Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Beer. It's the most popular drink in the world. Enjoyed at ballparks, in home-away-from-home pubs, on the family room sofa, and in every kind of restaurant, beer is at ease in any setting. For all beer lovers who have known the pleasure of draining a pint, Randy Mosher explores and explains the complete tasting experience as it applies to all the wonderful brews of the world.

Beer may be the common beverage of the people, but it is far from simple. With 10,000 years of history, more than 900 identified flavors, dozens of styles, and thousands of breweries around the world, beer is as complex as its grape-based neighbors in the liquor stores. It is an artistic creation, brewed from dozens of possible ingredients and processed in hundreds of different ways. Mosher guides readers to a better understanding of how every batch of beer is affected by each of the brewmaster's choices — recipe formulation, brewhouse procedures, yeasts, fermentations, carbonation, filtration, packaging, and much more.

Beer can be light, dark, mild, strong, flat, or fizzy. Hundreds of tastes can be detected in beer, from resin to toast, and from apple to smoke. Readers will learn how to identify the scents, colors, flavors, and mouth-feel of all the major beer styles. There are also chapters on proper serving and storage conditions, and classic beer and food pairings.

The second half of the book is a style-by-style compendium of the different brews within major beer families, including American craft brews, British lagers, German ales, and Belgian Dubbels. For each style there are historical and regional facts, taste and aroma characteristics, seasonal availability, food pairings, and a few terrific recommendations for readers to sample.

From the back cover:
Everybody knows how to drink beer, but few know how to really taste it. Tasting Beer is a lively exploration of the culture, chemistry, and creativity that make craft beers so wonderfully complex. Heighten your enjoyment of every glass with an understanding of the finer points of brewing, serving, tasting, and food pairing.

Praise:
"A radical passion for brews." —Bob Townsend, Atlanta Constitutional-Journal

About the Author

Randy Mosher is a public speaker, teacher, writer, and enthusiastic promoter of traditional beer styles. He is the author of The Brewer's Companion and Radical Brewing, as well as many articles and columns for All About Beer, the country's leading beer magazine.

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC (February 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1603420894
• ISBN-13: 978-1603420891
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,471 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Introduction to the World of Beer, April 2, 2009

By	William Howell Jr. (Sterling, Alaska USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Randy Mosher has been well-known in serious beer and homebrewing circles for years. His earlier book, Radical Brewing, is a classic for anyone interested in brewing and a wondrous font of cool recipes for beers to brew at home. Tasting Beer is a much more approachable work, aimed more at the general audience of beer drinkers out there than at us "beer geeks". It provides a broad overview of styles, tips on pairing beer with food, proper glassware and serving techniques, historical perspectives, and even the basics of sensory evaluation of beer. Profusely illustrated, including many helpful charts and diagrams comparing various styles of beer, this really is an exceptional work. It would make a perfect gift for anyone who is at all interested in any aspect of modern craft brewing. I like to think I'm fairly well-read when it comes to beer, but I was still fascinated and picked up several new and interesting beer facts.

If you're at all interested in beer, don't miss this great new book!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Tasting Beer" is an industry must-read, March 18, 2009

By	D. Augustus (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

Mosher's latest dissertation upon beer is a must-have, not just for beer lovers, but for everyone in the business of "taste". This book gives you the vocabulary and the sensory methodology to objectively evaluate beer- but the tasting disciplines can also be applied to other beverages and foods. Detailed beer style descriptions abound and the work of organizing a tasting, pairing, or epicurean expedition is already done for you. A fun and interesting read. I highly recommend "Tasting Beer" by Randy Mosher.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Recomendable Overview of Beer's Diversity and History, June 17, 2009

By	Daniel Lobo (Washington, DC More often than not.) - See all my reviews

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Tasting Beer is a good all around introduction to the history, diversity, and enriching ways to explore beer.
While it might be useful to share with beer novices and help break quite a few stereotypes and misunderstanding, it is also a nice volume for beer aficionados with plenty of advice and insightful background.

If anything the book might suffer from some top-down style narrative. Mosher tries hard to be amicable and casual, and more often than not does it well, but his occasional cheekiness sometimes can have a patronizing undertone. And while certainly this is a book that emcompasses a broad Western global perspective of beer, he slips a few times adressing exclusively a US readership, which for obvious reasons I find limiting and unnecessary.

And yet, these flaws remain in the background of what is a quite recommendable book. While I am just a small aficionado, he supported and expanded those things that I felt comfortable in knowing already, and excited the senses to explore quite a few that I did not know about, or did not know at that level of detail.