The home fermenter's workshop.

What Cellar Bench publishes.

Cellar Bench publishes reference books and tools for home fermenters who track their batches and refine them over time. The catalogue covers two halves of fermentation work: alcoholic ferments — beer, mead, wine, and cider — and food ferments such as sauerkraut, kimchi, vinegar, miso, and sourdough. Alcoholic-fermentation titles appear under the R J Barley editorial byline; food-fermentation work will appear under separate imprints when those titles ship.

The Fermentation Series is the alcoholic half: five volumes, one per craft, each built around the same batch-tracker pattern with back-matter references tuned to that craft.

A consistent pattern, by design.

Every volume in the series follows the same structure. The front matter sets the rules: copyright, trademark notice, a how-to-use guide, and a quick tour of a batch spread. The body of the book is fifty single-page batch entries — ingredients, fermentation log, packaging, tasting wheel, and a "next time" iteration line. The back matter is a craft-specific reference library: yeast strains, style families, troubleshooting, and a glossary that doesn't define the basics, because the books are written for fermenters who already know them.

What Cellar Bench is not about.

Cellar Bench is not a gardening site. The home-harvest cluster — raised beds, preserves, kitchen gardens — is out of scope and there are no plans to add it. Distilling is also explicitly out of scope, on legal grounds across the US, UK, and EU. Anything that doesn't fit "tools and references for fermenters who measure their batches" is treated as expansion territory for someone else, not Cellar Bench.

Get in touch.

Corrections, feedback, and inquiries: hello@cellarbench.com. Pattern-spotted an error in a calculator or a reference table? Send a note with the page, the input you tried, and what you expected — every correction sharpens the next revision.

Author bio: R J Barley, the editorial byline behind the Fermentation Series.