North Carolina Craft Beer and Brewers (1st edition), Blair, 2012
Way back in 2010 when I was working on starting my brewery, Mystery Brewing Company, I was casting about for something to do. I had realized that having a full-time day job meant that I wasn't able to respond to what I needed to do to get a business going, but since I spent so much time waiting for things to happen I also didn't have a whole lot on my plate, so I wrote a lot. As part of my self-promotion I wrote a blog called "Top Fermented" now lost to Wordpress database decay which focused, primarily on my, I thought, clever opions about the business of beer. I made a lot of contacts in the beer industry and within North Carolina.
One of them, an excellent gentleman named Jonathan Surratt had been contacted by a local North Carolina publisher to write a guide about North Carolina breweries. He had just moved to Chicago and it was likely going to be a difficult commute, so he passed them onto me. I wrote what was, for at least 10 - 15 minutes, the definitive and up to date guide to breweries in the state. There are 40 breweries in the book - many of which are still around! By the time the book came out several months later it was 20 breweries out of date. It's just too fast of an industry for this kind of thing, really. Still, a good history and/or snapshot in time.

North Carolina Craft Beer and Brewers (2nd edition), Blair, 2016
In 2016, Blair came back for a second edition. In the following six years, the industry had exploded and was ramping up and we tried to do an updated edition. I enlisted the help of my wife, an English professor and professional researcher, to help me write the second edition as my own brewery was taking up so much of my waking hours and the amount of content had literally more than tripled since the first book. Together, we managed to squeeze out 145 breweries worth of content which was out of date by almost 100 breweries when the book was finally published 4 months later. Again, good history and snapshot in time.
The benefit to this book, and its predecessor, is that we really tried to tell the story of the people behind the breweries rather than just sort of focus on "It's a garage you can drink beer in" though there's definitely a certain amount of that. The people that we profiled (that agreed to be profiled and interviewed) are genuinely nice people with interesting stories and even as just a snapshot of young entrepreneurs, I think it's probably an interested read.

The Homebrewer's Problem Solver, Quarry, 2017
Quarry (or their UK branch Quid/Quarto) contacted me out of the blue and asked me to write a book in their series "Problem Solver" which I jumped on because I thought - surely this will be easy. Boy, was I wrong. The example book that they sent to me so that I could see what formula I was going to write in was the Chicken Keeper's Problem Solver wherein 1) I learned a lot more about chickens that I had previously known and 2) I felt like... wow.. finding 100 chicken problems seemed like it must have been difficult. And, lo, so it was for homebrew. There are "problems" in this book that, honestly, if you are running into as a homebrewer you are well and truly fucked and you need a lot more help than this book can give you. But! If you're a homebrewer I hope that you'll find at least a handful of tips in there that can help you relax and get your beer made and it's got a lot of full-page full-color glossy photos so it's nice to look at, too.

CAMRA's Homebrewer's Problem Solver, Quarto, 2017
Same book with a lot more "u"s in it. Sort of.

I include this book seperately for several reasons.

1. As a beer nerd of a certain age that likes English-style beers (and particularly cask ales), I have a fanboyish appreciation for CAMRA which realizing that it's kind of a now problematic and conservative organization, and I'm even a member even though I can literally enjoy zero benefits from it. I just felt really proud that something I wrote became an official CAMRA guide. A couple of years ago on a trip to England I took the opportunity to go to a CAMRA festival in the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday where I had an absolute blast being the only American in a field full of well-aged blokes enjoying too much Real Ale and I just felt inordinately proud that my book was on display and for sale there, even though I felt mortified to actually identify myself as the author. Properly British sentiment, I think.
2. I think it's hilarious that the 1-Star review for this book on Amazon says, in the most British way possible:
   
   "...Oh, and an afterthought, although this is a CAMRA book, the language in it is very North American. A minor point, but I like a British book to use English.
   EDIT: After reading this book, I have reduced the score from three to one. The book needs to decide if it was written for the North American or European market. The units of measure are a mix between Imperial and metric, often swapped over mid-sentence and in some cases within formulas. Litres of water per pound? Or target temperatures in Celcius, but the solution to the formula in Fahrenheit. This book needs to decide what it is, then a good editor needs to take it apart and rebuild it in a form that makes sense and isn't confusing."
   
   DPickett, whoever you are, you are so correct and I could not agree with you more. Unfortunately, they did hire someone to update it for the UK (I know, because I worked with them as a consultant/editor on updating another book later, and it was the same person!) and, frankly, they're not really... measurement people. I wish I could have updated the book for you. Sorry! But! You appear to be the one person who sussed this out! Congratulations!