Hard Seltzer: A Guide for Craft Breweries and Homebrewers is a technical guide with some tutorial instruction for engaged hobby zymurgists up through small scale professionals to create alcoholic seltzers. Due out 7th Sept 2020 from Brewer's Publications, it's 250 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

The book follows a logical layout and is meticulously annotated throughout. Although it's slanted toward the professional/technical end of the scale, there's a fair amount of background history and information to keep non-brewers interested. I found it a fascinating read and read it straight through cover to cover. An introductory history and background leads into chapters covering characteristics, ingredients, instruction for craft breweries (professional scale) to produce seltzer along with recipes, government regulations, instructions and recipes for homebrewers, and cocktail recipes for using the seltzers produced.

The appendices include tutorials for beginning brewers with instructions for both seltzers and beer. The tutorials include good equipment lists, definitions of brewing terms, and relatively simple step-by-step instructions. Recipe ingredients are contained in bullet lists in the sidebar with American standard units given along with metric/SI measures in parentheses. Ingredients and varieties of hops, yeast, etc are very specific and will require a specialist retailer for sourcing. Alternatives and variation ingredients are listed in the recipes.

This is a -very- thorough and interesting book, but I would imagine it might be intimidating for complete beginners (maybe not with some mentoring from a local brewing supplier). My only quibble with the book was that I felt there was an implied elitist prejudice against anything other than -real- beer; that seltzer is a hipster drink, but it sells like crazy, so we have to produce what the customers want. It wasn't terribly overt, but it really was noticeable several places.

I've never before seen a book on brewing hard seltzers. This one is definitive. Five stars (despite the weird implied elitism).

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

I am not a home brewer, but I am a fan of seltzer and hard seltzer, so I wanted to read this book to see the behind the scenes of how my favorite beverage is made. I loved reading a bit of the history of brewing to set the foundation for hard seltzers and then also the history of seltzers in general and how brewers came to use them to keep sales continuing during the times of recession and COVID.

My favorite chapter of the book is chapter 9 where the reader is encouraged to take a hard seltzer and then doctor it up to make it a unique cocktail. I never thought about mixing my seltzers with other things to make new drinks - genius!

This is an excellent technical guide to making hard seltzer that is especially helpful for small breweries or hard core home brewers, although it also provides information for those who are new to home brewing and want to try making hard seltzer on a smaller scale.

What's most perplexing about this book is that the author makes no secret of the fact that he dislikes hard seltzer and pretty much dislikes the people who drink it. He runs a small brewery and they began selling hard seltzer recently because of consumer demand. There were no books with information so he wrote one for the industry and for home brewers. Colby frequently insults the drink though, and occasionally insults those who drink it. At the end of the introduction he writes, "I hope you enjoy the book. Now that I am done writing it, I need a beer." In the history section where he talks about how tastes developed for different beers in different countries (a very interesting section) and the recent rise of hard seltzers, he writes, "How can people continue to buy something that "tastes like TV static" they ask? The answer is that this is not what people are buying into--they are buying a beverage that is the thing that young, trendy, pseudo-health-conscious people are drinking." It's hard to get excited about doing something when the author seems to want to talk you out of doing it. He argues that hard seltzer is here to stay because of changes in the law and because people who want low carb, low calorie and keto drinks want it, and he says it's a way for breweries to stay in business even with the financial struggles that Covid-19 and such are causing.

The book itself is extremely complete and technical. Everything you need to know about every step is here, though there are not photographs of the steps or the equipment. It's like a very long, very well written manual. He then gives instructions for experienced home brewers to do it in five gallon batches, and then has a chapter for smaller scale and those who are less hard core. He follows that with a section telling you how to home brew beer, since this helps understand how to home brew seltzer (which is basically just sugar water that is boiled down, clarified, fed yeast and fermented until the yeast has turned the sugar to alcohol, and then very mildly flavored). For the most part the instructions are overly technical and are likely to discourage all but the most experienced home brewers. I have a lot of experience with home brewing country wines (wines made with fruits besides just grapes, frequently with wild or backyard fruits like elderberries, rhubarb and apples) and I thought it would be fun to brew hard seltzer, but I'm an old school brewer and am not the type to measure gravity, use purchased supplies and chemicals, filter it through charcoal, etc. Also, he was successful in kind of convincing me the end result isn't really worth it. I'll stick with my elderflower champagne and wild fruit hooch. :)

I'd highly recommend this book for brewers who want to get into brewing hard seltzer. Colby includes lots of information about popular flavors and combinations, and includes lots of recipes for varying alcohol content and flavor suggestions. While I probably will not use the information and brew hard seltzer myself, I now understand the process and enjoyed learning about it.

I read a digital ARC of this book for review.

What I thought this book would be: a yummy books filled with recipes and cocktails with a bit of background and science. What it was: all science and background and honestly it wasn’t for me. I was so excited to find new recipes to spice up my Hard seltzer but I just didn’t care for this. If you’re looking for a book song the lines of beer or wine crafting in seltzer form this is for you, but if you’re looking for a book with recipes to make quick and easy this is just not it.