Tag: book review

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Book Review – Bitter by Jennifer McLagan

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Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor is not the typical read for me.  I was hoping for a biography of sorts of bitterness.  I wanted to understand why the bitterness of hops is so appealing to me (as is citrus) whereas vegetables like broccoli or Brussel Sprouts are major turn offs in aroma and taste.

What the book is, is mostly recipes.  Some intriguing like Beer Jelly and others with ingredients that I would rather leave out of my kitchen.  There is information of both historical and cooking types inside the covers but it is more of an aside and less the main thrust of the tale.  Case in point: An excellent two pages on how sound affects eating pleasure. It was intelligent to point out how airplane sound is one if the reasons that food a mile high is unappetizing. The photography though is amazing.  Simple but detailed.  Close enough to really see the items on display and well staged.

Jennifer McLagan is an engaging writer whose personality shines through and I did learn about entemological backgrounds of grapefruit and other foods but I just did not get enough to reach the level of what I desired to learn.

Perhaps there is another book out there on this taste.

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Book Review – The Perfect Keg

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Perhaps word has gotten out that I love books about beer.  Because every twice-in-a-while, I will get  a new book to read and I was glad to get The Perfect Keg by Ian Coutts.  With the appended longer title of “Sowing, scythng, malting and brewing my to the best-ever pint of beer.”

What I liked most about this book was the honesty.  This isn’t a book about going from point A to B in a straight and unerring line.  This is a book with fits and starts.  There are learning curves and mishaps.  Two steps forward and one back.  But it is written in such a go-get’em tone that you are rooting for Coutts to make that Perfect Keg a reality.

There are home-brew recipes sprinkled throughout the book but not being a brewer home or otherwise, I was more interested by the the process of really doing a “local” beer.  There is a lot of lip service paid to local and community driven beer whilst deliveries from across the world come in the back of the brewery.  And I think it is very important to be more transparent about the whole affair.  If brewery A can only afford malt from a certain place then so be it.  There is no dishonor there.

And this book, though ostensibly only about brewing one special batch at home with local malt, yeast and hops really brings the point to a sharper point.  What do you do if the malt isn’t coming out of the ground in enough quantity?  How do you coax hops to grow in an area not conducive to hop bines?  What is the history of brewing in the area?

There are trips to professors of Agriculture.  Talks with brewers and farmers here that will add to the craft beer fan’s knowledge of brewing.  My favorite section of the book though is about the whole malting process and all of the conflicting advice and wisdom that is out there.  And trying to cobble together a Rube Goldberg malting set-up is one of the funnier (now, probably not then) parts of the book.

This is an easy and fun read that has a lot more going on than the typical craft beer book.

I also got the opportunity to ask the author Ian, a few questions.  Some will appear right now (others in Beer Paper LA in the future)….

1. How do you compare the beer scenes in Canada and the US?

We are a) catching up and b) slightly ahead. Let me explain. I think in most of English Canada, we are playing catch-up with the U.S. Despite all the jokes that Canadians traditionally made about American beer, honest Canadians have known for a decade or more that the Americans were way out there in terms of imaginative craft brewing – think of those West Coast Pale Ales that have conquered the world, for example. To my mind, craft brewing here for the longest time was still stuck back in the early days when a slightly hopped brownish ale could occasion utter hysteria. But I think we’re catching up.

But then there’s the slightly ahead part. And that’s Quebec. Beer-wise, they don’t just march to the beat of a different drum, it’s a completely different band. When craft beer started to take off in the 1980s, they were in there with live yeast beers, decades before anyone else. Belgian styles, French styles, beers made with spruce needles or hibiscus – even without any malted grains at all — craft brewers there will try anything and the audience is always up for something new.

2.  What Canadian breweries do you suggest Americans get to know?

That’s a tough one because, as in the U.S., craft brewing is highly regional. I am sure there are fantastic beers in British Columbia or Nova Scotia that I have never heard of here in Ontario. But I can recommend a few from my part of the world. Beau’s does neat beers – one-offs, seasonals, they keep mixing it up. I like Church Key’s Holy Smoke – made with smoked malt, there is nothing else quite like it up here. And then there’s Quebec. Three firms there that do daring beers are Les Trois Mousquetaires, Le Castor and Grimoire. Unibroue was one of the first Quebec craft brewers. They were bought out, but still do good stuff. And if you ever find yourself in the Ottawa region, cross the river and head for a shop called Bieres du Monde in Aylmer, Quebec. This guy stocks 300 different beers – all from Quebec.

 

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Book Review: Cheese and Beer

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Even for beer geeks who love minutiae and going down educational rabbit holes can be scared off of learning about other food and drink which have similar learning curves.

Thankfully, Cheese and Beer by Janet Fletcher carries a consistent tone that straddles the line between beer appreciation and snobbery well. By that I mean that some craft beer books seem to either apologize for the price or flavor adjectives and try to dumb down to an extent. Or they might avoid plain language for technical detail.

This book (which I read via the Nook) is straightforward. Here is the beer style. Here are examples of that style from breweries far and wide. Here are three cheeses to pair with it and why. Here are other cheeses you can also try.

The descriptions are great for both the beers and the cheeses. The writing is clear and as opposed to some books the beers selected as exemplars are uniformly solid. The photography is very nice though some of the backdrops seem a bit over used.  The reasoning that Fletcher uses as to why each style pairs with individual cheeses makes what could be complicated, understandable.

And it makes you hungry. The recipe using Picandou cheese and salad with a Kolsch is simple but sounds delicious and there are at least four or five cheeses that I want to try now.

The only issue that I take is that the format is a bit repetitive. And that point is highlighted when Fletcher focuses on a single beer and makes even more specific choices. I would have liked to see more specific beer and cheese pairings. Saison DuPont or a coffee stout would have made good choices.

All in all this is a splendid edition to a beer library.

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Book Review – Beyond the Pale

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My Kindle started up and I dug into the Sierra Nevada story on the flight up to Portland from Burbank.  And I was, to be honest, only intermittently enlightened.  Even though I really wanted to like it more.

Starting with the story of Ken Grossman’s childhood and how he found his way to Chico, good back story as it was, moved a little slow and highlighted aspects of his work habits and expertise that get repeated later.  And then when we got to the start of Sierra Nevada the details started to diminish.  And as we got closer to current time, it became almost a press release touting the workplace at Sierra Nevada and their ecological efforts.

And that is why I can only marginally recommend Beyond the Pale.  It is very important that all beer fans and writers see what it took for Grossman to make what we take for granted today.  It was nip and tuck at many crucial junctures.  The sheer amount of hours that Grossman put into the brewery building is tiring and amazing at the same time.  We could easily be living in a world without the iconic green label of the famous pale ale.  But that focus on the brewery getting off the ground trials comes at the expense of the beers.  How did Kellerweis come about?  Why was the stout overshadowed by the Pale ale?  Why is Torpedo getting bigger and not the pale?  As it stands, I got a peek into what makes a Sierra Nevada beer special but not the nitty gritty.

The section on the split between Grossman and his initial partner was also quite informative.  Recapping that part of Sierra Nevada’s history must have been hard to do but it was handled adroitly without being mean spirited or too soft.  And most importantly, it gave me the full (from Grossman’s perspective) story of what transpired.

But at other points in the narrative, I wanted to say, now talk about this or go in more depth about that.  And instead it would head to another chapter on building the new facility or buying more equipment.  More photographs may have enlivened those stretches of text (and perhaps the book-book has that as opposed to the Kindle version).  I would also have shortened the childhood section and fleshed out who the other brewers have been at the brewery and what they brought to the table and how that has changed the beers brewed and the flagship ales.  As it stands, you have a hybrid book that is part childhood memoir, part story of building a brewery and part brochure.  None of which is bad, but the subject matter is so fascinating to me that I wanted more.

Now I have to read the story of Lagunitas in book form and compare with that and the Brooklyn Brewing and Dogfish Head stories.

 

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Book Review – Inventing Wine

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If you think a wine book has no room on a beer blog then you will be happier with the other book review today. For those who want to see what I learned about the history of one our alcoholic brethren, then continue on.

Paul Lukacs takes us from the start of wine up to some recent history in “Inventing Wine”. And the first and most often reiterated point is that wine has been bad longer than it has been good. He goes through a laundry list of words to describe non-modern wine. Tart, spoiled, oxidized, thin, shrill and swill are just a few.

Another takeaway is that only since the mid 19th century did wine become associated with restaurants. And since then it has been out of vogue even there for stretches of time. Which leads me to hope that one day, future restaurants will have impressive lists of wine, spirits and beer simultaneously.

The other fascinating trend is the rise of as Lukacs calls them, “flamboyant” wines. Big fruity wines that took the wine world by storm and threaten to make lighter varietals obsolete. Seems like an obvious comparison to hyper IPAs. One prominent wine critic echoes statements that I have made about “big” beers. “I have a powerful aversion to wines that gush and scream”, Terry Thiese says.

This book does get a little repetitive at times and does quickly jet over recent history but will bring to many beer fans minds parallels to our industry.

Including this quote about preserving a history of wine making that wasn’t good, “…everyone enjoys fairy tales-if it did not also stifle inventiveness and suppress improvement…”

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North Carolina Craft Beer & Breweries


I love a good craft beer book. Especially one that takes me someplace that I haven’t been. And that is what the guide book, North Carolina Craft Beer and Breweries does.

Author, Erik Lars Myers has done an admirable survey of the blazing hot North Carolina scene and added a human dimension to the people behind it. I never tire of hearing about people who left behind a job for a passionate career in beer. But what I found most interesting was the section before the brewery profiles, when he covered the history of brewing in the state. And I would have enjoyed more information on the “Pop the Cap” organization and how they help to create an open environment for craft breweries to develop. That back story is what invests a reader in the breweries and in possibly taking the next step and heading to North Carolina.

I think more beer books would be better served to skip over the “How beer is made” chapter (which is also in the book) and use that space to discuss regional food pairings (which is in the book a smidge). But I would have love to seen that expanded past BBQ.

I liked the section on breweries that are still fermenting, so to speak, but that would be a great launching point to a website for the book that could update those listings as the beers start flowing from new taps.

Lastly, I would have added more heft to the bottle shop section. They are an important cog in the beer ecosystem and deserve to get more face time as it were.

Overall, with those nitpicky issues aside, the meat of this book are the profiles and those are well written and graphically attractive with good information which is what you need when you have a book in your hand and you are planning a beer vacation. This book is going up on the bookshelf waiting for me to win the lottery so that I can travel the beer world and hit ALL of the places in this book.

(Full Disclosure: This was a press copy but as I mention every year, whether free or paid for, EVERYTHING that I review gets reviewed with the same standard.)

You can get the book HERE.

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Book review – America Walks into a Bar

I am a sucker for beer history so when I saw this book pop up for instant Kindle download. I snapped it up.

I am glad that the author has focused on just America because there is a lot of history to be unearthed. The first few chapters though were a little dry and repetitive but with enough thought provoking historical facts to keep me going. Especially when it details the place that the tavern or saloon had in a community and how it evolved in different points in history.

I must say that I was mentally comparing this book to the wonderful Last Call by Daniel Okrent about Prohibition and in most instances it was falling short of that high bar. But that could be due to prohibition being such a juicy historical event vs a longer timeline of bars and saloons over 200+ years.

A warning though. Don’t go into this book hoping to learn more about beer. This is (as promised) about the place where drinking happens and the people that inhabit it. This is more a book that leads to reading other books. You will want to read about the Five Points in New York city. You will want to read more about Shay’s Rebellion and many other tangents.

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Ambitious Brew

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I devoured this book over the course of three days. That is usually a good sign. In this case, only partially so. If you want a book that timelines the big industrial brewers and promotes big capitalism then this will suit you just fine. For me, this was a slice of history. No where in the same league as Last Call by Daniel Okrent.

Here are my quibbles:
1. It starts with the Anheuser and Schlitz gang. Why not start at the beginning with Washington and the founding of beer in America. How can that not be interesting.
2. Regional breweries between 1776 and 1860 get no mention. Why?
3. Trying to praise the Budweiser, Miller and Pabst beers even in their classy heydays is really pushing it at best. I never drank it and it was better in the past but that is surely damning by faint praise.
4. Short shrift to great beer meccas. Portland barely gets talked about. Neither does Seattle or Brooklyn or name a pioneering city.
5. Marketing and business savvy are not the prime directive here. It’s the beer.

On the plus side, there is good history facts in here and she is spot on with how trends in eating and culture affected the buying patterns of beer consumers. I give this a barely recommend. Choose a Pete Brown book first.