Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
Followers of the blog know that I am not a chef, executive chef or anything kitchen related but I do see talent that has that expertise and Melissa Cole has “It”.
And she has a new book with 70+ recipes that just so happen to have beer involved. Pork chops. Blue cheese polenta. Hefeweizen sauce, flatbreads. All there. So if you can move about a kitchen, pick up The Beer Kitchen.
It may seem a mostly fun world of beer but alcohol has some huge downsides. No matter the reports that claim and counterclaim positive benefits. That is why I am always on the lookout for books about the topic, and I found a new one by Leslie Jamison, The Recovering.
And this book, though hard to read and fathom the depths of suffering caused by addiction, is excellent in showing what it is like to go through. It is carefully written and unflinching in detail.
The story weaves the author’s personal journey to sobriety amidst examination of other writer’s depictions and struggles with alcohol and drugs. You also get a mini-History of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) as well.
You quickly learn that the stories of addiction, while outwardly dis-similar, have many of the same characteristics. Empathy and not stigmatizing those who are caught up in the addiction is key.
Both sides of my family have drinkers and knowing that coupled with a revulsion of that spinning feeling when too much has been drunk has kept me restrained. I have counted ounces and set goals for my beer drinking which I think will serve me well as I grow older. But if I didn’t have that, this book would be a “scared straight” revelation. Drunk me won’t be able to solve problems that sober me is having difficulty with at all.
In the end, get help. Be it AA or medication or therapy. Or ideally, a combination of all three. Jamison has had a turbulent life but her gained wisdom will be of great service.
Browsing the beverages section of the lovely Vroman’s Bookstore one recent day, I saw this on the shelves and snapped a quick pic…
Lager by Dave Carpenter dives into the world of the famous style and gives you history and recipes in one hard-bound book.
Carpenter has the credentials to trust as a “longtime beer and home-brewing writer and the Editor in Chief of Zymurgy magazine.”
Nuggets of wisdom inside the book include:
“Why does lager, not ale, dominate world beer production, despite its comparative difficulty to produce?
Why are certain European styles like Vienna lager more associated with brewing in Mexico than on the Continent?
What does St. Louis have to do with České Budějovice?
What role does lager play in today’s expanding craft beer landscape?”
Setting aside the two big events that happened outside of this true crime book from Michelle McNamara. The author’s untimely death mid-writing and the capture through genetics of the Golden State Killer, what I was left with was a book that is less than satisfying.
Then again, I brought high expectations to I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. And initially as the story interweaves between McNamara and her childhood and accounts of the increasingly horrifying crimes, the expectations are met. But then the book settles down into simplistic recounting of the assaults and murders and theories that range from weird to faintly plausible and it becomes a little too voyeuristic.
By the end, in sections cobbled together by researchers, the book just becomes an outline that, when paired with the actual killer take on a wild guess character.
For a beer to pair with it, since the crimes started in the Sacramento area, I would go with Fieldwork Pulp or Pulp Free or Track 7’s Panic IPA. Bitter beers for a bitter point in California history.
The common wisdom is that the elderly have lessons for us if we can stand still enough to listed. The book, Happiness is a Choice You Make gives you example after example of that but also simply shares the lives of a sampling of people at the twilight of their lives.
Author John Leland has chosen a nice group of people to illuminate both the past and the present and the challenges that occur as we age and our bodies start to wear out and wear thin.
This book could easily get too maudlin or too sugary sweet but Leland, perhaps bringing his middle age angst to the writing, only veers into either side, never staying for too long. Sometimes he tries to shoehorn a life into a general life tip example but mostly he just distills down what is going on and how all ages can be a little happier earlier in life.
Thankfully this also doesn’t become a self-help book either. More a lighted path that you can either take or not.
A happy beer choice would be for you hoarders (myself included) to find a beer from their deep cellar. Maybe even the oldest one and open it! If you can’t bear to do that, perhaps pick up a nice barleywine to sip as you read this engrossing book.
Two confessions before I begin this review. One, is that I met and drank Bourbon County Brand Stout with Brett Porter in L.A. in a weird office building location with no other bloggers around. And two, I read Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out over a single day. I couldn’t stop.
Author Josh Noel has crafted a real page turner. It starts at the beginning of Goose Island and stops with the new Independent Seal being introduced by the Brewers Association and in between it covers all of the highs and lows of the strange phase of beer world where SABInBev was buying up breweries.
Though Big Beer is taken to task, this book is no screed against capitalism. This book is super fair but isn’t fair just to preclude future arguments. Neither John Hall or his son Greg get off unscathed but they also get the credit that is due to them. Same for the SABInBev folks. And that is important in history is to tell both sides as fully as possible while also using hindsight to point out where people made mistakes, small or tragic.
This is the first beer history book that has really used social media reaction in just the right proportion. It would have been easy to rely on the funniest tweets or posts but Noel has taken a measured approach to the outsized reactions that I remember reading and hearing about.
The big take-away for me was when Greg Koch from Stone refers to SABInBev as the Borg. The mega-villain of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is apt and I went back to earlier chapters and it really fits. They just want to take over beer. They will use whatever loophole or checkbook to get to that point but they are and will forever be at the mercy and stymied by individualism.
It is why craft beer was able to grow so big and it is why they still lag behind craft when it comes to setting the trends and agendas for beer. Everytime they trot out the worn saying, that the only thing that matters is the beer, you can see them sniggering behind the curtain or hear them sneaking up behind you. They just aren’t authentic.
But for most people, the beer in the glass is only part of the equation. For some, it is the company around the table and the beer, for others it is the big game and beer, and for others it is the beer and the story of the beer.
This book cemented my thoughts on the sell-outs while also deepening my understanding of the people who did it and the people who still work there.
As the Texas brewery Jester King said when Wicked Weed was sold, and I am loosely paraphrasing here, they remain our friends but we don’t like who they aligned themselves with and won’t pour their beer. That is where I stand as well.
One last thing, get this book!
This story from Tilar Mazzeo is about champagne but it also is about taking risk and the Widow Clicquot took many.
There were a lot of what are called “golden nuggets” of wisdom and factoids in this book. Did you know, for instance, that the founding home of champagne is England? Or that champagne was brown at one time? Or that Russia was THE market to break into?
And that is just industry origin story. Not even getting into the story of the Widow and how she came to be in charge of a large corporation through good times and bad. The sad fact being that she (and other contemporaries of the time) could be in charge because champagne was a declining, unfavored business. If it had been popular, men would have pushed her aside.
The fact that the author could glean so much information about a person with so little written about her is amazing.
To drink, well, that may be difficult if you can’t find one of these new Brut IPA’s or a champagne yeast beer. But since Napoleon figures in the story, a good all-purpose choice would be a Berliner Weisse. Maybe a wine grape version.
The Widmer Way: How Two Brothers Led Portland’s Craft Beer Revolution.
Combined with the soon-to-be-released book on Goose Island, this history that explores the Widmer brothers live and Portland beer history up to now as part of the Craft Beer Alliance fills in much needed information about the old guard of craft beer.
IPA by British writer Roger Protz is a bit of split personality. The first 1/2 is loaded with interesting tidbits of brewing and more specifically hop facts such as:
only the female hop is used in brewing. You learn about the history in Britain and I was digging it. And I was looking forward to him bringing us up to (or fairly close to) modern IPA times.
But then the book turns into a survey of IPA’s from different sections of the world. And while it is instructive to be presented with other nations take on the popular style, the pace just slows down as you go from beer review to beer review and I kept wishing that Protz had stuck in the timeline and not moved out to the beer listing.
It should be said that the listing does have its merits in finding breweries that might be of interest. I certainly flagged a few on my Kindle app but that seems like a different book to me.
Overall, this book rates OK. Only because the second half was not what I wanted.
It has been a hot minute since the Brewers Association tackled the ever expanding IPA style in book form but I think they found a brewer who has some good info to impart, Dick Cantwell who is back brewing in the Bay Area has a new book out that tackles the odd side of hoppy beers.
Brewing Eclectic IPA covers “a wide range of ingredients, from cocoa nibs, coffee, fruits, and vegetables, to spices, herbs, and even wood, to push the boundaries of the style.”
Here is the blurb: “Among the most well-respected and experienced craft brewers in the world, Cantwell provides scores of tips and methods for first-time brewers and beer veterans alike to concoct a delectable brew and shares the story of how and why the proliferation of American IPA came to be.”