A good beer book from Randy Mosher
Guest post from Jim Pavlik, a freelance writer and homebrewer living in Indianapolis. He writes about beer culture, beer business, and beer politics on Friday's at Porch Dog.
I recently flew down to Columbia, South Carolina to help a friend move to Chicago and I took the opportunity of delayed flights, layovers, and waiting to get picked up at the airport to get halfway through Randy Mosher's "Tasting Beer," and I love it.
The book opens with a hearty appeal to why we would bother to slow down and taste the beer rather than tilting our head back and just quaffing until we can quaff no more. Mosher is liberal about what beer enjoyment means and does not disparage the American lager completely. Sure, he refers to "the one hundred year flood of [bland] mass-market Pilsners" and how it threatens beer quality everywhere it goes (which is everywhere). But at the same time his understanding of beer culture and beer history is nuanced and appreciative of what every player brings to the table.
Mosher has two overlapping themes -- 1) Beer and 2) Taste -- and he deftly interweaves these two topics with an expert pen. It would be very easy to write about the history of beer and only consider who made what beer variety and at what time. It would be very easy to walk the reader through the basics of tasting stuff. It would be very easy to give a step-by-step tutorial on how beer is made. All of which Mosher does. But he does much more than that.
With a strong sense of writerly composition, Mosher never stops talking about beer even as he's talking about the intricacies of the fungiform papillae (aka "taste buds"); he never stops talking about taste even as he's walking the reader through the mechanics of bacteria strains in homebrew recipes. I've just gotten to Chapter 7 on food and beer pairings and I have never once felt insulted, talked down to, or -- for that matter -- felt out of my depth.
The worst part of the whole reading experience is that I wanted to taste beer (and I mean real -- taste it -- while I was reading and no one can do both at the same time. Which is my way of saying that Mosher may have written himself out of a publishing success: he wrote a book on beer so good I may not be able to read it.
I appeal to you, readers of Kasper on Tap, if I ever find my way to soberly finishing "Tasting Beer,"what do I pick up next?
Comments
The only beer books I could suggest are those by Michael Jackson and I sure you have already read them. For a book that celebrates taste try Adventures on the Wine Route by Kermit Lynch.
Posted by: Elite Elephant Lover | August 14, 2009 12:08 PM