A few good beer ideas

  • A British pub is hosting a hymn and beer night with the help of a local church. As well as pub customers and members of the congregation the Salvation Army also joined in the festivities.
  • Ron Pattison is offering some of his collected works for sale in hard copy of downloadable form. I can speak to the quality of two of the books. Decoction! is about a lot more than decoction, containing the most complete information you’ll find anywhere about Berliner weisse and Gose (at least in English).

    And Trips! (South) might be characterized as Bill Bryson meets a one-man Yelp. Lots of fun reading, but also plenty of vital information. If you really want to understand beer you need to spend time in Bavaria, and I don’t know of a better book for a beer-focused tourist.

  • The 33 Bottles of Beer pocket book helps you visualize what your taste. It combines the beer flavor wheel and “spider graphing” (which is not a matter of charting spider drinking activity but drawing a “web” that might show you something).
  • Basically, the little book comes with 33 pages, with the bottom of each looking like this.

    It might look a little familiar. I’ve previously posted similar spider charts that graph hop aromas and flavors.

    I suspect you might find yourself streamlining the flavor wheel a bit, but after a few beers — perhaps quite a few, depending on the variety you sample — you’ll have an actual picture of what you like.