books

Book review: The beerbistro Cookbook

The beerbistro Cookbook

Let’s start out with what’s wrong with The beerbistro Cookbook. It’s too dang pretty to risk taking into the kitchen to refer to. This book is pure food and beer porn.

Before moving on to what’s right about the book I must offer a longer than usual disclaimer. Co-author Stephen Beaumont is a long-time friend of our family (I even know his secret hotmail address). He links to this site and has written nice things about Brew Like a Monk. Likewise I occasionally link to his.

The beerbistro CookbookDuring our family’s lengthy travels we happened to be in Toronto the day after Daria’s birthday. She decided, with absolutely no coaching, she’d like to celebrate at beerbistro. Because our timing was terrible we had picked a time that Stephen, who helped start the restaurant as well as co-authoring the cookbook, was in New Orleans. However he did alert co-author Brian Morin, the chef and driving forcing behind the bistro, we’d be in town.

After we’d ordered our first beers (I started with the local King Pilsner, at Stephen’s emailed suggestion) Brian surprised us by showing up at the table to chat. We talked about beer, about cooking with beer, about the local food markets and his shopping trip earlier in the day, and similar topics. Sierra, our daughter, was totally taken with Brian. She was doubly taken by the Cheese and Lager Fondue. She is triply taken with the cookbook. So although Stephen and I are good enough friends I’d be comfortable enough criticizing the book I know better than to cross a starry-eyed 12-year-old.

Which takes us to the first good thing about the book. These are recipes Sierra and I can make, written to include ingredients you can find. Brian is big on local and fresh but also sensible. After one more bit of food porn a few more positives:

The beerbistro Cookbook

– Your friends will enjoy the primer. You may not need to read about beer’s history, beer styles, how to pour a beer or even beer at the able again. But these remain foreign concepts on much of our continent. Also be advised you don’t want to glaze over what seems familiar. The beer and cheese primer toward the end is exceptional.

– Beer in the kitchen. It starts with a philosophy about all ingredients, one of which happens to be beer.

– Beer Styles à la beerbistro. Twelve basic categories “recommended as an accompaniment to the recipes or, in many cases, as a descriptor of the beer called for in the recipe.” Thus the styles become quenching, sociable and soothing. Or spicy: “Well-rounded ales with a natural spiciness, either from fermentation or spice addition or both. Look for Belgian or Belgian-style strong blonde ales, such as La Find du Monde and Westmalle Trpel, and complex North American spiced ales, such as Dogfish Head Midas Touch and AleSmith Grand Cru.”

– The recipes. Including more with mussels than even a Belgian could imagine.

– The recipe for Rochefort 8, chocolate, and chocolate chip ice cream. Best dessert I had in 14 months on the road. I’m not one inclined to do anything with Rochefort 8 other than put it in a glass and drink it, but there’s no pain in parting with three bottles to make six cups of this ice cream.

Sierra gets the last word, and she actually has a question that amounts to a bit of criticism: Where’s the fondue recipe? But she can forgive that omission. Leaving out the recipe for beerbistro’s Belgian-Style Frites . . . that would be unforgivable.

 

Book review: World’s Best Beers

World's Best BeersWorld’s Best Beers: One Thousand Craft Brews from Cask to Glass, which I mentioned earlier this week, is a coffee table book, weighing in at nearly three and a half pounds. Although it includes an introduction to beer up front, thus qualifying as novice friendly, and a beer-and-primer apparently required in all new beer books, most will look to the 176 pages that list (disclaimer: I haven’t counted them) 1,000 beers.

A half dozen things to like about the book:

– Author Ben McFarland writes about Zoigl from the Oberpfläz Wald. Only a paragraph but I’m not sure Zoigl is mentioned in another of the other (a few hundred) beer books I own.

– He includes an essay on hops from Sean Franklin from Rooster’s Brewery in Yorkshire. Speaking of hops, more than two (oversized) pages about hop varieties.

– For descriptions like this for Empire IPA from the Burton Bridge Brewery: “A celebrated brewpub in the town of Burton-on-Trent, the spiritual home of British brewing and the engine room of the IPA boom years. It’s hoppy, and it knows it; clap your hands . . . , especially for the fruity, orange aroma from the late addition of Styrian hops.”

– It has lists. Love ’em or hate ’em they make good conversation starters. For instance, four of the five top five beers from Germany are Bavarian but none is a hefeweiss or helles or dunkles.

– Because he saves a little love for Achel 5 Blond, generally overlooked because it’s only 5% abv and sold only in the brewery cafe.

– Two beers from Kout na Šumave in the Czech Republic.

I hope you’ve figured out this is no cookie-cutter book. In an email, McFarland wrote he knew up front that some would question his selection of beers. To be honest, I think the Central Time Zone (the U.S. obviously) is under-represented. That’s the nature of these books. They are worth your time when the beers are thoughtfully chosen.

One reason to be disappointed:

Not enough McFarland. Huh? This is a 288-page book. Indeed, but while “800 Craft Brews from Cask to Glass” doesn’t have the same ring to it I’d trade a couple hundred tasting notes for an essay or two. McFarland clearly has more to him than cleverly worded descriptions. That’s what I want more of.

 

Book review: Christmas Beer

Christmas BeerDon Russell’s Christmas Beer: The Cheeriest, Tastiest, and Most Unusual Holiday Brews came out last year while we were in Europe. Thus I write from experience when I suggest this is not a book you want to start reading in January, when these beers have disappeared from the shelves.

A few facts: The book is a packed 208 pages, with extra details with his choice of “The World’s 50 Best Christmas Beers.” Of course he’s wrong about some of them, but makes up for it with vitals on 98 more. Then there are recipes, serving tips, places to drink, all the expected extras.

Research was serious work, as Russell explains at the outset. He writes, “So every year I pick a day in early December to skip work and go beer hunting. One year I flew to Norway for its holiday beer, juleøl. In other years, I’ve trooped off to the West Coast. Most years, though, I stay on the East Coast for a beer-hunting expedition that can last twelve hours and take me though five states, plus the District of Columbia.”

Why you’d buy the book:

– The front matter. The book begins with a series of short stories, most two to four pages. In our house we haul out a couple of dozen Christmas books each Thanksgiving. The tales inside are surrounded by illustrations, so can can read a book out loud (more popular when Sierra couldn’t yet read) in only a few minutes. Same with the stories at the front of Christmas Beer. Read a story, have a beer. Repeat tomorrow night.

– The list of beers. I’ll forgo my usual rant against “best” lists. In this part of the book you see a beer on one page, the story of the beer on the facing page. Always a better story than the marketing people include in their press releases. And, of course, the attraction of these special beers is they tell their own story. So if you plan to spend the proper amount of time with the book, a short story and a beer each evening, and you take into account the front matter, then the 50 “best” beers, and sampling all the other beers listed . . . we’re already behind on Christmas of 2009.

– I makes a great gift. It would be on my wish list if I didn’t already have it.

Why you wouldn’t buy the book: Your name is Scrooge.

 

Book review: Hops and Glory

Hops and GloryOn July 9 Luke Nicholas put two casks of Armageddon IPA on a New Zealand ferry, sending them on a journey that would last six weeks, 126 trips back and forth across the Cook Strait.

Colin Mallon, manager of Wellington specialist beer bar The Malthouse, and Nicholas, owner and brewer of Epic Beer, hit upon the idea during a trip to England. They named the casks Melissa and Pete, for beer writers Melissa Cole and Pete Brown, the latter author of Hops and Glory: One Man’s Search for the Beer That Built the British Empire.

“The idea is to see what effect changes in temperature and constant movement have on beer stored in wood,” Nicholas said. “Most pundits believe India Pale Ales benefited from the conditioning they received during their sea voyages.”

When they tapped the casks a couple of weeks ago they found the beer quite tasty, but then you go to that much trouble you’re likely to be predisposed to feel that way.

Likewise, when 410 pages into an epic journey Brown finally tastes the IPA he’s given up a good chunk of his life to haul from England to India would you expect anything other than love? It might have made a better story had he spit out the beer in disgust. That would have been a hoot, wouldn’t it? However, even though he attempted to “create a buffer of skepticism” he found perfection.

It pours a rich, deep copper colour, slightly hazy from the sheer weight of the hops. The nose was an absolute delight: and initial sharp citrus tang, followed by a deep tropical salad of mangos and papaya. And when I tasted it, my tongue exploded with rich, ripe fruit, seasoned with a hint of pepper. That bitter, hoppy spike had receded, the malt reasserting itself now against the hop attack. As well as the rich summer fruit, there was a delicate tracery of caramel, not thick and obvious, but more the golden, gloopy kind you get in Cadbury’s Caramel bars, light and not too cloying. The elements of the beer ran into each other, harmonizing. The finish was smooth and dry, clean and tingling. And by God it was damned drinkable for its hefty 7 per cent alcohol.

He also writes, “In the global family of IPAs, it combined the weighty hop character of the American beers I loved with the balance of the more restrained English brews, the best of both worlds.”

You’d expect no less enthusiasm from an author who proved in both A Man Walks into a Pub and Three Sheets to the Wind an unrelenting appreciation for what he refers to as the “best long drink in the world.” In Hops and Glory we get considerably more, some of which we might not have bargained for.

Well into his journey Brown steps aboard the tall ship Europa, one of several water vehicles central to the story:

A tanned blonde woman in her mid-twenties, Scandinavian looking, pretty yet overwhelmingly practical, direct from central casting for an advertisement for healthy living on the ocean waves, appeared and said, “Hi, I’m Val.”

“Pete.”

“Ah, you’re English Pete, yes?”

“Yes!”

This was great. Already I had a pirate name. English Pete — it suited me.

This was it. The full impact of what I was doing finally hit home. I was an adventurer, an explorer, embarking on something few wordinary people would every dare. Wasn’t I?

“‘You’ll be sharing your cabin with a couple of men in their late fifties.”

OK, maybe not as adventurous as I thought.

But it is an adventure. One that starts with what turned out to be a crazy idea: “. . . something that would make people stop and ask, are you sure? Something that might even make them worry for my safety.” In fact I remember when the first stories appeared, announcing that Brown would haul a cask of traditional IPA from Burton-on-Trent to India. Didn’t sound all that tough. Put some beer on a boat, actually a few boats in succession, sail to India. Get off. Tap. Enjoy.

That would be a magazine article rather than this book of considerable heft. Like in any good travel yarn, Brown uses his geographical journey to frame a story in which he and the rest of us move from illusion to understanding. Unlike in many the author — beer is not the central character in this book; Pete Brown is — also takes a long, honest at himself. He invites us to do the same, to perhaps consider similar questions about ourselves. How sane is he? Are we? How competent?

To the credit of his wit, and perhaps beer, what could have turned dark doesn’t.

Curiously, this book has not yet been printed for sale in the U.S. market, although it is available in Canada (where they spell flavor with a “u”). Curiously because of (some) Americans love affair with hops. It really should be sold in the U.S. Certainly it has a BBC feel to it — a well done travelogue with social history and liberal remorse — but Brown writes in a language the American beer drinker can understand and in a way hip readers of AFAR would likewise appreciate.

He’s not the first to get the IPA story right (Martyn Cornell did that quite nicely), but since history gets mangled in different ways on the two sides of the Atlantic there’s work to be done. He’ll also admits this is not the compleat history of IPA, because modern history took a turn since Bert Grant reintroduced India Pale Ale to the American market in 1983.

Writing a bit for Grant’s biography, Michael Jackson recalled the first time he tasted Grant’s IPA: “I was just stunned by the bitterness of it. I just loved the bitterness of it. I thought, ‘christ, he’s really going to do this. Bert really expects people to buy this?’

“It was like hearing Charlie Parker for the first time, and wondering, ‘Are people really going to buy these records?’ I have sampled Grant’s IPA many time since, and always found it very hoppy. But nothing could match the shock of that first encounter.”

American IPAs since evolved, heading in a variety of directions so let’s not start a debate about style definitions, keeping bitterness as a hallmark but with many putting equal premium on hop flavor. They are not beers designed to be put on a boat for months. Whether somebody else thinks they could do with mellowing brewers want them served fresh.

“This idea of keeping the hoppy beers fresh is what will keep us from ever growing too large,” said Russian River Brewing co-founder Vinnie Cilurzo, who is credited with brewing the first commercial Double (or Imperial) IPA ever. He said that he and his wife and partner, Natalie, take freshness of Pliny the Elder and Blind Pig IPA personally. “In Northern California, we have 100 percent coverage regarding these beers being kept cold (in store coolers). Now we are working to get at least 90 percent of the accounts outside of Northern California to keep them cold. Our next step will be to survey every market and note on our list of accounts on our web site who keeps our beer cold and who does not.”

There’s still more to explore about IPA, but you get a sense reading the book and his blog that Brown will not be the one making the trip or performing various experiments.

Too bad, because it’s hard to imagine anybody else writing about it in as engaging a manner.