Customer Reviews

Good Beer Guide 2008

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is published every year by the Campaign for Real Ale [...] . It is a guide to the pubs in the UK voted by CAMRA members in local chapters as those serving a good, real pint of well-kept beers from smaller, typically local breweries (as opposed to mass produced beers - think Bud, for example). The pubs in this guide generally represent the best of the best in the UK, pubs with charm and style, and that always serve a good range of locally produced craft beers. Pubs are grouped by region and small maps are included. It is well organized and includes descriptions of most regional breweries in the UK and the beers they produce. The pub descriptions include the range of beers are served, if food is served, and if there are rooms available for overnight stays. When we travel in the UK, we use this as our guide to beer and lunch stops and even places to stay overnight. If you are a serious beer drinker, and want the best of real pubs in the UK, this book is a must have.

We travelled to England for a month and did much of our lunching and dining in pubs. We needed a way to find places at each of our stops that were interesting and also represented good value. CAMRA (a society promoting real "ale" and real pubs) publishes a guide to help find the good pubs and the best brews. From the CAMRA perspective, "real" brews are ones made using traditional methods, including cask conditioning, whether they are offered for sale on tap or in bottles. Real pubs are ones serving real beverages and also meeting traditional functional standards like encouraging visitors, providing a public space for social interaction, discussion, live music, viewing televisedsports events and even providing nights for activities like trivia quizzes. Most entries in the "pubs" section of the book make it clear that the service of food need not be elaborate, nor even always available. For CAMRA what makes a real pub is real drinks, authentic and even historic furnishings and neighborhood atmosphere. Where a pub does offer good food on a regular basis, its entry notes that fact. We paid close attention to these entries and following the guide's advice greatly added to the pleasure of our trip.

Another section of the book contains an encyclopedic alphabetical listing of real beers and ales together with useful tasting notes. This section is really a guide to what we Americans call "craft beers" and beer fans know how different in flavor, texture and color our own beers and ales can be. Finding brews in a foreign land that meet our expectations could be a daunting task. The tasting notes are down to earth and realistic and they should allow a traveler to choose British brews we might like in what would otherwise be a trial and error process with its share of disappointments.

This guide has 36 years of experience behind its methods and is highly regarded for its coverage of pubs in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Chanels Islands and the Isle of Man. One result: most of the entries will not be for the places you are visiting. Since the aim of the guide is to direct users to "real" drinks and pubs, many other pubs and brews will not be covered in its pages. That noted, I also purchased Michelin's "Eating Out in Pubs 2009" and similar cautions prevail: even fewer places make their guide and most of the ones that do are in places you won't be visiting. Of course, the Michelin people are less interested in "real" brews and are more interested in real food, cooked on the premises and based on fresh local fish, meats and produce.

We did find enough "matches" of food, ambience and "suds" to make our purchase of the "GOOD BEER GUIDE" well worth our while. It will be worth your while, too, if you are visiting the places having a reviewed pub or if you have the interest and the flexibility to plan your route around these facilities. Otherwise, the guide may not make every traveler's list of "must" buys.

If you're going to the UK and want to have a handy list of pubs to consult before you go, this is a good choice. It's probably the definitive guide to good beers however, there isn't a lot of detail about any particular entry. Outside of knowing what kind of beer you'll find, you wont' know too much else about a selection.

I'd probably go 3 1/2 stars, but that isn't an option.