A Comprehensive Guide to Beer with Great Illustrations
Beer books usually focus on tasting, rating, brewing, or education and most every beer lover has a few books about brew on the family room bookshelf, waiting to be referenced when needed. Some beer books rely on catchy names and subtitles to grab your attention, but others rely on illustrations and one good example of the latter is The Beer Book, a picturesque guide to beer written by Dogfish Head Brewing’s Sam Calagione.
The Beer Book wants you to learn more about beer, but it also wants to hold your attention and it accomplishes this through its use of illustrations. This book is loaded with eye- catching illustrations that include clear, concise, and colorful photos of beer bottles, beer poured into a glass, popular pubs, breweries, and more. With each turn of the pages, an illustration is ready to greet you and the visual appeal of this reference guide is one of its strongest appeals. Even individuals who don’t like beer very much (do such people really exist??) will enjoy this guide for the excellent photos, if nothing else.
This book sorts the world’s beers alphabetically and by geographic region, making it a good choice when you want to learn about beers native to a specific location. This is good both for educational and travel purposes, and with the numerous illustrations and notes, you feel like your taking a walking tour, in many instances. As you read about nations, breweries, and pubs and enjoy yhe accompanying pictures, you feel like you’re right there, touring the establishment and learning more about the world’s greatest beverage.
The Beer Book has a very unoriginal name and I’m pretty sure author/brewer Sam Calagoine could have thought up something more creative for the book’s title. But the simplicity of the title is one of the things that attracted me to this book in the first place and now that I have thumbed through the pages of this reference guide several times, I am glad I made the discovery. It’s a comprehensive guide that will satisfy the senses and the many excellent photographs will leave you yearning for a pint of your favorite brew.
Rating: 9 Cheers out of 10
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