books

Tune in the Brewing Network Sunday

Pardon another brief advertisement.

I’ll be a guest Sunday on The Brewing Network Sunday Session. The show begins at 5 p.m. Pacific.

We’ll be talking about Brewing With Wheat (I have a copy in hand, Alan, and it weighs 11.8 ounces), the book and the physical activity.

You can even ask questions live by joining the CHAT ROOM or calling 888.401.BEER. Show some compassion and don’t make them too tough.

 

 

‘Brewing with Wheat’ shipping soon

Pardon this brief advertisement. The printer will ship Brewing with Wheat next week, meaning it goes to the distributors and then to stores. It could be in your hands by the end of the month.

The “public service” announcement here is that you can pre-order it for 20 percent off from Brewers Publications, entering the code that is provided at the Beer Enthusiast Store.

I’ll be posting more about the book at Brewing with Wheat, but here’s the excerpt from the foreword by Yvan De Baets that appears on the back cover. Totally relevant to the notion where matters when it comes to beer.

“Tracking those old beers—German, Belgian, whatever—makes one realize that the key to the old styles, probably even more than the recipes themselves, was to be found in the local microflora of each brewery. (Jean-Baptiste) Vrancken reports eighteenth and nineteenth century trials, in which brewmasters were sent from a brewery to another similar one, with all their equipment, raw material, and techniques. Sometimes the grains were even crushed in the first brewery to mimic the process perfectly. They never succeeded in making the same beer in the next village!”

And rather than include another giant image to show you the back cover here are the endorsements:

“In Brewing with Wheat Stan Hieronymus has given homebrewers, craft brewers, and beer enthusiast alike a wheat-fuelled flux-capacitor that will transport them from region to region around the world. This page-by-page journey will satisfy the readers thirst for the knowledge, history, and science needed for producing and enjoying the wide spectrum of wheat beers.”
   – Sam Calagione, founder Dogfish Head Crafty Brewery

“Stan Hieronymus has filled a giant, gaping hole in the beer literature with this book. And once again, he has done it with crisp, engaging prose, loaded with rock solid information, much of it directly from those who brew these delicious, but technically challenging beers every day.”
   – Randy Mosher, author of Radical Brewing and Tasting Beer

We will now return to regular programming.

Added Feb. 17 (just because Alan asked – see below): The book weighs 11.8 ounces.

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.

     

    Ten really good books for a beer library

    It started with this email from a friend: “What is the best book on the market that touches on beer, history, styles, glassware, etc.?”

    This was an easy one to answer: Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion, even though it was published going on 20 years ago and requires tracking down a used copy.

    So easy I thought I might as well extend it to nine more recommendations. Presented in random order (really, I used an online randomizer).

    Before we get to that, the context. There’s a good chance if you aren’t Ron Pattinson or Martyn Cornell (or Jay Brooks) that my beer library has more books than yours, but this is all just one man’s opinion and tomorrow I’d probably come up with a different list.

    I also made a few rules going in. Only one book per author, because otherwise when do you quit listing Michael Jackson books? Books written in English (or American) because that’s the language I read. No books focusing on the brewing process, because that’s too specialized and besides I write them and I have further relationships with Brewers Publications. No cookbooks. No guidebooks, although some include quite clever writing. No books dominated by photos, such as Beer naturally.

  • The Beer Companion, by the late Michael Jackson. This is a book that surely would have won a James Beard award had the publisher bothered to nominate it. Yes, a lot happened — much to his delight — since Jackson last updated the book in 1993, but a little bit of good beer was brewed before then as well.
  • Three Sheets to the Wind, by Pete Brown. Isn’t that the guy who wrote Hops & Glory (reviewed here) and isn’t that supposed to be a better book? Indeed he is and probably, but this book is such a fun romp. Nobody romps like the Brits.
  • Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, by Maureen Ogle. The other day I wrote, “Context and authority determine the value of a list.” Pardon me for quoting myself, but the same is true of history. America was not a beer drinking nation until the German immigrants arrived, which is when this book begins. Here’s a review.
  • Beer: The Story of the Pint, by Martyn Cornell. As above, authority matters. I have this image of somebody sitting on a barstool anywhere in the world and casually mentioning something like “Burton was home of the first pale beers brewed anywhere in the world” and Martyn Cornell appearing to say all of this. Avoid the embarrassment, read this book. Read “the short and entirely wrong history of beer” at least twice.
  • Travels with Barley: A Journey Through the Beer Culture in America, by Ken Wells. Clydesdales horses and yeast rustlers in the same book. Note to self: read this one for the third time.
  • Tasting Beer: An Insider’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Drink, by Randy Mosher. As it suggests on the cover, “Discover your inner taster.” The book that every other book about tasting beer should want to be.
  • Origin and History of Beer and Brewing, by John. P. Arnold. That’s history before 1911, when the book was written. See Ambitious Brew and Beer: The Story of the Pint for what goes into a good history. Chapter 1: Man, Religion and Intoxicants. Are you with me?
  • The Book of Beer Knowledge, by Jeff Evans. The perfect stocking stuffer, including the size. A CAMRA book, so intended first for the U.K. audience but a delightful read. I could also have suggested Don Russell’s Christmas Beer (reviewed here) for the stocking, but then this wouldn’t be a list of ten.
  • The Bedside Book of Beer, an anthology compiled by Barrie Pepper. Another book from the U.K. (from 1990). Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell and Michael Jackson among the contributors. Wouldn’t you like to hang out with them at Happy Hour?
  • Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920, by Madelon Powers. The final sentence should make you cry: “But the saloon was the creature of its time, and its time was past.” Lest we forget.

    • I haven’t included links to buy any of these books, but I recommend shopping at BeerBooks.com, kind of your small, locally owned, friendly bookstore, except online.

    Book Review: The Naked Pint

    Alan McLeod totally nailed it with his review of The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer, answering the two biggest questions I had while reading the book.

    – First, why are there homebrew recipes in this book? Can’t even a book for beginners be a bit specialized or must every introduction to craft beer tell us a little bit about everything? Look, I’m not exactly complaining because (disclaimer alert) they recommend Brew Like a Monk and it’s a good thing when a book that is going to rank ahead of yours at Amazon.com says nice things about it.

    I like the analogy that Alan draws to The Yachtsman’s Week-end Book, writing that Naked Pint “harkens to a day when a book could purport to be an omnibus filled with everything you practically need to know to get from novice to pretty well capable.”

    – Second, were you to give this book as a present who would you give it to? Again, quoting Alan, “This is a book for beer nerds to give their friends. It will tell the nerds a lot about good beer but it will also tell them a lot about their beer nerd pal.”

    Indeed. Any copy coming from me would come complete with Post-it notes correcting a variety of niggling errors. I can’t help myself. I’ve already whined about “candi sugar,” though because almost everybody seems to get that crooked I’m giving them a pass. However you wonder who was in charge of editing when you see the phrase “bottom-fermenting ales.” Or why on page 130 they get it right in explaining misconceptions about dubbels and tripels after getting it wrong on page 23.

    So you probably aren’t going to use this book to study for the Cicerone exam. But it’s easy to like. Authors Hallie Beaune and Christina Perozzi write in a breezy and sometimes brassy manner. (“A 5% ABV beer can make you friendly; an 8% ABV beer can make you French kiss a tree.”)

    They consistently explain things about beer that can seem overwhelming at the outset. Consider their approach to presenting styles. They always begin with an easy-to-read blurb. Like this:

    Bitter, but Not Angry: Bitters

    This beer’s for you if you like: being surly but not mean, long discussions about Shakespearean themes. Notes of toffee. Staying on your stool. Evenings at the pub.

    Far more interesting than any style guidelines you’ve ever read.

    Alan got it perfect, but before you give it to your friends ready for a bit of beer education read it over yourself. You might find yourself better prepared to talk with them.