Tag: Tim Webb

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The World Atlas of Beer

It is time to get back to the beer bookshelf and review another book about our favorite topic.

The World Atlas of Beer by Time Webb and Stephen Beaumont is a goodly sized coffee table book. But even the biggest book could not cover all of the current brewing world. And right up front both authors acknowledge that cover the world required pruning and that a brewery being mentioned once only was no slight. They were looking to showcase “above-average examples of a particular statement.” While also trotting around the globe and highlighting particular regional styles.

But the beer choices they did make are the strength of this book. They have unearthed gems and new breweries that I had never heard of before. Beer 33 from U Medvidku in Prague or XXX from Three Tuns in Shropshire, England. (I would have liked to see one of my locals get included, but it was not to be) I would suggest going through the book reading the beer choices first and then going back to read about the geographic locale and the style second.

The information presented is really solid and presented with a clear eye. No unwarranted rah-rah boosterism on these pages. Another strong suit of the book was inclusion of topics like “how to pour beer” and “buying beer” that I had not seen covered as well as in these pages. Yes, there was the obligatory history and process of brewing that could have been left out but it understand that it seems every book must have that.

The layout and some of the photographs though leave something to be desired. I would have bundled all of the beer choices together on a page and not as a scroll at the bottom like ESPN with sports scores. And some of the photos, especially the dual page spreads had nothing to do with beer or weren’t advancing the story at all. I am looking at a two page night time cityscape on pages 194-5. Is there a brewery there? Why spend the ink on a generic photo. I would swap out every two page photo for a snapshot of a brewer or the front of an iconic brewery building, or better yet, have included more beer choices!.

But those pages are easily skipped over and you can instead focus on beers like a Pale ale from Cerveza Zeppelin.

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The Firkin for June 2011

There seems to be a lingering resentment of beer bloggers by some of the “old guard” of beer writers and I do not know why.

Let me back-track, just as the 1st Beer Bloggers convention was getting underway in Boulder last year, Andy Crouch asked “to what end” in relation to beer blogging. Where he made some good arguments but as the title suggests did not know WHY people would blog about the world of beer. In my mind, I heard Woody Allen complaining about kids today and their “technology”

Then this month two separate items caught my eye that again seemed to again reinforce a negative vibe.

First, Tim Webb in his BeerAdvocate column in Issue # 52 proclaimed boldly in the first paragraph about an article on gypsy/roving brewers “do not blog”. Whether tongue in cheek, it sent the wrong message to me and colored for the worse, the rest of the column. Especially at the end when he basically said gypsy brewers would ALL eventually have their own breweries. So I chalked it up to either crass overgeneralizations on two separate counts or someone looking to pick a little verbal fight.

Then I read on the Pencil & Spoon that the chairman of CAMRA slyly dug into the “blogeratti” as well. Again, I tried to reason that maybe he was like a republican trying to say what the Tea Party wanted to hear. Please the rabble rousers type of language.

But I get the strange feeling that their are certain people in the craft beer world who are unwilling to jump into beer in the year 2011 with both feet. I should know. I eschewed Twitter for a long time and rather proudly. But denigrating keg beer for cask as CAMRA seems to do frequently or taking potshots at bloggers from your perch as a beer book author or magazine writer seems one of those desperate hold the Alamo ploys. I know that I cannot snark Twitter out of existence but I can come to a negotiated peace with 140 characters. But some people, I fear, think they can stop the computerized tide with verbal potshots.

I have come to realize that ANYONE involved in craft beer that tells you that blogging is useless or trivial or filled with bad writing is flat out wrong. Are some blogs useless, trivial and filled with bad writing? Yes. And there are days when this very blog harvest all three. But blogs as well as Twitter and Facebook are simply not magazines or books or organizations. They are transient bursts of information that convey instant moods and feelings but that also sometimes transcend the now and become fully formed snapshots. I firmly believe that art can be made from Polaroids as well as paintbrushes.

To the doubters, I say, I do not want to go back to one style of beer. And I don’t want to go back to one vehicle for conveying beer information.

All of us share a mission. To share our love of craft beer. Let’s all work to that end with our varied talents, shall we?

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Beer Amongst the Belgians – The Video

I am a big fan of beer movies. Especially ones that show me a side or place that I haven’t seen yet. Enter……

BATB Promo 3.0 from Taylor Brush on Vimeo.

Once you get past the obligatory, “Belgian beer is the best” there is a nice bit of history and discussion of the Art of Brewing which sometimes gets short shrift to the science aspect. Tim Webb is knowledgeable about Belgium to the max so I am looking forward to more of this series.