This is a marvelous addition to my putz, DIY approach to life! I love to be able to use my garden clippings for the things that I craft. My favorites have been lavender simple syrup in homemade lemonade, rosemary and citrus scented vinegar cleaning solution, and the many soaps and bathroom scrubs that I've done. Adding home brewed beverages is a wonderful addition.

This book took all of the easier, known ideas and combined it with things I would have never considered for scenting or flavor options. I can't wait to get fig leaves from my neighbor and give that a try. With full-color and easy to follow instructions, this book offered way more than I ever expected. Bravo.

Great information, packaged well! If you're looking for an at-home adventure- this book can help. Get ideas and methods for bringing local wild ingredients into your craft brewing.

It is interesting what Pascal Baudar writes on The Wildcrafting Brewer. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about drinking.

Being relatively inexperienced and from the southern hemisphere some of the material here just didn't suit my level of expertise and the produce is not easy to access. However, for the more advanced of brewers, this is a treat. The illustrations are beautiful as well.

Found my recipe: Lazy fruit or Berry Wine! Heading to local farmers market next week in search of!!!
Also, nice mead recipe I want to try in September when a buds honey is ready! So many new brew and drinks to add to my collection of cordials!

The Wildcrafting Brewer is an excellent book for anyone curious about home brewing. This book is full of wonderfully delicious sounding recipes some of which I just cannot wait to try. I am especially fond of the section on homemade molasses and syrups which I think will have many uses in the kitchen! Methods are fully explained and accompanied by beautiful photography making it very easy to follow along, as well as adapt to the native plants in your own area, which I am especially looking forward to.

This is an ideal book for readers interested in experimenting with local or wild ingredients to create beer-like and wine-like fermented beverages, as well as sodas and meads and some traditional ethnic brews. Especially helpful for anyone looking beyond a single or dual flavour in their brewing.

It is an especially wonderful resource for anyone who has wanted to evoke a time and place in a glass, as the author walks the reader through examining and meditating on a place, with examples from his own creations, and some hints as to how he balances flavours.

While the focus is on using wild yeasts, which will typically result in lower alcohol content depending on strains and local conditions, the recipes should also work with commercial yeast varieties.

I had the opportunity through Net Galley to read a digital galley, much to my delight. I had stumbled upon Pascal Baudar a few years ago through my adventures in mead making, and find his posts on Facebook about wild fermentation and wild food a welcome addition to my day.

Reading this is like a conversation in some ways, with gorgeous photography, and clear directions to get you started.

One thing I noticed: some recipes are more verbose than others - The Nettle Beer is the first reference I have seen to keeping the pot lid on when placing the hot wort in a sink of cold water to cool, as well as multiple water changes (the water changes is logical, the lid on makes sense to me, but isn’t something I would have thought of without having been told).

While beer is not really my thing, this is a fabulous resource for anyone interested in brewing anything of local ingredients or that evokes a natural place. Pascal walks the reader through a description of how he might evoke a specific location, and there are recipes that relate to specific places in specific seasons. Representing your own place and time is of course always going to be an exercise and experiment in trying to balance the actual amounts of ingredients, but the recipes are excellent starting points to look at, as they use different types and quantities of bittering-type herbs to achieve hop-like qualities.

The section on wines was extensive (although felt a bit shorter than the beers), meads are briefly touched upon (to any pagan friends reading: these are more akin to small mead, rather than full fermentations for the most part). A few ethnic and medicinal brews are also touched on to inspire further research. Sodas finishes off the lot.

Even if a particular section is not something you intend to brew, read through it as there are methods throughout that can be applied to other fermentation types.

This is definitely going to be acquired sooner than later, as rereading it I keep unearthing more. Without hyperbole, this is the book I have been looking for, to aid in my brewing of beverages that are more than traditional one flavour or two-flavour combinations

This book has beautiful photography and inspiring recipes giving you the want to try your hand at making your own wild foraged drinks.

Wow, This is a extremely detailed book on making wild brews, having said that, it is extremely easy to read and understand.
The book explains about all the ingredients needed and the best suited, and there are tidbits on information that answers questions before they are raised in your mind. The book has lots of recipes and a large section on wild yeast. A book for anyone that is truly into wild and organic brews I don't think you could find anything better

Although meant for the US market, many of the recipes can be adapted in Australia. This book has given me great inspiration particularly what to do with the abundant tropical white mulberries in my garden!

Brewing with the things available wildly....... A great book for home brewers.......

An expansive take on creatively preserving the harvest, this book stepped outside mainstream homebrewing publications in the best possible way.

Amazing book. I loved the details for each recipe and the step by step pictures. Also, the origin and the history of the recipes
are valuable. The recipes can be adapted and used during the year

A fun and unique take on brewing beer, wine, mead, sodas and more using ingredients found in your natural surroundings. Baudar distills his obvious knowledge into easy-to-read sections, and his passion and enthusiasm are evident on the page. Can't wait to try a few of these recipes!

There is a bewildering array of brewing tomes out there from which to choose. It's often difficult or impossible to know which of the myriad 'best ways' of doing things is the right way or most workable way. It's easy for brewers to be discouraged and confused. The Wildcrafting Brewer is unique in my experience because the point of the entire workbook is to experiment, find ingredients in one's local terroir and use controlled experimentation, availability, and creativity to make unique brews and sodas which are based on wildcrafted and locally sourced produce.

Due out 12th Feb, 2018 from author Pascal Baudar and Chelsea Green Publishing The Wildcrafting Brewer is both a workbook and primer along with a healthy dose of anthropology and oral history. It's a weird and very entertaining book full of guidance and experience.

The first chapters introduce the concept of wildcrafting in relationship to brewing along with a general introduction to beers, meads, sodas, wines, and hybrid concoctions which defy categorization. The author spends a great deal of time explaining safe gathering and brewing methods as well as preparing the gathered materials for use in brewing.

About 15% of the content is spent defining the history and methodology of brewing covering equipment and supplies as well as different types of sugars (gotta feed those yeasts and turn the sugars into alcohol).

Next he delves into a study of finding and sourcing yeasts and what the different sorts of yeasts and starters can add to homebrews. All yeasts are not created equal and the author provides a guide for tweaking and adjusting the sugar content to best suit the type of yeast which is being used. As an example, wild yeasts from homemade starter are generally less resistant to alcohol, so they die off at a lower alcohol percentage. If you use a recipe tweaked for a champagne yeast, which is hardy to up to 15% alcohol by volume, the wild yeast will die off long before all the sugars are converted in the wort, leaving an overly sweet resultant brew.

The yeast chapter is especially interesting and thorough, and encourages reflection and experimentation. The entire book has an encouraging DIY feel, but I especially appreciated the interesting aspects of sourcing and finding wild yeasts and making starters from wildcrafted supplies.

The book progresses through adding flavors and different methods for brewing as well as a relatively exhaustive look at sugars and sources, to finding (or making) different types of less processed and refined sugar in wildcrafted brewing.

The specific categories of brews; beers, wines and meads, ethnic drinks and medicinal brews, and sodas get their own chapters with a fairly exhaustive look at each group.
The book closes with an resource list and recipe index.

As a homebrewer, I've never used wildcrafted ingredients in my brews, apart from honey (I'm a beekeeper) and homegrown fruit (I'm a gardener). This book is not really for the 'blind follower' or for the brewer who's interested in cookie cutter brewing which will give identical results consistently. It is, however, a guided look at primitive brewing with wildcrafted ingredients along with a heaping dose of historical reference to our ancient connection with brewed and fermented drinks.

Definitely out of the ordinary, but well researched and beautifully photographed.

Four stars
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher.

4.5 Stars

I've been fascinated with wildcrafting ever since I saw the movie Where the Lilies Bloom when I was about thirteen. I promptly inhaled the book by Bill and Vera Cleaver (I still have the 1974 release) and embarked on an interesting summer stay at my aunt's house in Burnsville, North Carolina, trying things like sodas made with Queen Anne's Lace (aka wild carrot) flowers and baked goods made with wild carrot seeds at the farmer's market. It was a short hop to my wild berries obsession. So I hesitated over whether or not to try this Net Galley offering because, having celiac disease, I feared the disappointment of seeing a whole bunch of gluten-based brewing recipes that would leave me disappointed. Boy, was I wrong! This book is a treasure trove for the alternative beer and winemaker. As a treatise just on growing wild yeasts it's a thrill. And to top it all off, this book is truly beautiful to look at.

This book may not be something an urban dweller will find easy to work with (although if you have a good farmers market there are plenty of workarounds). My only hesitation about recommending it is that, like a real wildcrafter, you had better be very sure about what you're picking and fermenting. The whole debate about thujones in wolfsbane aside, there are a lot of mildly to very poisonous things out there, from pokeweed to bittersweet to yew-berry to holly. Some are well known to be poisonous and some are lesser known. For city-raised brewers, having a guidebook or other resource to the plants and fruits you're planning to use is vital. Likewise, as Baudar points out, using these recipes if you're pregnant would not be wise.

With those caveats out of the way, this is a beautiful book that is going to be purchased for my New Hampshire kitchen. One of these days I'll hope to post photos of my version of the Mountain Raspberry/Blueberry soda!

This has a lot of great information, as well as full color photographs and easy to follow recipes. I will be getting a copy for my husband for Christmas! It's not just about home brew, though...it also has many great projects for the kids to work on, too.