NEW YORK, NY— We are in the midst of a beer renaissance, and the beer world now has the new guidebook it deserves: “The Beer Trials,” by Seamus Campbell and Robin Goldstein.
The past few years have seen an explosion of craft breweries across America, more imported beers arriving on the US market than ever before, and unprecedented interest in beer around every corner, from back-road neighborhood pubs to tasting menus from cutting-edge chefs.
At the heart of this new book is a ratings guide to 250 of the most important and widely available beers in the world, from craft brews to macro-lagers. Each bottle in “The Beer Trials” gets a full-page review and rating based on a rigorous set of blind tastings by beer experts led by Seamus Campbell, one of the world’s 96 Certified Cicerones (beer sommeliers). “The Beer Trials” also includes an ambitious but accessible reference guide, which takes readers on a down-to-earth tour of the world’s major beer styles, flavors, and regions.
“The Beer Trials” is the brainchild of consumer advocate and Freakonomics contributor Robin Goldstein, whose previous book, “The Wine Trials,” surprised consumers by showing a lack of connection between price and quality and became the world’s bestselling guide to inexpensive wine.
“In a world in which superpremium wines or liquors can set back consumers hundreds or even thousands of dollars per bottle,” says Goldstein, “beer offers unmatched value. Many of the world’s most sought-after beers set you back less than an average bottle of supermarket table wine.”
Only eight of the 250 beers reviewed in “The Beer Trials” cost more than
$5 per 12-ounce bottle equivalent, and 11 of the 21 beers receiving the book’s highest rating cost less than $2.50.
Goldstein’s longstanding interest in the relationship between value and taste led him to the beer mecca of Portland, Oregon, where he recruited co-author Campbell to bring together a panel of his fellow beer experts and blind-taste a broad swath of the world’s most popular beers.
The results of those blind tastings are revealed in “The Beer Trials,”
and some of them might surprise you.
While some of Belgium’s vaunted Trappist ales, for instance, scored sky-high marks (p. 119), others turned out to be disappointing (p. 247), and one Canadian beer beat most of the Belgians at their own game (p.
146). One of America’s most popular European imports, meanwhile, went belly-up in blind tastings—and also turned out to be a Jekyll-and-Hyde act, with one identity in the bottle and a different one from the tap (p. 168).
The authors’ blind tastings yielded some low-brow surprises: a certain high-alcohol malt liquor that seemed quite at home in its brown paper bag—you might well have drunk it from a 40 in your college days—did surprisingly well in the blind tastings, scoring a 6 out of 10 (p. 285), while the so-called “Male Ale” won an impressive rating of 7 (p. 154).
As for America’s most popular imported beer (p. 127), or the one you might know more affectionately as “Natty” (p. 212)? Not so impressive.
Within these pages, you’ll find brews inspired by California secessionist sentiment (p. 79), beer from the heart of wine country (p.
187), the bottle whose alcohol content is higher than wine’s (p. 138), and the IPA that has its eye on you (p. 84).
Chocoholics can satisfy their cravings in fermented form (p. 87); Mexophiles can see how Anheuser-Busch’s foray into beers featuring “natural lime flavor” (p. 110) stacks up to the pride and joy of Sinaloa (p. 230); and sci-fi aficionados can take in the lager from outer space (p. 262).
And if you think you know your favorite brand pretty well, you might want to think again: the book reveals the results of a blind tasting experiment, run by the co-authors, in which beer drinkers performed no better than chance at distinguishing between major pale lager brands—a result that offers some insight into why those mass-market beers spend so much on advertising.
“The Beer Trials” is now available at local and national bookstores, food and wine stores, powells.com, amazon.com, bn.com, and everywhere else books are sold.
Showing posts with label beer book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beer book. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
A Life on the Hop Memoirs from a Career in Beer, by Roger Protz
Issued: Monday March 9th 2009
It’s the longest pub crawl in history. Leading beer writer Roger Protz has been trawling the world for more than 30 years in search of perfect pints and pubs and has now written of his adventures in a book that will appeal to all who enjoy a glass of good beer.
Roger’s journey started outside a pub in east London, nursing a ginger beer while his father and uncle enjoyed pints inside. The young Mr Protz observed:
‘As customers arrived and left, I would glimpse through the briefly open doors the secret, all-male world of the pub. These were utilitarian times. There were few creature comforts. The customers stood and drank. The floor was composed of bare boards and the air was wreathed in cigarette smoke. But I could hear laughter and conversation. It was a world I wanted to join.’
Roger was first able to enter “licensed premises” when he worked in the astonishingly boozy world of national newspapers in Fleet Street where so much alcohol was consumed by “scribes” and “inkies” that it was a miracle the papers ever appeared.
In the mid-1970s, Roger turned his beer-drinking hobby into a career when he went to work for the Campaign for Real Ale. Roger recalls the job interview with his ex-Evening Standard colleague and later CAMRA co-founder, Michael Hardman:
‘I applied for the post of assistant editor of publications with the campaign and went to its head office in St Albans for an interview with Hardman. It was a brief meeting. ‘I was on the Standard, you were on the Standard, so you’ll do,’ he said. ‘So you’ll do’- three fateful words that launched me on a new career as a full-time beer writer.’
Roger’s beer-related travels have taken him to the United States, where craft brewers have brought back choice and diversity to a country ravaged by Prohibition. He recalls his first visit to Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, where getting information from the communist authorities was difficult: at one brewery in Prague he was chased away by a guard with a machine gun and a snarling dog. To Germany, and on one of many visits to the world-famous Oktoberfest, Roger was horrified to find himself sitting on Hitler’s favourite bench in the Hofbrauhaus beer hall.
Belgium is also high on his radar and he details such amazing styles as sour red beer, lambic beer made by spontaneous fermentation, using wild yeasts in the atmosphere, the struggle to save the great ales brewed by Trappist monks, and the successful campaign to rescue Hoegaarden from the tender mercies of the world’s biggest brewer, InBev, whose name means something extremely rude in Brussels slang.
A Life on the Hop is an amusing romp around the beer world and is devoid of beery jargon. It will be enjoyed not only by beer lovers but also by those who enjoy travel writing.
‘A Life on the Hop, Memoirs from a Career in Beer’, is released Monday March 9th, and is available from all good retailers, and from the CAMRA website- www.camra.org.uk
The book is priced at £10.99 for CAMRA members and £12.99 for non-members
It’s the longest pub crawl in history. Leading beer writer Roger Protz has been trawling the world for more than 30 years in search of perfect pints and pubs and has now written of his adventures in a book that will appeal to all who enjoy a glass of good beer.
Roger’s journey started outside a pub in east London, nursing a ginger beer while his father and uncle enjoyed pints inside. The young Mr Protz observed:
‘As customers arrived and left, I would glimpse through the briefly open doors the secret, all-male world of the pub. These were utilitarian times. There were few creature comforts. The customers stood and drank. The floor was composed of bare boards and the air was wreathed in cigarette smoke. But I could hear laughter and conversation. It was a world I wanted to join.’
Roger was first able to enter “licensed premises” when he worked in the astonishingly boozy world of national newspapers in Fleet Street where so much alcohol was consumed by “scribes” and “inkies” that it was a miracle the papers ever appeared.
In the mid-1970s, Roger turned his beer-drinking hobby into a career when he went to work for the Campaign for Real Ale. Roger recalls the job interview with his ex-Evening Standard colleague and later CAMRA co-founder, Michael Hardman:
‘I applied for the post of assistant editor of publications with the campaign and went to its head office in St Albans for an interview with Hardman. It was a brief meeting. ‘I was on the Standard, you were on the Standard, so you’ll do,’ he said. ‘So you’ll do’- three fateful words that launched me on a new career as a full-time beer writer.’
Roger’s beer-related travels have taken him to the United States, where craft brewers have brought back choice and diversity to a country ravaged by Prohibition. He recalls his first visit to Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, where getting information from the communist authorities was difficult: at one brewery in Prague he was chased away by a guard with a machine gun and a snarling dog. To Germany, and on one of many visits to the world-famous Oktoberfest, Roger was horrified to find himself sitting on Hitler’s favourite bench in the Hofbrauhaus beer hall.
Belgium is also high on his radar and he details such amazing styles as sour red beer, lambic beer made by spontaneous fermentation, using wild yeasts in the atmosphere, the struggle to save the great ales brewed by Trappist monks, and the successful campaign to rescue Hoegaarden from the tender mercies of the world’s biggest brewer, InBev, whose name means something extremely rude in Brussels slang.
A Life on the Hop is an amusing romp around the beer world and is devoid of beery jargon. It will be enjoyed not only by beer lovers but also by those who enjoy travel writing.
‘A Life on the Hop, Memoirs from a Career in Beer’, is released Monday March 9th, and is available from all good retailers, and from the CAMRA website- www.camra.org.uk
The book is priced at £10.99 for CAMRA members and £12.99 for non-members
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