Customer Reviews

The World Encyclopedia of Beer

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Brian Glover's World Encyclopedia of Beer is a good resource about the brewing industry, the history of beer, and the different products brewed around the world. I received this guide a couple of years back as a Christmas present and I have been consulting it on and off ever since.

With the first section of this guide, Glover spends some time talking about the early days of brewing. He doesn't spend a great deal of time here and he doesn't go into great detail but he does cover the important points and he does help to answer many common questions about beer. The next part of this section talks about the ingredients that are used in beer; with the malt, hops, yeast, and water each receiving a few pages of facts. The brewing process and a detailed glossary of beer styles follows, with enough important facts to adequately educate readers on the subject.

The remainder of this guide takes the reader on a world tour of beer and this is the part of the guide I consult most frequently. This section describes each country and its brewing business and then lists the country's most common beer products in alphabetical order. When I first glanced at the listings, I was a little disappointed that the descriptions weren't longer and more thorough. Glover tries to keep it simple with the descriptions. He includes alcohol content on most every beer but this is the only quantifiable fact he consistently notes. Other than that, he generally provides only a brief description of the product and while I didn't like this at first, I can understand why the author didn't say more. By stating only as much as he does, the reader is more tempted to seek out the product and give it a try.

This guide has many pictures and my personal favorites are those that show a full, colorful glass of a specific beer product alongside one of its bottles. These pictures are nice because they let you visualize the description of certain beers and they make you very thirsty. The beautiful colors, perfect head of foam, bubbly body, and shapely glass will make your mouth water. I often look at this guide and inevitably head to the nearest beverage store to make a beer run.

With some of the nations and regions highlighted in this guide, only a small number of beer products are spotlighted. Generally, this is due to the fact that the region or country in question doesn't brew very many different beers. An example would be the Caribbean region. With only a handful of products like Red Stripe, Dragon Stout, Caribe, and a few others brewed in this area, there isn't really much to talk about. On the other hand, the United States receives fifteen pages of beer listings. This still isn't much when you consider that there are thousands of beers brewed in the USA but it's a good start and it includes well- known products like Budweiser and Miller along with some of the microbrew specialties like Red Hook, Stoudt, Leinenkugel, Sam Adams, and others.

One bad thing about this guide is that parts of it have become outdated. The most recent edition was published in 2001 (the original edition was published in 1997) and some of the data in the guide is no longer accurate. Sections like the history of beer, ingredients used to make beer, and the process of brewing beer are timeless and they can be referenced over and over again for many years to come. But charts like "The Top Ten U.S. Breweries", "Global Malt Production (by country)", and "Top Brewing Nations" were created using data from the early to mid 1990's. I'm fairly certain that these rankings haven't changed too much from then to now, but they have changed some and therefore should not be taken 100 percent seriously.

One other thing I don't like about this guide is the way it ends. There is no conclusion or final section to close out the guide in the proper manner. Instead, it goes directly from talking about the beers of the Caribbean to displaying the book's index. A closing section would have been nice and it would have kept this guide more in tune with an actual book rather than simply a reference tool.

Overall, the World Encyclopedia of Beer is a good guide to understanding more about the history and production of beer and it's a good way to find out about new products to try and the nations that brew them. Much of it is outdated, like the charts and the individual country's listings of beer. Many of the highlighted products are no longer brewed and there are hundreds of new products that have climbed into the ranks of popularity that received no mention here because they were not yet very well known at the time of publication. For these reasons, I'm giving this guide a middle rating of three stars. I love looking at the large mugs of beer and I appreciate the educational material but this guide needs an updated edition to keep up with the ever- changing face of the brewing industry.

A global smorgasbord.

A large size book that has a pictorial spread showcasing some of the beers for each country it covers, from all continents. Antarctica doesn't have too many native beers though.

Will definitely make you want to find a few you find that you may not have seen before.