Around the World in 80 Beers by Martyn Cornell is on my Christmas list for sure not a funny giant chocolate advent calendar wish.
My first thought when seeing the book title was, how many of these beers have I had? If this part of the description is any indication, not many. “The range of different beers covered is astonishing: not just the well-known, such as IPA, pilsner, and Imperial stout, but the rare and little-heard-of, such as Norwegian kveik ale, or Jopejskie, the thick, black, amazingly strong beer recently revived in Poland.”
The Maltose Falcons have been celebrating their 50th year in fine style with many collaborative beers and now they have opened up the archives for some of those as well as many other recipes in a new book.
The book ( in Kindle or paperback) includes a whopping 129 home brew recipes that tun the gamut of their combined brewing experience, beers such as…
“Doug King’s “Dougweiser” that was George Reisch approved or the Steelhead “Bombay Bomber” that was liberated from the brewery (but the actual recipe creator – Teri Fahrendorf – says is nothing like the recipe she created). Silly things like my clam chowder saison. Strong things like the various Falconsclaws, Russian Imperial Stouts, Richard Webster’s stupendously outrageous 18+% beers.”
All proceeds for the book go directly to the Maltose Falcons so buy a copy and support America’s Oldest Homebrew Club.
There is far too little written about beer history that isn’t German White Male heavy. Thankfully that imbalance is reduced now with the upcoming release of Filthy Queens: A History of Beer in Ireland by Dr. Christina Wade.
Here is a little about this book:
“You’ll find an 18th-century courtesan who had a wicked streak of beer snobbery and early medieval monks who wrote beer reviews so terrible, any Untappd fan would feel right at home.
There will be beer tastings, parties, music and wakes.
You’ll meet thieves and murderers, saints and goddesses.
You’ll hear stories of kings and paupers, witches and bishops, Irish, English and Vikings from the Late Iron Age all the way up to the early 20th century.
People do love beer and books as a pairing. Trustworthy Brewing in Burbank has a book club and when I was in Denver visiting breweries, Novel Strand Brewing had a full year of books.
And you can also join David Nilsen and Emily Swank on Instagram Live for HopLit. What is HopLit you ask?, It is “a casual book-and-beer hangout where we talk about what we’ve read recently, what’s on our TBR piles, and what beers we’re enjoying along the way!”
Follow Emily @thebeercanon on and @davidnilsenbeer on their Instagram accounts to get in on the reading action.
Season 2 of Silo is coming out on Apple TV and like many streaming shows, I have yet to view Season 1. To compensate, I read the first book in the trilogy, Wool (followed by Dust and Shift in one word cryptic book titles).
Hugh Howey, the author, has a great story about the genesis of this series that was a self-published novelette that suddenly gained digital traction to the point where he all but had to embiggen it.
It joins the Fallout series in a post-apocalyptic setting with survivors hiding underground along with a lot of secrets. I will do my best to not include spoilers in this mini recap. The heroine of the story, Juliette is part of a mechanical team for the silo who gets the tap on the shoulder to literally go up in the world to become the sheriff. Factions develop between the mayor, the mechanics, the supply crew and the IT department and there is a lot of going up from floor 100 to 34 to 1 and back down again that will make your legs feel tired just from reading.
For a nearly 600 page book, the pages fly by. I could see why this was plucked for a TV series. The trilogy could supply plenty of story for a showrunner. However I felt it was a bit too fast paced and the silo feels so big just for the sake of being massive. I felt good about the characters to start but they got a little plastic as the book wore on. In a weird way, I would say this book could have ended earlier. Maybe make a foursome of books.
I do not think, I will be picking up books two or three.
For beer, I would suggest pondering what beers you would take into a bunker when the world inevitably ends. And then which ones would be everyday drinkers and which you would save and / or hoard and not share a drop of.
Since we are talking pubs, let’s get into the latest book from beer writer Adrian Tierney-Jones, A Pub for All Seasons.
I would say that the sub-title of this book is misleading. It is not a book of rankings or whether Fall is better than Winter. Winter obviously wins. But more a trio of interlocking themes. Memoir meets existential thoughts and the people who run and frequent the pubs.
And for some readers, that second thread of musings on life is the one that I found hardest to latch onto. Yes, you can wax poetic about the first sun of summer but I want to know more about why a pilsner on a pub patio works so well or give me a tip as to beers that you might not know work really well on a rainy day in April. There is some of that in the book but it is a little more inner when I was hoping for a little more travel guide.
Which leads to my next nitpick. I really would have loved to see a map or three in this book. I was trying to follow the winding train tracks but kept having to press pause on the book to do so.
Those two improvements aside, I did really enjoy the book and how the publicans and brewers are piloting their ways through ownership in this day and age. The beers described made me thirsty throughout the book and it was overall a relaxing read through all four seasons.
It has been a pretty good last half of the year for beer books and now you can pre-order a nice shiny coffee table book filled with info and photos of the Hidden Beers of Belgium.
Just after wrapping up judging some beer writing, more on that later this month, I received Issue # 06 of Final Gravity, the October edition.
An in that judgmental state of mind, I dove in and was pleasantly surprised overall. There were a few that seemed more like good starts but could use more detail. Which is better than the other way around.
My standouts were both female tilted with Ruvani de Silva, a writer I like the more I read, had a smart piece on perimenopause and Cat Wiest had me wanting more stories about her fishing days and brewing days.
Behind that, as honorable mentions, were ‘zine co-founder Melinda Guerra’s piece on the beers she has picked as malty eulogies for friends which was pitched just right for spooky season. And Lucy Corne’s evocative writing on Charlie’s Garage in South Africa which made me want to try the beers and hang with the locals even though I am an introvert.
Time to dig into some ancient beer history with Tate Paulette and his new book, In the Land of Ninkasi.
First off, Paulette seems to be a big beer fan so this book already is a step ahead of most academic inclined books where the author doesn’t seem excited about the topic or is tamping down excitement to remain scholarly.
Second, he is very clear about what can and cannot be guessed at when it comes to archaeology. Claims are made but they are backed up by evidence and when that evidence is too slight or flimsy, Paulette will say so.
With that housekeeping out of the way, In the Land of Ninkasi covers beer and brewing in Mesopotamia in ancient times. From where it was brewed and by whom. What is was brewed with. How it was brewed, all the way to who drank it and why. Each step is backed up with evidence and if there is an alternative thesis, he brings that up as well.
Paulette also isn’t afraid to be challenging to our normal thought process. An example being the Minimalist Trap. From our perch in 2024, we cannot assume that we are at the pinnacle of how to brew. We may be but that does not mean that Ancient Mesopotamian brewing wasn’t complex too. There were purpose built brewing areas and specialized equipment back then too.
Another interesting aspect is that the records we have from that time are basically inventories and sales slips. It can be hard to say what a day in the life of a brewer was when it is all just so much zeroes and ones.
Before you think this book is about literal dust and dry facts, the Epic of Gilgamesh is also wove into this tale and one part that I did not remember is about Shiduri, the tavern keeper at the end of the world. How cool that an epic warrior seeks help from a bar owner.
This book is academic in parts as well and those do make the reading drag a bit. There are instances of explaining the different languages and what the words translate to for our times and there is some inside baseball as well that glazed my eyes a bit but overall, this history opened my eyes as to how this time in beer will be remembered hundreds and thousands of years from now.
Followers of the blog know that I am more than just a little keen on Beer history. I like all the nooks and crannies of beer throughout the years. But it is not as well covered as many other fields. Thankfully, the Beer Culture Center along with the Newberry Library are partnering on a fellowship that will help remedy that situation.
It is the Beer History Studies Fellowship which is open to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) MA students, PhD candidates, or post doctoral scholars who are researching beer and who have a specific need for research in the Newberry Library collection.
I am hoping that initiatives like this will bring forth more beer books for me to read and review.
