Drinks bibles, ethics and other beery links


MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.25.15

Why I Wrote ‘The Beer Bible’.
[Via All About Beer]
How To Write The Bible Of Wine: Karen MacNeil On The Craft Of Writing.
[Via Forbes]
The second link is included because a) some contrast between “The Wine Bible” and “The Beer Bible” should be obvious, and b) to point out “The Wine Bible” has sold a half million copies. Imagine the potential impact of “The Beer Bible.” Jeff Alworth writes, “Americans do brew differently — in an unprecedented fashion, in fact — and it wasn’t until I started seeing how the rest of the world does it that I understood how.” How is answered piece by piece throughout his book, but he provided some examples (via email). Here’s one, from a chapter labeled American Ales:

As American brewing evolved, it began to acquire the characteristics that now define it — and which can be seen acrosss styles and traditions. Americans brew for intensity, a penchant reflected particularly in high hop rates and alcohol strength, but more broadly in ales that are just a bit louder than comparable ales brewd in other countries.

I would not argue with this, but I must wonder if this is always as it must be.


Click on the date to read the conversation, and then proceed to the following links.

Nine Food-Related Companies That Are Changing the World.
[Via Eater}
The blogger blackmail saga.
[Via jamie goode’s wine blog]
How ‘The End of the Tour’ Nails an Entire Profession.
[Via The New Yorker]
The many aspects of ethics.

Guzzling 9,000 Years Of History With ‘The Comic Book Story Of Beer’.
If the authors don’t get every bit of history perfect, and what are the odds of that?, will the Internet cut them some slack because it is a comic book? Or will this from Mike Smith — “A lot of beer books tend to be very serious, and I think the comic medium allowed us to tell the story of beer with a degree of levity.” — land in an uncomfortable part of what he calls geek overlap? [Via npr]

The porter in Majorca tastes like what it oughter.
There are now seven craft breweries on the Mediterranean island of Majorca. More beer from a place. [Via Zythophile]

This Beer Used 77 Hop Varieties, But Not for the Reason You May Think.
Forget the “Guinness Book of World Records” stuff. Great Yorkshire Brewery in England brewed a beer it called Top of the Hops 2012 with what it claimed was 2,102 varieties, using plants that failed in trials at Wye Hops Limited in Kent. At the time, brewery director Joanne Taylor said the brewery wanted to support Peter Darby’s research at Wye. The mix included dwarf varieties, aphid-resistant types, plants with Russian and South African pedigrees, and hops derived from Fuggle and other British varieties. [Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]

HBC-438: New Hop Variety Just for Homebrewers.
This struck me as the biggest news to come out of the National Homebrewers Conference in June, so (even though I wasn’t there) I wrote about it for the AHA website. [Via American Homebrewers Association]

Recreating a classic London pub crawl.
[Via All About Beer]
Beer Awesomeness In, Er, 1908.
[Via beeretseq]
Two from the time capsule.

Nom de Bier – Beer Reviews as Told by Your Favorite Authors.
Going to be interesting to see what Oliver Gray manages to tell us the beers themselves. [Via Literature & Libation]

‘Peak TV in America’: Is there really too much good scripted television?
Anybody for Peak Beer? [Via HitFix]

And this week’s award for best use of more than 11,000 words goes to . . .

10 New Orleanians on How Katrina Changed Their City.
Not beer. Important. [Via Next City]