Waller - Drinkology beer: a book about the brew

For Mary OConnor and Fritz Kenemer

Published in 2011 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang
An imprint of ABRAMS

Text copyright 2011 by Thumb Print New York, Inc., with the exceptions of the essays Pent-Up Demand and Home Run, which are 2011 by Tony Moore.

Illustrations copyright 2011 by Glenn Wolff

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waller, James, 1953
Drinkology beer : a book about the brew / James Waller.
p. cm.
Summary: An informative reference about beer styles, touring breweries, beer festivals, beer-cocktail recipes, and recipes for dishes made with beerProvided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-58479-851-4 (hardback)
1. Beer. 2. Brewing. 3. Cooking (Beer) 4. Cookbooks. I. Title.
TP577.W246 2011
663.42dc22

2011008521

Editor: Kate Norment
Designer: Jay Anning, Thumb Print
Copy Editor: Ana Deboo
Production Manager: Ankur Ghosh

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P ART 1
Basically Beer
(B EER H ISTORY AND B EER M AKING )

P ART 2
Beer Bestiary
(A N A- TO -Z OF B EER S TYLES, WITH S EVERAL D IGRESSIONS )

P ART 3
Beer and Culture
( AND B EER C ULTURE )

P ART 4
Beer Bash
(S ERVING B EER , M AKING M IXED D RINKS WITH B EER , C OOKING WITH B EER , H OME B REWING, AND L OTS OF O THER S TUFF )

EER WAS THE FIRST ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE I EVER DRANK . I N the German-American household in which I spent my formative yearsI lived with my grandmother, two unmarried uncles, my divorced mother, and my little brotherbeer flowed like the River Rhine. Children were occasionally allowed to sip from an adults glassmostly, I think, for the adults diversion. Like most (though not all) children, I hated the stuff, and whenever I took a sip, I made my displeasure known with a scrunched-up face, a stuck-out tongue, and a loud declaration about how bad it tasted. This always made the adults laugh. (Adults are so easy to amuse.)

Let it be noted that, despite my dislike, I did keep trying.

The beer that flowed so endlessly and so freely in my grandmothers house was, for years and years, of a single brand: National Bohemian. National Boh was one of Baltimores leading local brands; another was called American Beer. (Both brewers went out of business years ago, though the National brand has been revived by Pabst.) Just as some Americans in those daysthe 1950s and early 1960sdrove only Chevrolets while others drove only Fords, Baltimoreans were divided into irreconcilable camps when it came I conquered my fear (well, kinda sorta) only when I recognized that one couldI couldbegin my research from the perspective of someone who didnt know anything about wine, and that the resulting book might be of some use to others who liked wine and wanted to know a little something about it but who were intimidated or simply bamboozled by most wine writing. I could, in other words, write a wine book that presupposed exactly zero knowledge of wine on the readers partthe kind of book that I myself yearned for.

Two years ago, I proposed to my publisher that I write a book on beer. Id become dimly aware that there was this thing going on in the culture at largea phenomenon that was being referred to as the craft beer movement or the beer renaissance. Of course, this movement/renaissance had been going on for about four decades, but, having long convinced myself that I didnt like beer and therefore wasnt interested in it, Id paid it scant attention.

To my delightand my frightmy publisher accepted the proposal: delight because I needed the cash; fright because I realized, going in, that I knew as little about beer as Id known about wine when Id begun work on my wine book. Correction: I knew less about beer. Whats worse, I quickly discovered that beer, as a subject, is every bit as complicated as wine. Correction: Its more complicated. And whats even worse, I found that I was joining this movie in the middle. The world turned out to be every bit as soaked with knowledgeable beer loverscredentialed and uncredentialedas it is saturated with experts on wine. Perhaps worst of all, from a prospective beer-book writers viewpoint, beer had already become the new wine. Oh, dear Jesus. A culture of beer snobbery was spreading, like a culture of E. coli in a petri dish, to their citys brews: some people drank only National Boh; others drank nothing but American. When it came to beer, the drinkers in my family were committed National (Boh) leaguers.

My distaste for beer lasted only till adolescence. With puberty, a young mans body undergoes some radical alterations. Little noticed among that list of changes is a transformation of the taste buds: the previously unpalatable becomes, suddenly, tolerableand potently desirable. By the time I was in my mid-teens, my mother had remarried, and she, my brother, and I were living in a ranch-style house in a distant suburb of Baltimore with her second husband, Rod. It will not surprise those of you whove had stepfathers to learn that Rod and I did not get along. Part of our trouble was ordinary Oedipal struggling, but the warfare between us was surely exacerbated by the era we were living through. My stepfather was a clean-cut, politically and religiously conservative Catholic; I was a long-haired hippie who trumpeted my atheism, carried around a paperback copy of The Communist Manifesto, and shouted Sieg Heil! whenever Rod expressed a reactionary opinion at the dinner table (which was frequently). He, in turn, referred to me as the Animal.

But there were truces in the ongoing combat between Rod and me, and beer played an important role in calming the tensions. One of Rods good qualities (in long retrospect, I do see that he had several) was his easygoing attitude toward booze. He certainly never encouraged me to get drunk, but he did sometimes invite me to have a beer with him. On those evenings, wed crack open our cans of Miller (I think it was Miller) and settle down in the living room to watch TV together. I was flattered to be treated as the adult I so wanted to be. I especially remember the times wed watch the sitcom