Category: Beer Books

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Beer Book Review – Filthy Queens

Combine history and beer and I am in and I quickly pre-ordered Filthy Queens by Dr. Christina Wade that covers the history of beer in Ireland.

My overriding history book guide is that if it is textbooky then it is not good. History, when written well, can be electric. Most school taught history though is dry as dust.

Preamble aside, Wade has put fun into this gallop through Ireland and its brewing history from 300 AD up to 1900. I mean gallop because it is under 200 pages. Part of the reason is that back just over a century ago, a fire broke out in Dublin and the flames consumed a lot of historical documents. Making a hard task even harder and necessitating comparing other countries and making leaps and guesses as to what could have happened in Ireland.

I knew that I was in good hands when an Untappd joke appears on the pages of this book. Wade doesn’t bog you down with dates and instead finds little personal moments where people and beer intersected through the years.

The only down note is that the book ends at 1900. I know I wasn’t going to get modern craft beer in Ireland but I think the boundary end could have been up to pre-WW2 where there are more sources and info that could be passed on.

Every chapter of Filthy Queens had a nugget of learning, if not more and I am sure I will be referencing this book in the future.

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‘Zine Review – Final Gravity # 7

Issue # 7 of Final Gravity arrived last month with 8 new pieces of beer writing that I greedily read in one sitting.

The three stories that garnered my most interest were regarding the Swiss Beer Cartel which sounds more ominous than what it was, a state sanctioned monopoly of beer. My first exposure to Archival Brewing which re-creates historical beers and the tale of the revolutionary dive bars which takes place way back in, well, revolutionary times in Philadelphia. This was a really solid all around issue. I heartily suggest getting it.

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Bock It

One could argue that we do not need IPA books or barrel-aged beer books since they are beer style categories already oft discussed and argued over, whereas the humble Bock Bier could use love.

When I purchased the latest Final Gravity beer ‘zine, what did I notice? A ‘zine about Bock. Looks like a quick way to learn more about a seldom seen style.

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Beer All Year

Beer writer Tom Acitelli with past works as Pilsner and The Audacity of Hops is back and his latest book is The Golden Age of Beer: A 52-Week Guide to the Perfect Beer for Every Week of the Year and will be released at the end of February by Apollo Publishers.

This book is described thusly – “Acitelli’s inviting, accessible voice and dives into homebrewing, beer icons, today’s industry game-changers, and more. It cuts through the noise and the hype to leave you with a lush, inspiring, and reliable guide for sampling and entertaining all year long.”

Probably should have been released last year so that we could get a jump on 2025 but we go March to March.

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Only 80?

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.”

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Book Day – The Maltose Paperback

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.

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Book Day – A Good Dirty

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.

Oh, and don’t forget the zombies.”

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Book Day – HopLit

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.

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A Book & A Beer – Wool by Hugh Howey

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.