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Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) is justly famous as an astronomer, but his livelihood came from the family’s brewing business, and Johannes himself was admitted to the Brewer’s Guild in 1636. His interests lay elsewhere, however. Devoting himself to constructing astronomical instruments and, most importantly, to carefully and precisely grinding lenses for telescopes, he developed an extremely well-equipped 17th-century observatory in Danzig, Poland.

The owner of a brewery and several public houses in Hampstead, then a suburb of London, author Michael Combrune wrote this book as an expanded version of an earlier work, incorporating his experiments on malts and fermentation, among other aspects of the brewing and wine-making trades.  Scientifically minded, he pioneered the thermometer as a crucial diagnostic tool for these processes.  The Libraries' copy was acquired in a major purchase of trade literature from the Franklin Institute in 1986.