Category: Beer Books

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A Beer & A Book – Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

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Sequels are tough things for writers. The initial thrill has worn off. You take characters in new directions and have them interact with new people in new ways. Any of which could turn off the fans who, in many instances, love that book and want that book again.

Toss in a movie that the writer did not like and which took the story off book and you have a host of hoops to jump through.

But then you are Stephen King, so does any of that matter?

I think so in a few instances. IT, The Stand, Four Seasons, The Shining. Which brings us to Doctor Sleep. Wherein, King catches us up with Danny Torrance who was terrorized in the Overlook Hotel by malevolent ghosts and only saved because he had a special gift, the Shining.

This new book gives us a more cardboard set of villains in the True. RV riding, kind-of vampires who live off the energy of people as they die. With people who have the Shining being a gourmet meal. Now Danny, newly sober and with many ghosts of his own making in his closet, has to become the mentor to a young girl who Shines even brighter than he ever did.

I enjoyed the parts where King filled in what happened to Danny after the evil hotel burned to the ground. Someone who has to deal with that trauma, plus hear the thoughts of his mother and others, plus have a tendency to alcohol abuse is a bad trifecta to have in your life. The way that Danny and his protégé communicate is well handled as well but once the plot heads to showdown town, it heads to quickly to clean and happy endings for all.

Since the action of the piece takes place in New Hampshire and Colorado, I have selected a hard to get and easier to get beer from each locale as my choices for beer while being King’s “Constant Reader”:

Colorado
Hard to Find – Black Shirt Brewing and Electric Currantcy. A wild ale from those in Black Shirts that is sour like the True or Castle Rock Brewing and their Red Irish Hart which plays into a character in the book and the oft used location of many a King frightfest.

Easier to Find – Crooked Stave and any of their Nightmare on Brett versions or Great Divide’s Rumble IPA for the climatic fight scenes.

New Hampshire
Hard to Find – Oddball Ales has a Postmortem IPA that would give a creepy vibe.

Easier to Find – Smuttynose Finest Kind IPA has a name that fits the positive ending of the book.

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Locavore

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The latest release from the Brewers Publications imprint is Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer. Written by long-time beer writer Stan Hieronymus, “introduces brewers and drinkers to the ways herbs, flowers, plants, trees, nuts and shrubs flavor distinctive beers.”
This latest book seems a perfect companion to his 2005 book, Brew Like a Monk. Part history of locally sourced brewing ingredients and part technical brewing book this book could be slotted into the history shelf of your beer book collection or in the brewing technique section.

Plus you will probably get an in depth education on agriculture as well if his last book on hops is any indication.

Brewing Local is certainly going on my Christmas book list.

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A Book & A Beer – Hamilton – The Revolution

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Hamilton – The Revolutionis half annotated lyrics and half the backstory to how the musical went from White House performance to mixtape to phenomenon. And I don’t say phenomenon lightly. Even Dick Cheney, ex-Vice President apparently likes it. This despite it being so closely associated with President Obama.

This is a heavy and handsome book that is well designed. You can put on the soundtrack and hear the words being sung or you can read after listening to the amazing soundtrack. If you only get one take-away from this book, it’s that the passion from Everyone involved was amazing. To create a really old-school constructed musical using both history and hip-hop is a strange and daunting task.

For me, the power of the correctly chosen word is what gets me the most. Even a quickly said word is pondered to see if it doesn’t tip a secret too soon or is too esoteric. Just great stuff.

Beer wise, I have a multitude of options. Since Alexander Hamilton was an adopted New Yorker, I have to go with a New York Beer first, maybe even something sold at the famed Fraunces Tavern, something from Grimm Artisanal Ales like Purple Prose to match his writing chops. Ommegang and their Great Beyond evokes where one might go after a duel and both are as bitter as Burr and other Founding Fathers. You can also go with the traditional Sam Adams Boston Lager since the patriot and brewer is name checked in the show. Another hoppy choice would be from Alpine here in San Diego, Duet is perfect for a musical n

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Oregon Hop History

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Odd to see a tale of Oregon hops published by the UC Press of California but if that is what it takes to get to the root of the mighty bitter bine in Oregon, then so be it.

Here is the book blurb and it has me excited to read what author Peter Kopp has dug up, “The contents of your pint glass have a much richer history than you could have imagined. Through the story of the hop, Hoptopia connects twenty-first century beer drinkers to lands and histories that have been forgotten in an era of industrial food production. The craft beer revolution of the late twentieth century is a remarkable global history that converged in the agricultural landscapes of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The common hop, a plant native to Eurasia, arrived to the Pacific Northwest only in the nineteenth century, but has thrived within the region’s environmental conditions so much that by the first half of the twentieth century, the Willamette Valley claimed the title “Hop Center of the World.” Hoptopia integrates an interdisciplinary history of environment, culture, economy, labor, and science through the story of the most indispensible ingredient in beer.’

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Cooking with Hops

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Most craft beer cookbooks either fall into the camp of A) what to pair with beer or B) cooking with beer. But what about using the ingredients of beer in cooking, specifically hops?

That is the task undertaken by the Kickstarter funded book: Hedonistic Hops – The Hopeheads Guide to Kitchen Badassery by Marie Porter with photographs (and some commentary) from Michael Porter.

This book walks you through from growing your own hops all the way to harvesting and then the recipes that they can be used in. Of course, you can always buy hops and use those and the Porters are nimble enough to make recipes that can be used with fresh hops, pellets and even the shoots and leaves too.

The tone is genial sometimes verging on the hokey. I am still wondering about the choice of “badassery” for the sub-title but overall it is like talking to the somewhat goofy aunt or the dad with bad jokes while they are cooking. It is a welcoming tone throughout and the instructions and hop information is laid out in a way to re-focus on cooking and not brewing.

The main chunk of the book is devoted to recipes. Starting with appetizers and sides, then proceeding to Main Dishes, condiments, desserts before finishing at beverages.

For me, the section on condiments and sauces was the most intriguing. Creating a BBQ glaze or hoppy butter seems to be something that can be used in many different meal preparations and I think is under represented in cookbooks. Same goes for the beverages section. Making hop accented ice tea or lemonade are cool and quick ideas that adds something extra to a dinner.

If you cannot get enough hops and like brownies with green flecks in them, this might be the cookbook for you.

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A Book and A Beer – City of the Lost

There is a certain type of book that falls into the “airplane” read category. The swiftly paced thriller or mystery that you can finish in a plane ride or layover and forget about the next day. City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong falls into that category.
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I picked it up due to an intriguing premise. A rustic community, off the radar, houses criminals and those trying to escape their past. Some inhabitants pay a premium, others are pro bono but it is a working community and those with skills in high demand are desired. Doctors, cooks and carpenters.

But then people go missing and a detective is needed. Enter the heroine of the piece. A tough but sexy. Damaged but sexy. Determined but sexy. Casey Butler. She buys a friend in need of escape from an abusive relationship a golden ticket. She gets six months to solve the case.

More people die. She falls for the gruff sheriff. Adventures ensue.

Two issues caused me to lose interest:
1. It takes way too long to get the protagonist to the outpost. Too many pages are chewed up with backstory which leads to problem…
2. The villain is apprehended basically on the last page and it’s no great reveal. It’s your basic mystery where anyone could be the killer. No real set-up that leads you to guess. You just have a list of characters who have appeared enough to be possible killers.

To drink, I would recommend the upcoming New Belgium Cookie Dough beer that the Colorado brewery developed with ice creamer Ben & Jerry’s. Cookies are part of the character of the “town” of Rockton as is tequila, which leads to the second beer choice, also from Colorado. Avery Brewing has aged a few beers in tequila barrels, but the latest is Expletus, which has cherries added as well.

Or you could pick up a Canadian craft beer and make believe that you are in your own witness protection program.

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Beer Book Review – The Opposite of Woe

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To be upfront, I was 100% more interested in the beer portion of The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics by Governor John Hickenlooper.

By the end though, I found myself much more interested in his childhood and his mother and how that affected his personality and choices throughout his life.

Maybe that was because both the beer and the politics really get short shrifted in this telling. Wynkoop Brewing was one of the pioneers of craft beer in Colorado, and I didn’t really get to read much about it other than an anecdote about cleaning toilets and fundraising through friends and families. There wasn’t mention of his favorite beers or much about the customers and the growing beer scene or even the Great American Beer Festival for that matter.

The tenure as Mayor of Denver got some coverage but his first term as Governor is just blitzed through with just a laundry list of accomplishments and personnel who helped him.

It is probably too early for a thorough accounting of his political career but I would have hoped to learn more about the craft beer part of his life. But maybe that is for another book. There were many hints dropped as to buried stories underneath the polite line of history that just were not picked up.

But the section up until he got to Denver is really interesting stuff from the point of view of how people are affected by those in their lives and how you can keep pushing and learning all through life. Just following his geographic route through life is remarkable.

Overall, this memoir suffers from what many do. The initial pages are full of content but as the pages go by, the coverage gets thinner until the end, whole years are barely even sketched. There is interesting stuff here but not enough for the beer fan.

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Beer Book Review – Beer Pairing by Julia Herz & Gwen Conley

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Sub-titled: The Essential Guide from the Pairing Pros, this book covers quite a bit of ground and is certainly a handy reference guide for setting up a major beer dinner or just to enjoy a dinner with family with beer that will really enhance the experience.

Julia Herz and Gwen Conley have come at the problem from a different angle. First how to talk about pairing and what the goal is. The typical Three C’s of Compare, Contrast and Cut are there but they add more nuance to those common practices. A wow moment for me was to think of intensity and bridges as just as important. What is the intensity of the food or the hops in that IPA? And are there friends of friends that can cart you over the bridge from the beer to the food?

There were other golden information nuggets in those first three chapters such as discussing beer in non-beer terms such as ice tea or maple syrup or flavors in relation to past food experiences. Did that beer remind you of your Mom’s cooking or a trip to Oregon? They also place, rightly, importance on What comes first? music (beer) or lyrics (food) when creating a craft beer dinner. But at 60+ pages of science of smell and other book learning, it came across more as a data dump as precursor to the good stuff later.

The graphs used were also hit-and-miss. Most did not seem to be organized in an immediately recognizable format and required poring over to see what should have been a distillation of information. The Potential Interactions chart of page 72 is a prime example. The type is way too small and there are too many columns with what appears, at first, as repeated information. But then the intensity beer tasting form is better….
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In between, is the Palate Trip graphic which looks a little too clip-arty and makes the really good idea of trying the same foods with different beers a bit harder to grasp. The authors use train wreck as the term for bad pairings and this is a prime example of one…IMG_7019

The meat of the book is well done. (Pun intended). The basic beer styles are covered with data for the super geeky and with a range of pairing suggestions that are both comfortable and outside of the box. I really like the idea of “Try this First”. You (or I) may not like that particular food, but reading about why they chose it can easily lead one to a different pick. Plus, I appreciated that nothing was way too fancy. There were fancy examples but this book is firmly geared to what even a rare occasion cook, like me, could accomplish with a little work.

The expansive section of chocolate, cheese and other strong pairing choices probably could have been folded in as sidebars to the main chapter since it re-covers ground already trodden.

Overall, the book has some solid reference points and I think adds to the beer library admirably.

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A Book & A Beer – Wood & Beer

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Normally, I would review a book of Fiction or Non-Fiction for this monthly post that was totally unrelated to craft beer. But this month, I break that rule to talk about Wood & Beer a new-ish release from Brewers Publications written by two heavyweights in the beer world, Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert.

The book covers a lot of ground delving into history, construction, natural resources and microbiology. Mostly, you will know a lot more about wood after reading this book. From the veins and structure of trees to fashioning staves that make up the barrel.

Yes, it is directed primarily at brewers and to a lesser extent home brewers but there are lots of interesting factual nuggets to be found in the pages. One that really stood out for me was that over 85% of U.S. breweries are at least dabbling in using wood in creating beers. That seemed astonishingly high but it does account for the exploding market in barrels and the growing range of types of barrels being used.

I had hoped to read more about how Elysian and New Belgium grew their barrel programs and what they learned, mistakes made and surprise successes. There is a bit about the Foeder Forest and the Salazar influence on the wild and sour beers coming from Fort Collins but I would have lapped up even more. Maybe I will have to wait for Lauren Salazar to write a sour book. There is nothing about Elysian, which is understandable but still a bit disappointing to me.

For drinking with this book, I can give two California suggestions. Amburana Porter from Three Weavers is a lovely dark ale that really showcases the Brazilian wood and imparts tremendous cinnamon notes into the beer. It is one of my favorites from the Inglewood brewery. I have been told it is a limited release but it seems to pop up frequently.

Then, I should say try anything from Barrelworks – the sour arm of Firestone Walker but let’s narrow that down to trying two Bretta’s. Rose and my absolute favorite, Bretta Weisse. They really showcase how oak works on a beer to add layers. These are two very well rounded beers.

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THE Hops List

265. That is a lot of hops. And Julian Healey has created a handy dictionary for each one.
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Each Hop merits a short description along with brewmaster notes as well as flavors/aroma characteristics and most common usage.

This may be geared more toward the home brewer but if you pick up a digital version, you can also make quick reference while you are drinking your next IPA.