Beer Book Reviews
Greetings,
There are a few ways to gain a real appreciation of beer. The first is to do a lot of beer tasting. The second is to cruse the World Wide Web and follow every link you can find. The former is more accurate and more expensive. The later is less expensive but can waste hours. Somewhere in between is the world of books. Over the last two months I've acquired four books sent to me by the publishers for my comment. I was especially pleased to get all four of them, because I at least knew of or about the people that wrote these books.
The first to arrive was fermenting revolution by Christopher Mark O'Brien. Before I had a chance to read this book I had a chance to meet Mr. O'Brien. We exchanged books, I signed mine and he inscribed in his.
Fermenting revolution (How to Drink Beer and Save the World) by Christopher Mark O'Brien (ISBN 13: 978-0-86571-556-1):
The full title of this book is Fermenting Revolution (How to Drink Beer and Save the World)... I can tell you that Mr. O'Brien and I have one thing in common; we both truly enjoy drinking well made brews. (I am also rather sure that he and I also enjoy well prepared foods but I can not be sure of that. The venue for our book signing/exchange was a beer tasting at a vegan restaurant in Manhattan.) When it comes to politics and our views of history we disagree. I have a great deal of respect for zealots. Their dedication is something I will never be able to attain and I know it. Their point of view however, is by the nature of the situation, focused to such a fine point that supporting evidence becomes superfluous. Thanks to Mr. O'Brian I can tell you that most of the ills in the societies of this world today can be directly attributed to the fact that beer is no longer brewed as part of the family meal by women of the house. To paraphrase the cartoon character Homer Simpson: "Commercial beer is the cause and not the cure of all mans ills."
The Beer Guide (Edited by Josh Oakes) ISBN 1-892588-16-1
For those of you World Wide Web surfers this book's for you! Josh Oakes has compiled this pocket (well, big pocket) sized tome is, as we learn from the blurb on the back of the book: "Based on a consensus drawn from hundreds of thousands of reviews posted on RateBeer...". In short, what we have here is a print version of the RateBeer.com site with all of the shortcomings of being in print. (I like that because I can not take my lap top to the beer distributor and refuse to own a smaller Black$$$$ry.)
Grilling with Beer by Lucy Saunders (ISBN 13: 978-0-9769875-0-5)
I really wanted to like this book even though I live in an apartment and the chance of grilling food is infinitesimal. I wanted to like this book because I like and respect Lucy Saunders. I wanted to like this book because the design of the book. (It has spiral binding that makes it easy to open to the page you need and have it there in the cooking area, open to the page you need to see. Not flopping closed every time you move the heavy object you placed on it to hold it open.) You should like this book for all of the above reasons (except for my personal ones). If you have food grilling apparatus you can use, and you are just beginning to explore beer as a cooking ingredient I suggest you acquire this book. I can only hope the book stores place this book in the cooking section. In the "beer" section it will disappoint geeks and leave the newbie wanting more.
N.B.: Ambitious Brew (The Story of American Beer) by Maureen Ogle (ISBN 978-0-15-603359-6) is the paperback version of her book.
Cheers!
Peter LaFrance
( peter.lafrance@beerbasics.com / http://www.beerbasics.com/ )
