It's Officially Official: TRUE BREWS Is Going To Be A Book!

Blueberry-orange wine, strawberry wine, and blackberry wine, all ready to get their ferment on.

I have been sitting on this for a few weeks now, bouncing and giddy and crazy-impatient to shout my news from the rooftops. I'm writing a book, y'all! Ten Speed Press took a gander at my proposal for a cookbook devoted to all things brewing and decided they liked what they saw. I've signed on with them to write "TRUE BREWS: Your Guide to Brewing Naturally Fermented Sodas, Beers, and Wine at Home."

Yup, this book is not only about how to brew beer (the fermented libation nearest and dearest to my heart), but also about brewing soda, kombucha, kefir, cider, mead, beer, sake, and fruit wines. And if you can think of another fermented beverage to throw in there, I'm totally game.

Saying that I'm excited is putting is extremely mildly. And not only am I excited to work my way through all these awesome brews, but I'm over the moon about working with Ten Speed. I have admired their cookbooks for years now. The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart and Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook were among some of the first on my shelf when I started my cooking journey after college. Every volume they publish is so lush and engaging, filled with recipes and pictures that carry me into the kitchen and keep me there.

The chance to work with them seems like a dream. And the fact that my editor and the other folks at Ten Speed are just as excited to get their brew on as I am makes the whole experience even awesomer.

There's lots more on its way in the coming months. Lots more stories and pictures and brewing tales, and more than likely, a few brewing woes. I have a year to develop all these recipes and get them ship-shape for publishing.

My aim to is to develop one-gallon recipes for all of these brews and use the same basic set of equipment for each. This amount can be easily made and stored in the tiniest of tiny city apartments, but it still makes enough delicious beverage to be worth doing. I also think that smaller batches are more conducive to fun experiments!

These three buckets hold my first attempts at wine making: a strawberry wine, a blueberry-orange, and a blackberry (though I'm actually using olallieberries from the market last week. Shhh...don't tell.). So far, they are doing a great job of making my kitchen smell funky-fresh with their carbonated burpings. Fun times!

I'll be sharing my brewing adventures here on the blog, on Twitter, and on my Facebook page. I'd love to have you along for the ride, and I welcome your input at all times.

And when it comes time to taste-test, I trust I'll have a few volunteers, yes?!

P.S. For those of you curious about the status of my memoir about learning how to brew beer: When all the dust settled over last few weeks, I decided to concentrate my energy on TRUE BREWS and put the memoir on the back burner. It's definitely still there, simmering away, and will have its own time to shine in due course.