IN 2001, the wine educator Karen MacNeil published a book called The Wine Bible. A conceptual triumph, it manages to take more than nine hundred pages of information and put it into a form that is instantly understandable by even the layest of laypeople. MacNeil’s steady voice, lyrical and accessible yet authoritative, guides you through the rolling hills of Italy’s Piedmont and the Maipo Valley of Chile. Wine is a drink of place, the grapes that make it defined by the heat of the sun and elements in the earth. MacNeil acts as an expert guide on a world tour.
Beer is a little different. It is also a drink of place, but not in the same way. Culture and history exert at least as great an influence as where the barley and hops are grown. Beer types or styles are manifestations of these influences, and act as the organizing principle of The Beer Bible. Mostly. It turns out movement is also the nature of beer styles. Porters jump seas and become stouts; pilsners cross borders and become hellesbiers. Places like the United States, Italy, and France pick up brewing almost from nothing and rebuild it like immigrants do, borrowing this, dumping that, scrambling x and y. Styles mutate and change. Remember that as you read about these styles, and recall that even though we wouldn’t dare to question the legitimacy of Munich’s famous helles beer now, once a pale lager was so radical that the city’s brewers nearly had a civil war over it. Today’s abomination is tomorrow’s treasured tradition.
Some people who come to this book will be new to beer, perhaps enticed by the burgeoning world of craft beers; others will be old hands who want a little more information about their favorite styles. Whoever you are and whatever your reasons, you’ll thumb around and drop into sections that interest you. The book is designed to be read in pieces; Karen MacNeil had the insight to structure The Wine Bible that way, and I happily followed her lead (though this book is segmented by style, not region). The first part of the book will give you some of the important background to understanding beer, but you might prefer to dip into it elliptically, to backfill as necessary. You may not be compelled to read through descriptions of the strange flavors of beer, for example, until you encounter something unexpected. Or perhaps the history of beer won’t be interesting to you until one afternoon, as you’re sitting behind a pint of abbey ale, you wonder what in the world monks have to do with brewing. If you prioritize any sections of Part One, I recommend “Tasting Beer Like a Brewer,” starting on page 58—that’s where you’ll find the concepts and terms important to the sensory experience of beer that are repeated in nearly every chapter.
I’m an American, but this is not a book solely or even centrally about American brewing. Even though breweries in the United States now make every style of world beer, I’ve written about the traditions from their origin points. There are lots of American pilsners and abbey tripels, but when you flip to chapters about those styles, you’ll find a discussion of Czechs and Belgians. Craft brewing has sparked a renaissance in countries throughout the world, but this book does not spend a lot of time talking about all the various international interpretations of each style.
Following each beer style chapter is a list of “Beers to Know.” These highlight examples that give a good sense of the classic contours of the style in question. I selected them based on a few criteria: They should be regular or seasonal beers, likely to still be in production a year or two after the book’s publication. Since there was usually a surfeit of good beers in each style, I tried to select brands so that wherever you live, at least one should be available for you to taste. When choosing foreign beers, I limited the selection only to those that are imported to the United States—though not all imported beer is available in every market. If you’re like me, you’ll scan the names to see if I got it right—and no doubt wail when you see I omitted a beer like, say, the cult favorite Three Floyds Dark Lord. The Dark Lords of the world may score very highly among critics, but it has such a constrained release that very few people will ever have the chance to sample it.
Place names can be a political topic. To call India’s large western city Bombay instead of Mumbai is a political act. Throughout the book, I’ve used the American standard for place names even when it carries the aroma of politics. Köln is rendered as Cologne (uncontroversial), but České Budějovice is Budweis even though the city itself, like Mumbai, has made a conscious decision to leave that name behind. I did this solely to reconcile names with American usage.
Beer names are less controversial but just as confusing. By tradition, convention, and uneasy agreement, we have come to an agglomeration of titles that don’t always serve the purpose of clarity. To try to restore some, I have condensed a few categories. There were once two distinct styles of red and brown beers in Flanders, but even around the West Flanders town Roeselare, home to Rodenbach, they call them one style: “red/brown” Flanders beers; I’ve settled on “tart ales of Flanders.” The world’s most popular beers, such as Budweiser, Foster’s, Sapporo, and Heineken, are called everything from light lagers to American adjunct lagers, usually with several subcategories. In this book they’re all “mass-market lagers.” Craft breweries in Europe and the United States are experimenting with a range of ales made with wild yeast and bacteria; these I call “wild ales,” and they’re not brewed to a particular style.
Scattered throughout the book are more than a dozen short biographies of breweries. They follow and are meant to further illuminate elements of the preceding style chapter. For example, after the weizen chapter is a description of the most important Bavarian wheat beer breweries, G. Schneider and Sohn. Orval follows abbey ales, Samuel Smith after bitter, and so on. In each case, the history of the brewery or its processes, or even the physical brewery itself, helps tell the story of the style it follows. Beer is not just a product, it’s a living tradition; these are the breweries that link the modern beverage to its history.
I live in Portland, Oregon, home to more breweries than any city on earth. The Pacific Northwest has the most developed beer culture in the United States, and has not only a ton of good beers and breweries, but local maltings, most of the country’s hop fields and the USDA hop-breeding program, one of the two national yeast suppliers, and one of a small handful of degree-granting college brewing programs. In the nearly twenty years I’ve been writing about beer, you might imagine I’ve become just a little compromised by this bounty. You’d be correct. Every time I needed to ask a brewer a question, I had to stifle the instinct to pick up the phone and call one I knew. When thinking of the “Beers to Know,” I had to stop and remind myself that there is wonderful beer in every corner of the country and the world. Nevertheless, if you detect the whiff of a West Coast orientation in these pages, my apologies. I come by it honestly.