Book Week: Strong's Modern Homebrew Recipes

Modern Homebrew Recipes: Exploring Styles and Contemporary Techniques
Gordon Strong
Brewers Publication, 322 pages, $20

• What is it? A beginner-to-intermediate homebrew guide for modern tastes
• Who's it For? Beer fans who want to brew their own
• Reviewer Disclosure. None; never met Gordon Strong

The Review

According to the Amazon stats the moment I checked them (6:30 pm, July 6), Charlie Papazian's Complete Joy of Homebrewing is the 5,024th best selling book on the entire site. It was originally written over 30 years ago, and show no signs of losing commercial viability. But the truth is, it's very, very badly outdated on nearly every front. It mainly explains extract homebrewing, which no one should ever do, tells you how to improvise a homebrewery out of materials that existed in the early 80s, and worst of all, gives you a bunch of recipes that look ... quaint. Anyone coming to beer in 2015 should rightly regard it more as a historical text.

Many homebrew books have been written since, but few actually consider the interests of that 2015 beer fan. It's next to impossible to assess a homebrew book without brewing several of the recipes, and I haven't done so with Gordon Strong's new book, Modern Homebrew Recipes, but by all appearances, it is for that 2015 beer fan. The first section in the book starts right where that fan live: IPAs. Perfect. People may one day get around to an altbier, but it's the IPLs and double IPAs and Belgian IPAs that they really want to sink their teeth into. As you glance through his recipes, you see the same kinds of beers you see in pubs now. These aren't homemadey, hippie batches from the heart of the Baby Boom era, they're updated versions of modern styles.

Strong is the president of the Beer Judge Certification Program, the author of the BJCP guidelines, and an award-winning homebrewer. He is, unfortunately, a self-trained brewer, and it shows in places. The Flanders red is a case in point. "When I visited the brewery, I saw how after the beer came out of the barrel it was much more sour than their finished product. They must do some blending to hit a target sourness level, most likely like gueuze." Actually, not really. The recipe itself makes the same mistake every American brewer whose made this beer (except Josh Pfriem!) has made--pitching the Roselare strain straight into wort. That's not how Rodenbach makes it, and it's a sure-fire way to make a chemical stew. Sometimes, trying to reverse-engineer beer works brilliantly; sometimes it doesn't.

But hey, small criticism. Overall, I think it's the kind of book brewers are probably actually looking for now when they decide to take up homebrewing.

Book Week: The Beer Wench's Guide to Beer

The Beer Wench's Guide to Beer
Ashley Routson
Voyageur Press, 256 pages, $23

• What is it? A personal beer tour by Ashley Routson
• Who's it For? Aspiring beer geeks
• Reviewer Disclosure. I know Ashley a bit and have met her a couple times--and had one unintentional online fracas with her.
• Scope. The U.S. mostly, though she touches on foreign styles

The Review

This book is aptly named. It's not a general primer, written by a faceless writer in the classic voice-of-God third-person. It's a personal book written in the first person in a very chatty, familiar voice. You have the feeling, very early on, that Ashley Routson has you by the elbow and is taking you on a tour of the beer world, pointing out the things that catch her eye. During the tour, she offers a very current sense of the way American beer geeks see the world--which I sense is also quite personal. Routson is in many ways the face of American craft beer, and folks who are entering that world will get a strong sense of its flavor. (She has an all-star list of blurbs on the back cover: Dogfish Head's Sam Calagione, Stone's Mitch Steele, Firestone Walker's Matt Brynildson, the Brewers Association's Julia Herz.)

The structure itself captures the current thinking on beer in the US.  She starts with beer types, organized by family, but only spends 40% of the book there. She points them out from her perspective, offering punchy little observations like "my take," "in the mouth" (taste), "in one word" (mild: friendly; IPA: invigorating; saison: majestic), "drink instead of" (and here she helpfully offers alternatives to wine and cocktails). Then she moves along to a section on ingredients and appreciation, which is again interpretive. For example, in describing esters, she has a table that lists the "fancy scientific name" and the associated smell. The last 40% of the book concerns food pairings, cooking, and beer cocktails, and while I am largely ignorant of those things, it seems to be a strength in the book.

The feel here is of a welcoming insider showing a newbie the ropes. The information in some sections is not always accurate. The beer styles section has some poor history* and I would quibble with the introduction to the styles in several places.  I wish these had been cleaned up a bit, but I don't actually think it's a huge problem. If you're the kind of pedant who reads Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell and knows what a mild really is, you were never going to buy this book in the first place. If, on the other hand, you are a Corona Light drinker who has put your toe in the Blue Moon waters, that's a good enough description.

Ashley Routson is, like craft beer culture itself, a somewhat polarizing figure. She is as close to "celebrity" as beer writers get (ain't no one paying me to write Jeff Alworth's Guide to Beer), and that means she attracts attention both positive and negative. Her rise to fame has been fueled by social media (she has 33,000 Twitter followers and 45,000 Instagram followers; Widmer Brothers have 21,000 Twitter followers), and this is a book for the social media age. It is light, breezy, personal, and filled with the personality of the writer. Although the book will no doubt draw some negative reviews, it will introduce a lot of people to beer--and they'll be the better for it.

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*Mild ale: "Milds got their name for the same reason bitters got theirs--patrons used it as a way to differentiate between the two styles at the pub. They would either order the bitter (the hoppy pale ale) or the mild (the less hoppy, less alcohol and therefore more 'mild' ale)."

Book Week: Beechum and Conn's Experimental Brewing

Experimental Homebrewing
Drew Beechum and Denny Conn
Voyageur Press, 240 pages, $25

• What is it? A detailed guide to modern American beer types
• Who's it For? Intermediate-level homebrewers
• Reviewer Disclosure. None (though Denny Conn does live in Oregon).

The Review

Rare is the homebrew book with a running theme, but Beechum and Conn devised one with their "experimental" concept. The notion is that homebreweries are essentially little labs, and homebrewers should embrace the science of experimentation. I'd put it a different way. While most homebrew books describe standard techniques and help you brew classic styles, Experimental Homebrewing encourages you to dabble. In this way, it is the most modern homebrew book out there, and one that closely mirrors the experimentation going on at the professional level.

There's a lot to love about this book. Beechum and Conn brew separately--and differently. They bring their first-hand experiences to bear, and the reader gleans one of the most important lessons in brewing: there's no one way to do anything. They have a loose, informal approach to brewing, and while they're happy to give you the math if you want it, they do so only to show their work (and, I suppose, for those math nerds who love it). Everything else is in clear, descriptive prose that makes the process of homebrewing seem approachable. Which is perfect--it is approachable. You can make great beer without understanding hydrogen ions.

Homebrewers are nearly always experimental in temperament (they like to make jalepeno helleses before they really know how to make helleses), and this book encourages them. There's plenty of talk of crazy ingredients and how to use them. More interesting are the sections that teach brewers how to experiment with process and technique. There's modern stuff like force injection (infusion might be a better term) , along with classics like parti-gyle brewing, invert sugar, cask brewing, blending, and more. There's quite a bit on experimenting with ingredients and technical stuff like dissolved oxygen and yeast counts.

This is a great book. If you haven't started brewing yet, you need one of the standard manuals to teach you how to get started. This would be a perfect second book--and I put it right there with Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing as a great intermediate resource. As a bonus, the authors have set up an interactive website to continue discussions about the experiment.

Beer Week: Steven Shomler's Portland Beer Stories

Portland Beer Stories; Behind the Scenes with the City's Craft Brewers
Stephen Shomler
American Palate, 170 pages, $20

• What is it? A collection of stories about the people who work in Portland's beer world
• Who's it For? Portlanders
• Reviewer Disclosure. I wrote the foreword. I know Steven a bit, but mainly in the way I know many people whom I see around town at pubs and fests.
• Scope. Portland, Oregon

The Review

Portland Beer Stories is something of a curious book. It contains a fairly large number of vignettes about brewers (home- and pro), publicans, business owners, and writers (a few cider makers even make the list). It's actually something like a collection of blog posts, though author Steven Shomler is not a blogger. (He does, however harness our local blogging talent for interstitial "writer perspectives" pieces, giving it an even more bloggy feel.) That is to say, there's no through-line connecting these stories; their organizing principle is the city itself. Collectively, the vignettes manage to convey the kind of variety you find here in our rich little ecosystem, from the owner of one of the country's oldest homebrew shops to the director of the Oregon Brewers Guild to Rob and Kurt Widmer.

But the structure also limits the appeal of book to folks beyond our borders. For those of us who live and drink here, it adds wonderful texture to the world we see superficially. I've been shopping at FH Steinbart's since the 1990s, and it was cool to read about John DeBenedetti's family business. Portland's a small town, and if you've been to more than five beer events, you're likely to have seen certain faces appear again and again. Some of them people this book, like homebrewers Lee Hedgmon and Rodney Kibzey. I doubt there's very many people who don't know beer goddess Lisa Morrison, but there she is. Beer writer John Foyston, check. Owners of  and familiar faces at Saraveza (Sarah Pederson) and BeerMongers (Sean Campbell)?--yup. 

For Portlanders, it's a pleasure to read the stories of these folks, but what if you live in Cleveland? I dunno. If this were called Munich beer stories and was peopled by local beery Munichers, I spose I'd actually be pretty interested. My guess, though, is that this is really a book for, by, and about Portlanders. You'll have to decide if that applies to you or not.

Beer Week: Mary Izett's Speed Brewing

Speed Brewing
Mary Izett
Voyageur Press, 192 pages, $20

• What is it? A homebrewing book focused on speedy fermentation
• Who's it For? Urban homebrewers on the go
• Reviewer Disclosure. None. I have no connection to Mary Izett
• Scope. Homebrewing

The Review

I have noticed a recent trend in homebrewing of books that offer full all-grain brewing experiences, but in uncomplicated forms especially for urban dwellers. Mary Izett, a New Yorker, follows this trend and offers a range of different fermented beverages that can be made quickly in one- or two-gallon batches. No complex RIMS or HERMS system--nor a back yard--necessary. These books are a very welcome addition to the homebrewing canon; they recognize a basic obstacle to brewing (complexity and cost) and address it not by dumbing-down homebrewing with extracts, but just making smaller, less complicated beers.


Izett spends the first 55 pages explaining the process of brewing and giving an overview of the various ingredients. It's brisk and clear, and those who follow the instructions will be able to brew their first batches without investing a ton of money. Homebrew converts can easily scale up without having spent a bunch of money on now-useless equipment, and those who make just a batch or two won't feel guilty about what they spent.

The recipes are divided into different categories of fermentables: beer, cider, mead, kombucha, fermented sodas (hey, they're a thing now, don'tcha know?), and a way-too-short section on traditional beverages like kvass and tepache. I didn't brew the recipes but the beer, anyway, looks well-done. The cider section isn't so great (she directs readers to ferment plain grocery-store apple juice), but the mead section is. (Mead is an overlooked treat.)

Since it's an introductory book designed to get people to try their hand at brewing, the recipes are basic and designed to be foolproof--or at least hard to mess up. Anyone who buys this book in order to get started with the mechanics of brewing will be very pleased. If you want to get someone interested in homebrewing, buy them this book or a book like it--it is far better than a $200 kit for making extract beers.

Book Week: Mosher's Beer for All Seasons

A Beer for All Seasons
Randy Mosher
Storey, 200 pages, $15

• What is it? A introduction to beer, arranged by season
• Who's it For? New to intermediate readers
• Reviewer Disclosure. None. I've admired and ready Mosher for years, but have no personal connection. I did write one of the promo blurbs on the cover, but that's because I thought it was a good book.
• Scope. Spans the globe

The Review
Most people who read this blog are already well-acquainted with Randy Mosher. He has published two of the best general-purpose beer books ever written, one for homebrewers (Radical Brewing) and one on appreciation (Tasting Beer). If you already own and treasure those books, this one is, paradoxically, probably not for you. It's an introduction to the world of beer, organized, innovatively, around the seasons. 

Anyone who wants to offer newbies a comprehensive introduction to beer is confronted with the huge task of how to arrange the material so that it is adequately complete, somehow coherent, and ultimately not so overwhelming that readers abandon the quest after a few pages. Mosher arranges things by season, slotting in the types of beer you'd be most inclined to drink then. He lists seasonal events and celebrations, and embroiders each chapter with interesting historical vignettes (a Mosher specialty). He doesn't go deep, but he does manage to bring coherence to the subject in a novel and organic read.

There is the usual stuff you find in all books (and which you'll find in the Beer Bible): an overview of the styles, history, and ways to appreciate beer. All of that will be completely familiar to anyone who reads beer blogs. That doesn't mean it's not great. Mosher is the best explainer in the biz. He fuses an informal, lighthearted voice with the ability to condense his encyclopedic knowledge into concise sentences. Here are a few sentences on yeast.

"[A]s it ferments our beer for us, yeast churns out hundreds of flavor chemicals. Yeast is quite a complex little creature, employing a huge array of bio-chemical processes in its business of staying alive and reproducing, but it's a bit sloppy about cleaning up after itself. Depending on temperature, genetics, and a number of other conditions, yeast releases many volatile chemicals into the beer, affecting the overall flavor and aroma of the finished product."

Perhaps the best thing about Mosher is his accuracy. I suppose he's probably made an error about the history or craft of beer somewhere along the way, but his batting average is so much higher than the average writer that you can pretty much take what he says as gospel. Given how many books are festooned with well-worn myths and rumors, that's a big benefit. It's not for the reader who already knows who Gabriel Sedlmayr is or what kettle souring means, but that's fine. It's the book to buy for your friend (or mom, or dad) so you know they will get the facts--and probably enjoy reading about them, to boot.

Book Week Commences: Field Guide to Drinking in America

I have been remiss. Publishers keep sending me emails asking whether I'd like to receive the newest, most excitingest beer book and I always say yes. Even when it's about cider. Or mead. Although I do not promise to review every title, it's my secret goal. And now, as the pile threatens to grow large enough to attack me, I am resolved to fight back. Herewith I offer Book Week, which is likely to extend beyond seven days, but sounds better than the more accurate Beer Fortnight or Beer Almost Fortnight. I generally try to do more lengthy reviews when I receive books, but if I'm going to get through this batch, we'll have to do shorties. Let's get started.

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The Field Guide to Drinking in America
Niki Ganong
Overcup Press, 214 pages, $20

• What is it? A state-by-state guide of local drinking culture and laws
• Who's it For? Ramblin' men (and women)
• Reviewer Disclosure. It's by local writer Niki Ganong, whom I consider a friend. I've known she was working on this book since it was just an idea, and I've been a supporter. So obviously, objectivity here is out the window.
• Scope. National--it covers every state in the union (sorry, Canada)

The Review
Niki travels a lot. Facebook friends marvel at how often she posts from some very attractive brewpub across the country--or globe. All that travel alerted her to how distinctive local drinking culture is, and how weird local laws are. She decided to create a guide describing these discoveries, and it's one of the most unusual, unexpected beer books I've encountered in awhile.

Each chapter starts with an overview of the state's local culture and history. (This covers all booze, not just beer--but it is beer-centric.) It's followed by an overview of the way liquor works in each state--what the laws are, where you can and can't buy spirituous liquors. This is in turn followed by a miscellany of quirky state-specific facts. (Minnesota: a description of Minnesota 13, a "smooth, high quality moonshine" distributed nationally by Al Capone. Colorado: a mini-bio of Hunter S. Thompson and his connection to Flying Dog. Hawaii: description of Harry Yee, who invented the Blue Hawaiian.)

Maybe the coolest feature is a tip Niki elicited from a local bartender in each locale. Here's the entry for Maryland, with a tip from Brendan Dorr at Baltimore's B&O Brasserie. "Maryland has a long history of beer and spirits, from American whiskey's humble beginnings of Maryland Style Rye to German breweries scattered about Baltimore City. Even William Walters, Baltimore's local philanthropic art collector...built his fortune on rye whiskey.  However, if you are going t odrink in Baltimore and feel like a real local, then order a shot of Pikesville Rye and a Natty Boh, hon!"

I think it's a pretty cool book (but I'm biased), and the only criticism I'd levy is this: I really wish Overcup would also turn it into an app. That would be handy. 

The Secrets of Book Publishing

A note. Many people have taken this post to be a harsh indictment of publishers, particularly Workman. That wasn't my intent. I am very grateful and indebted to Workman for giving me a chance on this book, and they have been great partners in making it a far better product than I could ever have managed on my own. I offer the criticism in the same spirit I would in a book or beer review--a critique of mistakes made. In this case, those mistakes have directly affected me and those who have been waiting for this book (including a lot of breweries and informants who made it possible). I felt I owed it to them to reveal exactly why it's been taking so long.

__________

Why does it take so long for books to go from ideas to paper and ink?  We live in an age of advanced digital tools that make it easy for even amateurs to produce professional-looking books. Why then do publishers still proceed as if it's 1958?  Good questions all.

Roughly five years ago, I changed professions.  I scrapped a reliable paycheck as a researcher at the local university for the very unreliable prospect of writing a book (or books). In conventional terms, the period has been a success: I signed four contracts, completed three manuscripts and am at work on a fourth--but in that time I've published zero real books. (The Beer Tasting Toolkit was a funny little side project that included a 6,000-word pamphlet, so it's not exactly a book, though it did actually make it out into the world.)  Why it took so long is--to me, anyway--a fairly fascinating story; for those of you who started asking about The Beer Bible years ago, it may help answer the question of why it's taken so damn long.

The Pitch/Playing Footsie
Publishing a book is expensive and risky; the large majority of books never earn back their advance. As such, publishers adopt a wise policy of skepticism toward any books pitched to them. In order to convince them to publish a book, it's nearly mandatory to have an agent (who, more than anything else in the pitching process, is the person who vouches for you). To get an agent or a book contract, it is absolutely mandatory to have a proposal. This is a document that not only describes the project (including sample chapters), but outlines who the audience is, what the competing books are, what the market is, and how you're going to sell it. It's as much a business plan as literary document.

In my case, I put together a proposal for what was essentially Lisa Morrison's Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest. That proposal was good enough to find me an agent and then, when my agent pitched the book to publishers, good enough to attract the attention of Workman Publishing. They had been thinking to do a companion to The Wine Bible and were looking for the right author.  The Beer Bible was a far better project than the one I was pitching, so I immediately agreed. Over the course of the next year, I submitted a prospective table of contents and then sample chapters, and finally, because those pieces weren't reassuring enough, a full proposal. (Which was weird, since it was Workman's project.) 

At the publisher's, a book will typically begin with an acquisitions editor or, in the case of The Beer Bible, the editor who would be overseeing the project. That person must convince other people at the publishing house that the book (or author) is both right for the company and a decent financial prospect. It works its way up the ladder until someone decision-making authority green lights the project. Joy!

In the graph above, you can see the different amounts of time it took for this phase (in gray).  It took a full year for The Beer Bible.  My first contact with Workman was March 2010, and I got conditional approval a year later. Around the same time, I was approached by Chronicle Books about doing The Beer Tasting Toolkit, which was also based on an earlier wine version of the same thing. As with Workman, editors at Chronicle were judging me, not the book.  Cider Made Simple was also Chronicle's idea, and they pitched it to me exactly three days before the manuscript for The Beer Bible was due. Since we'd already worked together, there wasn't a lot of footsie on that one.

The current project, which I'll describe sometime soon, was the first book I pitched that actually got accepted. Since  it wasn't a publisher's idea first, my agent spent quite a long time trying to coax Workman and then Storey into signing me. That one took nine months.

Contract
When a publisher offers you a book, they outline the basic contours of what will become the contract. This is a pre-negotiation that usually happens quickly. (Either you will work for the advance they're offering or not, and while there's wiggle room there, it's immediately evident whether the deal is going to be adequate.)  This is another great moment to have an agent. Book contracts aren't especially difficult to understand, but their implications are. If you don't understand the subtle ramifications of legalese (rules by which you'll have to live for years or decades), you can find yourself in trouble down the road. Once you've settled on the contours of the agreement, you can begin work on the book while your agent and the publisher hash out the details. Since contracting usually takes a couple months or more, it's time you do not want to waste.

Writing
This is the one phase that went pretty much like I expected it to.  The contract contains the due date for the manuscript, and they expect you to turn it in by then. (In the graph, the writing portion is in blue, and the diamond corresponds to the due date.) I've found that while you're writing a book, editors pay no attention to you and it can even be hard to get a response to questions along the way. Don't take up book-writing if you need someone to help you manage your time. Workman gave me two years to write The Beer Bible and Chronicle a year to write Cider Made Simple. I'm proud to say I've never missed a deadline.

Acceptance
There's a pretty big moment after you've completed the manuscript where the publisher formally accepts it. This means they believe it's up to minimum snuff--and it's when they release the rest of the advance. It usually takes a month or two.

Editing, Layout, Publishing
This is easily the most mysterious part of the process. When you buy a book, very little of what you're paying for is the physical expense of ink and paper. It's paying the writer along with the salaries of copy-editors, photo-editors, content editors, layout people, publicity people, and salespeople.Once you deliver the manuscript, they swing into action to turn it into a polished, attractive, tangible object.  In roughly chronological order, here's what they do.

• Content editing. An editor goes through the entire manuscript and helps you sort out the pieces that don't make sense, or are draggy, redundant, and so on. At Workman, they used three editors and went over every sentence with a microscope. I had to battle one editor who didn't like my voice and wanted to rewrite most of my prose (which would have been bizarre in just a third of the manuscript).  At Chronicle, they used an incredibly light hand and only adjusted confusing parts. I'm not sure which is better, actually. The central benefit of a published book--as opposed to self-published--is good editing. Writers have collaborators who can help them get to the place they were shooting for. Although it took weeks more of time, I didn't hate Workman's strong hand.
• Copy editing. Grammar, punctuation, and continuity. At Workman, they use freelance copy editors, and the woman they assigned to me was spectacular. She was super detail-oriented and seemed to get stressed by ambiguity, which was reflected in her anxious comments. I would love to run everything I write through her.
• Layout and design. This is where professionals make a book look like a book (and one of the obvious ways in which amateurs self-publishing their own material reveal themselves). I tried to offer very little in the way of strong preference here because, honestly, I know bupkis about layout and design. This is a big part of what sells books, and that's a publisher's business, not an author's. Nevertheless, some of the different cover designs Workman considered are suggestive of the amount of time it took to settle on one they like. (They advance chronologically left to right, and I think the one on the far right is the final.)

•  Print layouts and galleys. As the book is in various stages of editing, the layout people begin to plug the text into the format the book will take. This includes page design, font selection, colors, and art.  Publishers have a strong vision of what they want to do here. Workman, for example, wanted me to snap a bunch of pictures on my travels, preferring the narratively-specific (but photographically limited) quality they'd bring. Chronicle, by contrast, decided to do illustrations rather than photos in Cider Made Simple. Once the layout is coming along, they do various digital and print versions, including what's called a print or bound galley--sort of a rough draft of what the thing will look like. This is the copy that goes out to booksellers and reviewers in advance of publication.

For reasons completely inexplicable to me, the process takes far longer than it should. If you asked an ad agency to publish a book, they'd be able to turn it around in less than six months. The publishing pipeline takes a long time, and this is one factor. Publishers release catalogs they use to secure contracts from booksellers, and these go out months in advance.  But they also just fart around and miss deadlines. I submitted The Beer Tasting Toolkit manuscript in December of 2010, and Chronicle sat on it until Feb 2012.

With The Beer Bible, it was far more egregious. They received the manuscript on May 1, 2013 and accepted it on July 19.  The contract stipulated that the would release it within 18 months, and they told me they expected to release it in Fall 2014. As far as I can tell, they sat on it for an entire year and did absolutely nothing. We began to wrangle when I realized what was happening, and things got very tense. (According to the contract, if Workman didn't publish the book within 18 months--a date we passed in January--I could take the advance and the book and walk. It nearly came to that.)

The bound galley arrived yesterday.

It illustrates the structural imbalance of the publisher-author relationship.  The publisher has quite a bit of power over the work of the author; the author has no power over the work of the publisher (or, often, any idea what the publisher is even doing). The author needs his book on the market in order to earn his living (and is therefore motivated by deadlines); publishing employees get a paycheck either way. The author is one person; the publisher is many people. As this process has unfolded, I have had very little influence over events, so when Workman blew by their own deadline, there wasn't a ton I could do. To illustrate just how incredibly incompetent they were in managing their own affairs: I will have managed to write and publish an entire book in the space of time it took them merely to publish the Beer Bible.  Put another way, it took me 24 months to write the 230,000-word book; it will have taken Workman 27 months to get it inside paper covers.

Publication
Eventually books do get published. In the fall, I'll be doing some kind of book tour to support The Beer Bible (and maybe Cider Made Simple, though Chronicle hasn't responded to my inquiries about that.)  A writer starts earning royalties once a book earns back its advance, and that can take months to years to accomplish. So publication is actually just another middle state in the whole process.


Freelance writers have to pick their poison--books or articles. It's possible to do both--Stan Hieronymus seems to pull it off--but juggling the two is a challenge. I still think book writing was a good choice for me. I managed to get decent enough advances to make the books worthwhile and I have the expectation there will be royalties down the road. I also work better in long form. With books, you have pretty much carte blanche over voice and content. But, as I now understand, the process is more convoluted and opaque than necessary, and takes far longer than it should. So we'll see. After this current project is complete, I may go sniffing around Portland State University to see if they still need researchers.

Book Reviews: Creative Writing With Evan Rail, Max Bahnson, and Alan McLeod

The world of readin' and writin' has been in flux for about a decade now.  The gatekeeper model--print magazine, paper, and book publishers--has broken down.  That means writers now have a more direct avenue to reach readers--one they've happily seized for shorter forms.  In the beer world, the leading pioneer has been Evan Rail; just less than three years ago, he put out Why Beer Matters on Kindle, and suggested that there might be an alternative to the New York publishing mafia.

The emergence of digital publishing has had two important effects.  Books always needed to be a certain length to justify a cover price that paid for an author, several editors, an art department, and a marketing team needed to sell them.  When you're publishing your own pieces directly, you can sell them for a dollar or few, which means they can be short.  Why Beer Matters is just 22 pages long--way too short for a regular book, but too long for a blog post.  In many cases, this frees up an author to either tackle a subject that would never have justified a book, or to skip the inevitable padding needed to fatten up a regular book.  The second benefit is that it also frees up the author--for the same reasons--to try something less obviously commercial and marketable.  We have two recent examples that I've been meaning to review here: Evan Rail's latest, The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest, and The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer by Alan McLeod and Max Bahnson.

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The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer
Kindle/Digital only, 149 pages, $4 

We have to start this review, as with all reviews, with Steven Soderbergh.  Back in 1997, he released a movie you may have missed called Schizopolis.  Schizopolis was weird.  It was aggressively noncommercial.  It looked like a student project.  It eventually made a whopping ten grand at the box office (12,000th all time!)  I went to a screening in Portland, and Soderbergh answered questions afterward.  They were mainly of the "what the hell ...?" variety.  It turned out that he had reached a kind of creative exhaustion.  Following Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he made a series of meh big-company movies, and the grind of working in the Hollywood mode drained him of the will to make movies.  He needed a chance to hit the reset, to have 100% control and make a cinematic primal scream.  No one has ever seen Schizopolis, but the movies that followed--Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brokovich, and Traffic--are among the best four-movie runs in history. 

The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer is a literary Schizopolis.  The authors are two bloggers you probably know if you read Beervana much: Max Bahnson and Alan McLeod.  They share a distaste for beer boosterism and, even more, dislike how that boosterism interferes with what they see as beer's true joy--the simple pleasures of drinking it and sharing it with friends.  That's a heterodox view in the beer-writing world, and the form Alan and Max chose to express it is nearly as weird as Schizopolis: a fictive dialogue between the two shared in various fictive settings.  Thomas Hardy gets quoted; Beckett gets alluded to (I think).  There's a fragment from Alexander Pope.  In one chapter, we get stage direction and a script.  There are direct message exchanges and Twitter exchanges. 

All of these techniques are harnessed to give voice to a cri de coeur aimed at the myriad offenses of beer geeks.  They don't want to give us a didactic, reasoned argument, they want to give spleen.  The effect is curious:

While Alan looked for the opener, Max picked the bottle to study the back label. Other than the ABV% there was not much that he considered very useful information. It wasn’t until he took a second look at the front label that he noticed the two words: “Imperial Pilsner”.

“F'ing 'Imperial Pilsner'! The ‘style’ born by ignorance and plain stupidity. You brought me here for this?" Alan shrugged in reply. "A bock with more hops and less sense. Don’t you have anything else?” Max continued, complaining, holding the bottle with one hand and his head with the other. With a shrug Alan gave him the opener and let the man do the honours. The Argentine made a big show of sniffing the beer, taking a short sip, he rolled it in his mouth, gargled a bit and declared with mocked solemnity, “not true to style.”

It is actually the didactic argument, but placed in fictional settings--in a work absent any of the usual trappings of fiction, like plot, climax, or denouement.  If you read it either to hear the argument or to be entertained by the settings, though, I think you miss the point.  The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer is a howl, a primal expression.  You are meant to understand the writers' emotion, not pay close attention to their words. Their real point is implicit and concealed--the joy of beer is in the negative space between the words.

As a work, it is aggressively noncommercial.  No publisher on the planet would have touched it.  But that's what makes it a fascinating artifact of the modern age.  I'm not sure who the audience is or how big it is, but for the souls who find pleasure and solace in this work suffice it to say they have little recourse elsewhere.  This is a strange, singular book.


The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest
Kindle/Digital-only, 60 pages, $3.

Evan Rail's contribution is much less mystifying.  Although it is ostensibly a story about Kout na Šumavě, a mysterious, remote Bohemian brewery, it's really a memoir describing a person's relationship to beer.  In this way, it shares something with Unbearable Nonsense.  Evan is more conventionally excavating his own experience to learn what it is, really, that brings beer alive in his life.  Beer is oddly intimate, and Evan uses his interaction with Kout to slowly reveal why.

Evan is one of the beer world's real writing stars.  His prose sings, and as with any good memoir, it's the story that draws the reader in.  There's a central plot point that he uses like a spine to support the body of his story, and in the following short passage, you can get a sense of how he sets up his page-turner:

“Trash still carpeted the furnace room when they arrived, the light coming in through windowless frames and the empty spaces where rusty hinges would have creaked and grated, if only the doors had remained. Around the old steam furnace, thick layers of plaster had cracked open, presumably with the heavy frosts of the previous winters, and the strata of stucco that had been built up around the furnace as insulation lay open and exposed. One of the layers, however, glowed just slightly differently: instead of brick or stone, it looked more like fabric, or even papyrus. The men brushed away the mortar and paint, scratching their own coarse fingers on the equally coarse rocks and crystals in the plaster. Eventually, enough of it gave way, and they were able to remove a thick book that must have been waiting there for many decades, disguised in the thickness of the wall.”

There's a chapter on Anthony Bourdain that doesn't really work and could be skipped entirely, but otherwise, it's a little gem of a book. We are attracted to a lot of lesser things in life--our favorite baseball team, a hobby, movies or video games--but so few of them rouse an emotional response like beer does.  The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest goes a long way to explaining this, at least for one person.  It's the first release of what will apparently be a series of similar pieces in a "Beer Trails" series--and it's a great start.

_____________

For different reasons, neither of these works would have existed ten years ago.  Evan's book is too short, and Max and Alan's is too odd.  But both deserve a chance to find an audience, and I hope they do.  The more diversity we have available for readers, the better.  And as a bonus, little works like this can be had on the cheap--less than the price of a pint.

Book Review: Beer Britannia by Boak and Bailey

Brew Britannia: The Strange Rebirth of British Beer
Jessica Boak & Ray Bailey
Aurum Press, 298 pages
$20 






Considering the long history of British brewing, most historians have focused on London or Burton and their respective great eras of brewing.  Few have turned their attention to the most recent forty years, a depressing time when ales lost out to lagers and breweries consolidated and collapsed by the legion.  But it's possibly the most dynamic period in Britain's brewing history, and certainly one of the most interesting--and these are the decades Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey consider in their engrossing new book, Brew Britannia.

The narrative they tell is equal parts straight history and ethnography.  The events are fascinating because they're so English. (The title of the book is slightly misleading; this is really a story about England, and nearly all the protagonists are English or live and brew in England.)  The story starts out describing the activities of two different citizen groups, both devoted to preserving some part of English life that seemed imperiled by the churn of modernity.  The first didn't have a huge impact on the course of events, but the second, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), did.

For the first time, I finally understood the context that gave rise to CAMRA and the effect it had in English life.  And, given that the switch from ales to lagers continued to plug along unabated through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, CAMRA's impact really does seem to mostly cultural.  They did not so much restore real ale as they did change a nation's understanding about it's place in society.  If cask ale did not displace lager, it at least came to be seen as local, as English--a powerful shift that may have at least allowed it to survive.

Boak and Bailey then describe how small breweries started popping up in the 70s and 80s.  Americans who (like me) imagined this development paralleled the US microbrewing trend of 1980s will discover they are mistaken.  Again, the contours of this story are entirely English.  The first small breweries made cask ale.  It would take a couple decades before breweries started making the stuff we think of as "craft beer," and yet even that part of the story is particular to the situation in the UK.

Boak and Bailey did scads of research and talked to tons of people in assembling the book.  The arc of Brew Britannia is told through the stories of scores of individuals--activists, beer drinkers, and brewers--which makes it a hugely propulsive read.  We've enjoyed a number of good beer books in the last few years, but none can touch Brew Britannia in terms of pure entertainment.  If you have even the slightest interest in English beer, you'll really enjoy it.  (Even people who are interested mainly in American craft breweries will find it interesting because of the contrast it offers to our story.)  And for people like Ted Sobel (and me), it is an absolute must-read.

__________________________
Addendum.  As I read the early chapters, marveling at the way the English seem to naturally form clubs and campaigns, I wondered why we don't do that here in the US North America.  The Brewers Association has effectively seized the space occupied by CAMRA in the UK, and they have taken it in a very particular direction.  It's not that CAMRA is a flawless organization (in fact, it's got so many problems that CAMRA-bashing is something of a national pastime), but it is a consumer organization.  They do not represent the interests of the breweries, but the people who drink beer.

If we in the US North America formed our version of CAMRA, I doubt we would spend so much time obsessing about who owns which brewery, seemingly the sole concern of the Brewers Association.  In framing the conversation in the UK, CAMRA in some ways invented English beer--or at least the idea of it.  If consumers made an American-beer advocacy group, what would they focus on?  I don't have any ideas, but it would not be the issues that so interest the Brewers Association.

Book Review: Gilroy Was Good For Guinness by David Hughes

Gilroy Was Good For Guinness
David Hughes
Liberties Press, 256 pages
$40 hardcover






How about a nice off-speed pitch?  Today's review touches only tangentially on beer.  Almost everyone, beer fan or no, is familiar with the iconic ads from the twenty years on either side of midcentury: My Goodness My Guinness, Guinness For Strength, and Lovely Day For a Guinness.  The main illustrator behind those ads was John Gilroy, an English artist whose Guinness ads started appearing around 1930.

Self-portrait.

The book's central focus are those illustrations, though it does touch on his full career, which included fine art as well as commercial art.  Although he was never able to fully ascend to the highest echelons of the fine art world, he did do some very accomplished portraiture work, capturing the vitality and spirit of his subjects.  But the book only acknowledges this element of his career; Hughes is much more interested in the Guinness material.

What interested me most was not the familiar art (though flipping through the pages and seeing rough sketches and discarded ideas is fascinating) but the amazing grasp Gilroy and Guinness had on the brand--in decades long before ad men used the term.  This part of the story is only hinted at, and yet with each new illustration, you see how the clarity of the vision led to an iron-clad sense of the brand.  One of Gilroy's most memorable series involved a zookeeper whose stouts kept getting purloined by different animals.  In one, a satisfied-looking ostrich has a pint glass descending his long neck.  In another, an upside-down kinkajou cradles the glass.  Gilroy suggested a theme with a cobra and a snake charmer--the rough sketch is included--but Guinness rejected the pitch because snakes weren't cuddly enough.  It's a great idea, and it must have taken some soul-searching to discard it, but such was the clear-eyed sense of what the company wanted to project.

Hughes doesn't do a spectacular job with the text.  The long introduction spends way too much time on Gilroy's personal life and way too little time on his life as an artist.  Except for my reading of Peter Schjeldahl, I have very little sense of art.  It would have been useful for Hughes to have covered the artistic side of Gilroy.  I would also have liked a sense of the Guinness ads in a larger context--what was their influence?  What kind of art was typical for the time?  How did Gilroy influence other illustrators and ad men, and what was the legacy of the Guinness ads?  Hughes skips all this.  

The art does speak for itself, however.  We learned earlier this year that a cache of Gilroys revealed some unsettling illustrations for export ads to Nazi Germany.  In the context of his full scope of work, though, they look pretty typical.  Gilroy was asked to adapt a lot of his themes for foreign markets, and--remember, these are advertisements meant to sell beer--he played on national and cultural themes of the countries in question.  That a 1936 campaign for exports to Germany involved Nazi images is not incredibly surprising (they were never produced commercially).  Nevertheless, they are fascinating and add to the narrative.

It's a full-color book that captures the richness of the Guinness campaign.  It's not a cheap book, but the money is well-spent on the reproductions.  Those who enjoy commercial art, and especially the fans of breweriana, would probably appreciate having this on their bookshelf.

Book Review: The Craft Beer Revolution by Steve Hindy

The Craft Beer Revolution
Steve Hindy
Palgrave Macmillan, 250 pages
$25

Steve Hindy's new book is a serious and important work.  It contains some incredibly revealing details about the long history of brewing--particularly the history from 1988 onward, after Hindy co-founded Brooklyn Brewery and entered the history books.  It is also a wandering, unfocused narrative that contains two competing threads: early craft-brewing hagiography and an insider's guide to the unkempt, sweaty inner workings of an industry.  One half is disposable; the other half is indispensable.

The hagiography occupies the first section of the book, and it reads like many forebears.  Hindy clips through the pantheon of greats--Maytag, Grossman, McAuliffe, Papazian, Michael Jackson, and so on.  There is little here that's new, and Hindy treats the founders with a reverence we've come to expect in these kinds of books.  As he gets further along, to when he enters the picture, things start to pick up speed, though, and we see hints of things to come.  There is an absolutely fascinating section where he takes on the early, carnival-barker years of Jim Koch's rise at Boston Beer.  But then it loses focus again when he devotes a chapter to the class of '88, the ostensible goal of which is to illustrate the diversity in approach among the craft brewers.  But that was the year he founded Brooklyn, and he gives his own brewery a little biography along entries for Goose Island, Deschutes, Great Lakes, Rogue, and others.

Before he was a brewing magnate, Hindy worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press.  The Craft Beer Revolution benefits from his skill as a reporter.  He ably weaves history and anecdotes (his and others') into a compelling narrative.  But I think that reporter Hindy would have made a different decision about how to approach this book than brewery-owner Hindy did.  You can either write a business memoir or a straightforward history, but blending the two mars the history.  Hindy can't write about Brooklyn dispassionately (who could?), and for large stretches of the book, those competing impulses weaken the narrative.

Hindy shifts gears midway through, however, and the book becomes a revelation.  Here Hindy starts talking about the inside of craft brewing, the blood-and-guts reality that has been largely airbrushed out of the canon.  He treats the flood of money in the mid-90s with more details and insight than I've seen anywhere.  It's a blend of big-picture trend analysis and anecdotes that reveal the more human aspects of that time.  Oregonians may remember a mysterious brand that appeared briefly on shelves called Oregon Ale.  It was a contract-brewed stealth product by Boston Beer.  Hindy describes the situation and gets nice quotes from Oregon brewers--and then shows how Oregon responded to the threat.  These kinds of examples go on and on.

He goes into the tensions among craft brewers and between craft brewers and larger brewers.  Hindy describes the painful strife that led to the creation of the Brewers Association, with folks like Deschutes' Gary Fish on one side, glowering at Charlie Papazian on the other.  As an inside observer to the industry, he also understands the role distribution played in preserving large-brewer dominance, and devotes two chapters to describing the politics of changing the old arrangement.  (Old timers from Oregon who remember AB's vaunted distribution network and it's "100% share of mind" moment in the 90s--which led to the union with Widmer--will find that story placed in a larger, understandable context.)  These chapters about what really happened, with protagonists and antagonists, is absolutely fascinating.

For anyone interested in the beer business (which is to say anyone interested in beer), I would recommend picking up a copy.  It has large sections of the kind of writing we don't need--congratulatory (and sometimes self-congratulatory) prose about the great and wonderful American craft brewers.  You will have heard of these saints before.  But the other half is full of the sinners, the real people and the real stories behind the glossy promo--people you know a lot less about.  And that half makes this book quite a read. 

Feeling Bookish: The State of Reading

There's a lot going on in the world of books.  I've received a raft of interesting tomes recently, just at the moment when this whole Hachette-Amazon battle has put publishing square in the spotlights.  And that in turn raises an interesting discussion about how Americans get their information in 2014 and what the future of reading looks like.  All of this makes me think it's about time for a series of posts on the subject, including some reviews of these books I've been receiving.  But let's start with an overview. 

How We Read

I get vertigo when I think about how radically we've shifted what we read and how we read it--all in the space of less than two decades.  We may never have gotten our Jetson's flying cars, but we did get the internet, and it has transformed media in ways no one could have imagined or predicted.  Two decades ago, I was working at Memorial Library, a 5-million volume shrine to letters on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  If you wanted information about a subject, you had three choices: newspapers, magazines, or books.  By that time, card-catalogs had given way to computer catalogs, and that alone seemed revolutionary.  But there was no functional internet yet.  Oregon was already a decade into craft brewing, but the internet was being born: "The number of websites grew from 623 at the beginning of the year, according to one study, to more than 10,000 at the end. E-mail quickly spread from universities to offices and homes." 

In the beer world, we passed around rumors and wives' tales about history and brewing because there was no way to readily access anything else.  Within a few years, though, information started filtering onto the internet.  Message boards and listservs helped speed the dissemination of those rumors (as well as some good information.)  A decade later, blogs came into their own and more information flooded onto the internet.  Shortly thereafter, the first social media sites started to proliferate.  The iPhone came in 2007, and by the 2010s, we were all using data from maps, review and social media sites, commercial sites, Wikipedia and search engines to seamlessly navigate between the domains of knowledge and those of terrestrial space. 

From books and mags (pre-1994) to email, message boards, and listservs (pre-2000), to blogs (2002) to social media (from 2003--Myspace--onward), to information that knitted all these sources together in handheld computers (2008ish onward).  With the addition of Wikipedia in 2001 and Google Books around 2006--combined with the extraordinary power of search algorithms--information became instantly accessible to humans at the whisper of a question to Siri.  No flying cars, but that's not too bad.

It's a little hard to appreciate how radically it has changed the way we think about and consume information.  I used to read probably 30-50 books a year.  A certain portion of my day was allotted to reading.  I'm lucky if I hit double digits now.  It's not that I find books any less useful--in a way, I think all this fingertip access has made them more valuable--but the minutes in my day that I can devote to reading has shrunk.  Like everyone else, my eyeballs spend a lot of time being caressed by the soft blue light of my smart phone. 

All of this has changed how information is produced and packaged.  We have become fast-food readers, gobbling information as quickly as possible before clicking on.  Content providers have responded by offering shorter and shorter bits--generally to their detriment.  The publisher of our local paper, the Oregonian, has instructed reporters to squeeze multiple posts out of each story, so you get several half-baked fragments that are the literary equivalent of raw footage.  The O has also decided to package as many stories in list form, or at least to use a headline that suggests a list ("The Five Things to Know About the Street Fee").  That in turn drives readers to scan, because who's going to devote serious brain power to such slapdash "reporting?"  (Treat your reader with contempt and don't be surprised if you lose her.)

It's not entirely clear how all of this affects book reading.  We know that the way we read books has changed.  From an industry report (pdf): "In the United States, where ebooks have taken off dynamically since 2010, until plateauing in 2013, the overall revenues in all of the publishing industry, and print in particular, seem to continue their decline."  Physical books still constitute the pretty large proportion of the market.  Since Amazon doesn't share sales numbers, estimates are a bit dicey, but figure 80% of sales are still hardcover--which doesn't include the second-hand market.  Amazingly, hardcover book sales are now outpacing ebook sales--though I don't think anyone believes ebooks are a fading trend (and paperbacks are tanking).  Overall, book sales seem to be robust, with decent gains in four of the last five years. 

Twenty years ago, almost all our information came from newspapers, magazines, and books.  Now, information comes through dozens of sources, and newspapers and magazines are fighting to stay in business.  We spend more of our reading time on shorter, disposable pieces, but we still reserve some of it for books.  I take from this two lessons.  As readers, we now divide our attention between short pieces for either mindless entertainment or quick facts and longer pieces that help bring that fragmented information together.  People in the content-delivery business, therefore, seem to be sorting themselves into the two camps--providing longer, deeper reads, often at a cost, and disposable listicles and clickbait.  Once I thought the two worlds couldn't coexist, but now it seems like exactly the opposite.  In 1994, we were desperate for quick references.  But in 2014, we need more than just flotsam.  The two types of information are symbiotic; they need each other.  Because we, as readers, consume both types.

Early Contender for Book of the Year: Home Brewer's Guide to Vintage Beers

Home Brewer's Guide to Vintage Beers
Ron Pattinson
Quarry Books, 160 pages
$25

If you're reading this blog, you probably know Ron Pattinson.  His blog, Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, is a cult hit--the most-scrutinized blog by professional brewers, at least in the US.  I don't speak as often to homebrewers, but I suspect they are big fans, too.  Casual readers ... well, maybe not.  Ron writes about the history of beer, using a voice that makes you feel like you've wandered into the middle of a discussion between two friends at the pub.  Today's post, for instance, begins with this sentence: "Another day, another set of dodgy Milds from the 1920's."  That's typical.

Back in 2007, he started his blog with an admirably clear vision:

Books. I have piles of books. I can provide photographic proof if necessary, but believe me, the piles are just about up to my elbow. I blame the interent. It's just too easy to buy the most obscure publications. Once I have them, I have to read them.

But, once you've plucked out the juiciest sweetmeat of knowledge, where's the fun if there's no-one in whose mouth to drop it? The solution is obvious: join with the unemployed and unemployable in the blogsphere. Share with my peers the weird bits up crap I've unearthed.

Over the course of 3,175 posts, a clip of 1.3 a day, he has documented the details of those books--plus many more, including brewery log books, that he has dug up since.  He has revealed many truths about old English, Scottish, and German beer styles, helped clarify some misunderstandings, and correct many myths and legends that have gathered like cobwebs over the years.

The problem with 3,175 posts of material is that it's very hard to find succinct information.  I know, because I spent hours poring through Ron's archives as I researched history for the Beer Bible (and, full disclosure, Ron agreed to have a look at some of my history to see I'd gotten it right).  He has collected his posts together in slightly more digestible books--but these have the appearance of a binder full of loose-leaf pages clamped together (I consulted both Scotland! and Decoction! as well).  They lack a through-line.

Now, at last, we have all that Ron has learned distilled down to 160 concise pages.  (Complaint: I'd have preferred, say 300.)  These include fairly detailed history sections followed by--and again, readers of his blog will find this familiar--recipes for five-gallon batches of various historical beers. He describes two methods of mashing for the recipes, a scaled-back, single-infusion mash, and a multiple mashing system as the pre-sparging breweries used to employ.  If you're hardcore, you can learn how to brew like an early Victorian brewery.  He mostly covers British styles, but he devotes a few pages at the end to lost German styles like Kotbusser, Broyhan, Grodziskie, and Salvator (precursor to doppelbock).

The recipes are just delicious, too.  If you flip through and aren't inspired to brew one of these, you're beyond my help.  The picture below captures one high on my list--an 1805 pale stout.  If you look down at the mashing regime, you'll notice something incredibly interesting: the second mash is cooler than the first (they usually step upward).  Why?  Pale stout, weird mashing schedule: enticing.  The book is full of this stuff.  (Sorry the photo's crap.  It does, however, reveal my other complaint--that weird binding.)

You should buy it if you're a homebrewer or if you're interested in brewing history.  And you should especially buy it if you've wished that someone would collect the information from Ron's blog in a concise, easy reference guide. 

New Book: The Pocket Beer Guide by Beaumont and Webb

The Pocket Beer Guide
Stephen Beaumont and Tim Webb
Sterling Epicure, 320 pages
$15

Over the course of nearly two decades, Michael Jackson published a slim volume called, in slightly different wording, The Pocket Guide to Beer.  It was first released in 1982, which marked almost exactly the moment in history when the world's stock of breweries had reached their nadir.  To pad the guide, he dutifully reviewed all beers, from Grain Belt to Rodenbach.  (Henry Weinhard: "a clean, fairly light body.")  As new editions continued to come out--seven in all, by several different publishers--they got progressively more cheery, if harried.  By the time the last edition came out in 2000, poor MJ probably regretted he'd ever started the thing in the first place.

This year, as a stocking stuffer, you may once again select a copy of The Pocket Beer Guide.  Jackson and Running Press are gone and in their stead are Canadian writer Stephen Beaumont and British writer Tim Webb (though Webb's specialty is Belgium).  They are the team who recently brought us the World Atlas of Beer.  While the relationships are not particularly transparent, Webb and Beaumont (from the press release) "have [also] collaborated with top international contributors."  There are thirty in all, including a few familiar names like Evan Rail, Max Bahnson, Lisa Morrison, Stan Hieronymus, Joe Stange, and John Holl.  It seems both a sane and liver-preserving way to attempt to taste enough beers to recommend 3,000 from around the globe.

Except for its shape (this one is wider than Jackson's), the book follows the established format.  Breweries are summed briefly, and a selection of their beers ranked from ★ ("dependable quality but unexciting") to ★★★★ ("one of the world's great beers, a champion"), with the always slightly mystifying ★★ → ★★★ as a safe punt.  They've even adopted Jackson's incredible verbal economy in putting together each entry, condensed for brevity.  Here's a typical entry:

BRUERY, THE
Placentia, California

Brewer Patrick Rue punned on his name to create his brewery's moniker and quickly earned a devoted following for his oft-quirky ales.  Spicy-yeasty and faintly tart Saison Rue ★★☆ and peppery, pearish Mischief ★★☆ headline the core beers; while Autumn Maple ★★★, brewed with yams and complex with sweet maple, spice, and yam flavors, and lightish, quenching dryly tart Saison de Lente highlight the seasonal offerings.  

I was enjoying reading along, particularly through the Belgium section, where (presumably) Webb exercises enormous restraint issuing stars.  Remembering Stan's wonderful post on how few beers Jackson ever rewarded four stars, I nodded as I saw all the beers that got passed over for this rightly-rare laurel.  (Orval, Cantillon, Boon, De Dolle: nope nope nope nope.) There were exactly four to achieve the trick: Rodenbach Vintage, Blaugies Saison de l'Epeautre, Saison Dupont, and Rochefort 10.  You may think this is low--and I do.  In seven editions, only 19 beers got the highest mark in each one, and six were Belgians.  I'd have included Orval and a gueuze (though it would have killed me to have to select one), but hey, I think Webb erred on the right side of exuberance.

If there's a fault in the book, it's the very thing that probably made it possible.  When Jackson was writing the Pocket Guide, it was idiosyncratic in the way humans are and the ratings were always arguable--but at least they were consistent.  You lose that with multiple writers. 

Because I know the American West Coast so well, I glanced through the sections on California (presumably Jay Brooks' bailiwick) and the Pacific Northwest (Lisa Morrison?).  The brewery numbers are similar--32 California breweries were included, along with 33 from the Northwest (which includes Alaska and Hawaii).  But either California is blessed with a lot more good beer, or Jay and Lisa didn't use the same rating criteria.  In California, three-star beers seem to be the norm; sixteen earned three and a half, and four--the same number as Belgium--got a perfect mark.  Three stars were hard to come by in parts north, and across four states not a single beer was good enough to be considered "a champion."  Just seven got three and a half stars. 

This isn't a fatal flaw, though and I have few other complaints.  The book's greatest strength is its breadth, which while not absolutely complete (rustic African and South American breweries are not included, and emerging regions like India and Southeast Asia are largely skipped) does include Lithuanian farmhouse breweries and a nice description of European breweries outside the usual five.  All in all, a great effort. 

Finally, I have to give Webb (again, I'm assuming) a special award for most amusing, astute, and irreverent review of the year.  It goes to show how much information--and personality--you can pack into a hundred words.  Here's his entry on Westvleteren.

A low-production brewery in West Flanders that has been afflicted by adulation, with the scarcity of its beers being mistaken for magnificence.  The only one that uses whole hops is the skillful, light, rustic Blond ★★★☆ with its intense floral aroma and just enough grain; Extra 8 ★★★ is a licorice-edged, strong dubbel that improves grudgingly in the cellar; and Abt 12 ★★★☆ is a dark, intense barley wine that used to grow with keeping but less so now.  Special releases for a supermarket chain and US importer were unlikely to have been brewed here exclusively.

There are similar gems scattered elsewhere.

Buy This Book: Pete Dunlop's "Portland Beer"

Portland Beer by Pete Dunlop
American Palate/The History Press, 142 pages
$20 

I don't think anyone who has visited Portland doubts its place in the pantheon of good beer cities.  Its status is far too nascent to offer comparisons to historic centers like Munich and Brussels, but now, in 2013, it has precious few rivals.  You may ask yourself: why?

History is a funny thing.  In the moment, world-historical events may not seem world-historical (did contemporaries realize what fruit Rosa Park's bus ride would bear?).  We tend to retroactively designate one moment to stand in for what were, in the event, a long series of smaller causal happenings.  And because things happen incrementally, we sometimes forget how remarkable they are.  It is the job of historians to look at end points and snake their way back through time to answer the question of how we got here.

In what will become the definitive narrative for years forward, Pete Dunlop lays it all out.  When we scan the current beer scene, what we see--the fifty Portland breweries, the seeming established reality of craft beer--is actually only the denouement.  The real story begins far earlier, almost as far back as the founding of the city.  It was in 1845 that Bostonian Lovejoy and Mainer Pettygrove flipped their coin to name the city; seven years later, the town of a thousand had its first brewery.

The period between the birth of Liberty Brewery and the sale of the Weinhard Brewery to Pabst in 1979 is largely untrod territory, but critical in understand why Portland is now Beervana.  My favorite chapters in the book describe the period following Prohibition through the 1970s, as the city's brewery struggled to stay solvent in a world of mass-production and -distribution that ultimately swamped it.  It reads like an elegy not just for Blitz-Weinhard, but a city that was once the pride of the Northwest but was slipping into second-rate status.

Then there are the indispensable chapters on the early craft breweries, including the quirk of the failed, bottle-only Cartwright Brewery and the keen preference it sparked among later craft breweries to stick with the draft market.  The chapter on the brewpub bill corrects long-held misunderstanding about how the fight moved through the legislature.  And finally, most of the later chapters focus on the founders--a critical capturing of that oral history while the principals are around to tell it.

I was writing about beer for some of the history covered in the book and--full disclosure--Pete interviewed me and I'm quoted in the book.  And it's obviously a topic I'm deeply interested in.  But my own connection aside, I encourage everyone to get a copy--those who like beer but live outside of Portland, those who don't like beer and do live in Portland, and of course, the hordes who live in Portland and love beer.  It's a wonderful story wonderfully told, relevant to the Upright-only beer geeks as much as to the beer-neutral Portlander interested in her city.  It's a story about beer, but it transcends it.  It is a story of a place and how culture evolved there--a universal tale.  And one you should read.

New Book: The Complete Beer Course by Joshua Bernstein

The Complete Beer Course
Boot Camp for Beer Geeks: From Novice to Expert in Twelve Tasting Classes
Sterling Epicure, 318 pages
$24.95

The folks at Sterling Publishing sent me a review copy of Joshua Bernstein's (Brewed Awakening) new book.  I was excited to receive it and was looking forward to giving it a close read and careful review.  The conceit is that you walk through it like you might through a ten-week beer education course, and Joshua acts as your chatty guide, pointing out the subtleties of flavor and style as you go along.  But when I cracked it open I realized I was going to be useless as a reviewer.

The design of the book is slightly artificial, though.  Really, what Complete Beer Course amounts to is an overview of beer.  Joshua organized it so that ten of the dozen chapters focuses on beer style, and the first and last give you the basics about how beer is made, beer flavor and aroma--and appreciating them--serving beer, and pairing it with food.  In essence, almost the identical material I covered in writing the Beer Bible.  They're very different books, but Joshua has had to pore through the same material I did and make the same ten thousand decision about how to organize and present a narrative. 

This is one of the hidden dynamics behind any book.  The author presents material as if it's a kind of enduring truth.  In 1842, Josef Groll brewed a pale lager in Pilsen, Bohemia.  Hops are actually bines, not vines.  Lactobacillus is the same bacteria that sours milk.  It's misleading, though.  What the author actually has to do is take a collection of material that collectively constitutes knowledge, distill it, and present it in a meaningful way.  A writer--a good writer, anyway--will see in the bare facts of Josef Groll's story an opportunity to describe something essential about the hinge of history that swung from those first batches of pale lager.  It's a story but also a metaphor.  And the way Bernstein tells the story is different from the way I did (though you'll have to wait another year before you can compare them side-by-side).  Beyond the storytelling aspect, there are a million other tiny decisions he made that I also considered, like the right temperature to serve a beer, which beer represents the world classic, whether to put citrus in your weizen. 

As I read the book, I kept second-guessing whether he or I had made the right decisions--the problem being, there is no right decision.  They are all roads the reader hopes will take you to a destination of understanding.  But they necessarily look very different.  One example.  In the Beer Bible, IPAs get one of my shortest treatments.  I figured it was one of the most well-known styles, so no need to go into a lot of detail.  In Complete Beer Course, conversely, IPAs get by far the most ink.  Joshua breaks them down into myriad sub-styles: English, East Coast, West Coast, Pacific NW, double, triple, black, white, red, rye, and Belgian.  The book is written primarily for an American audience, and Joshua decided to try to bring meaning and coherence to all the different kinds of hoppy beers that may or may not be labeled IPA.  Same material, very different decision.

Aside from writing a 5,000-page book that includes everything from the Sumerian texts describing the different styles of beer brewed in the early 4500s (BC) to the genome of Meridian hops and the reason they add a bright quality to IPA, a writer has to make decisions about what to include.  Since we made different decisions, I am too close to the subject to stand back and assess Joshua's.  I can say that it's well-researched and fairly comprehensive; the writing is accessible and personal.  Any reader, especially those new to the broader world of beer, will be able to pull a lot of information out of it. 

And maybe that's review enough.  If you want more, you will probably need to consult a more dispassionate reviewer.  A sampling are here and here and here.  At the very least, stop by one of your finer bookseller's, page through it, and see if it's something you need to have on your bookshelf.  The answer is likely to be yes.