Reddit reviews The Homebrewer's Garden, 2nd Edition: How to Grow, Prepare & Use Your Own Hops, Malts & Brewing Herbs

"The Homebrewer's Garden" was a great book for getting me started. I have four hills with two rhizomes each of chinook and cascade that are currently on their 5th year, and doing great. I have 8 lines (set up in four "V" patterns) going 25' up the side of my barn's southern facing wall ( check it here ) and that setup has worked great for me so far.

edit: That photo was taken before we raised the ropes up, they're about 12'-15' there.

So, like I mentioned in the post, if I'm gonna be technical, this is maybe closer to an African-inspired braggot, or sorts. By nature, it's qualifiable to call it a "t'ella", which is an Ethiopian type of a beer. However, my main inspiration for this, beyond Black Panther, was "t'ej", which is kinda like an African mead.

On the other side of the spectrum, a "gruit" is a slightly more well known term. It refers to brewing with either no or minimal use of hops, in favor of brewing with herbs. Some good resources for that would be Against All Hops, which is written by Butch Heilshorn, the Headbrewer of Earth Eagle Brewing Co, who specializes in brewing gruits. I'd also say to check out The Homebrewer's Almanac, which is written by the owners of Foraged Brewing Co, and also focuses heavily on using botanical ingredients alongside traditional ones in brewing. Heck, it's a little more old school, but even The Homebrewer's Garden has some pretty good material in it for reference.

To break it all down: this beer was strongly inspired be African t'ej and t'ella, but to put it in some more familiar terms for EU/US readers, it can also be seen as a gruit, because I didn't use any hops in it either. The way it works out, you could probably say it falls under multiple umbrellas and however tried it could call it how they see fit. For me, this was totally experimental I don't have a neat little BJCP box to say "Mmmm, yes, right there. Number Xc. category."

Unless you meant the name of the beer, which is Mnyama T'ej, where "mnyama" itself would translate, loosely, to "black" in English. Also kinda means "beast" in Swahili, but I wasn't quite so sure how dark the finished product would be, what with a whole pound of roasted barley in it. Suffice it to say, the beer is more black in inspiration, rather than appearance.

I have found The Homebrewers Garden to be a pretty good resource for this kind of information. Does a nice job at combining gardening/growing tips and tricks with and how you can implement it all in your beer. It also has a full selection of recipes included in the book which utilize all of the home grown adjuncts that it highlights.