The author enjoying a pint at a favorite pub. (Paul Waters photo)
This book is both a global survey and a global celebration of beer. In this book, we speak of an archetypical beer traveler, who may be on the ground in a local or foreign land, or in an armchair with a selection of beers imported from around the globe. Our book is organized regionally, because regions have their own characteristic brewing culture and heritage of beer styles. It is designed for people who enjoy beer as well as the cultural nuances of brewing history.
Our beer traveler’s journey circumnavigates the globe, beginning in Ireland, then moves eastward across northern Europe to Russia. From here, we turn south and travel westward into the heart of Europe. Next, we turn south through southern Europe into the Middle East and Africa, before traveling eastward to Asia. Then, we move south into Australia and New Zealand before crossing the South Pacific to Latin America. Traveling to North America, we visit Canada, then wind up our journey by moving westward across the United States. The beer traveler’s last stop is the westernmost brewery in the world.
The author enjoying a pint at a favorite pub. (Paul Waters photo)
Beer is an ancient beverage, brewed by the Sumerians, enjoyed by the pharaohs, and produced in countless civilizations from the arctic to the equator and beyond since before there was a known written record of human progress.
Professor Solomon Katz at the University of Pennsylvania found Sumerian recipes for beer that date back four millennia, and beer is mentioned often in ancient Egyptian literature. As H.F. Lutz points out in Viticulture and Brewing in the Ancient Orient, Middle Kingdom texts from Beni Hasan “enumerate quite a number of different beers.” Among these were a “garnished beer” and a “dark beer.” In the Newsletter of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, David Ryder notes that Egyptian beer “was also used as a medicine, a tonic for building strength…a universal cure for coughs and colds, shortness of breath, problems of the stomach and lungs, and a guard against indigestion!”
It has been suggested that the brewing of beer is at least as old as the baking of bread, and certainly both have been practiced since the dawn of recorded history. Indeed, the art and science of the brewer and those of the baker are quite similar, both involving grain, water and yeast. In fact, the Sumerians baked barley loaves called bappir that could be stored in the dry climate and either eaten as bread or mixed with malted barley to form a mash for brewing.
Beer is mentioned by Xenophon and Aristotle (as quoted by Athenaeus). Among others, the Roman consul and scholar Pliny the Younger estimated that nearly 200 types of beer were being brewed in Europe by the first century. The Latin texts refer to the barley beverages as cerevisia or cerevisium, root words that are still with us in the Spanish and Portuguese words for beer—cerveza and cerveja—as well as in the Latin name for brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
This is not a book about ancient beer, but it is important to know the origins of our subject.
Each chapter contains a capsule history, because it is useful to know how the beer and brewing culture, as well as the major brands and breweries, evolved over time. This is also an homage to people, of whom there are many, who enjoy collecting labels and brewing ephemera, or breweriana. For them, it is interesting to observe the twists and turns that specific brands have taken over time.
Hundreds of specific breweries and brands are profiled in detail, with the full knowledge that we have omitted many more, and that such a discussion is a mere snapshot in time and clearly subject to change. In this regard, the book you now hold should be regarded by the beer traveler as a point of departure for a journey. With this book as a portal, there are numerous ways to keep up to date on specific beers and brands. Magazines and websites such as RateBeer and Beer Advocate contain a depth of constantly updated information.
This is an exciting time in the history of brewing. The large are growing larger through mergers and acquisitions, and the world is growing smaller. Once the world was filled with great national brands, but now the biggest are international. Heineken is visible virtually everywhere on earth and controls nearly 200 brands other than its own from Europe to Africa to the Far East, and has a tenth of the global market. In 2002, meanwhile, South African Breweries merged with Miller Brewing, and another global consortium came into being with another tenth of the market. In 2008, InBev, a Brazilian-Belgian conglomerate formed just four years earlier, acquired America’s Anheuser-Busch, then the world’s largest brewing company, and the resulting AB InBev now owns more than 200 brewing companies, countless brands, and a 20 percent global market share. There is more to come in way of consolidations.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the venerable giants, the brewing world is crackling with innovation. The interest in imaginative craft brewing, once confined to corners of certain countries, has gone global and is now growing in double digits annually in key markets. In this book, the reader and beer traveler will see how and why. This book is a pictorial presentation of the amazing world of beer in the twenty-first century, and a look at how it evolved over the past centuries, with an indication of where it is going in the future.
Notes on Measurements and Abbreviations
With the exception of the United States, the brewing industry in most of the world uses hectoliters as a standard measurement. In this book, production and capacity volume is listed in hectoliters for all nations except the United States. The numbers are rounded off throughout, subject to change, and included for historical reference only.
Three very common industry abbreviations are widely used herein without explanation. These are ABV, meaning alcohol by volume; IPA for India Pale Ale; and IBU for International Bitterness Unit, a 100-point scale for measuring the bitterness of beer. On the IBU scale, pale lagers are at around 5, most ales in the 30 to 50 range, IPAs somewhat higher, and Double IPAs closer to 100, the taste-bud threshold.