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.