About Horst Dornbusch

Horst Dornbusch is an award-winning brewer, bilingual beer journalist and book author, the former owner of an American craft brewery, a frequent judge at international beer competitions, a sought-after event speaker, and the founder of Cerevisia Communications LLC, a consulting firm in the international brewing industry.

A native of Düsseldorf, Germany, Horst emigrated to the New World at age 22, after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States. After graduate school, he lived and worked for ten years in Montréal in the French-Canadian province of Québec before returning to the States. Horst is now a dual German-American citizen, with native fluency in both German and English and conversational ability in French and Spanish, and he still remembers his seven years of high school Latin.

His knowledge of beer-making and the brewing industry is self-taught. He made his first five-gallon (20-liter) batch of “undefinable” ale as a homebrewer in 1971. In subsequent years, as his home brewing became more sophisticated, he studied the standard brew science textbooks in German and English in his spare time. Finally, in the early 1990s, to acquire some commercial brewing experience, he hired himself out as a weekend brewery apprentice at a craft brewery. In 1995, he chucked his corporate career and founded his own craft brewery in Massachusetts. At the turn of the millennium, his Altbier won him a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival. In more than four decades of beer-making, he has fearlessly brewed, in systems large and small, virtually all of the world’s beer styles, as well as many beers of his own design.

In addition, he has been able to happily combine his passion for beer with his penchant for writing. When not busy consulting, he regularly contributes brew-technical, beer-historical, and brew business-related articles to several periodicals in Europe and North America. In addition, he has written eight books on beer, and was the Associate Editor and a major contributor to the 900-page reference work, The Oxford Companion to Beer, published by the Oxford University Press. Horst has also been interviewed on radio and TV from New Zealand to Austria, from Brazil to Germany, and from the UK to the US.