Travels with Barley: A Journey Through Beer Culture in America (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Perdido Key, Fla.-Paige Lightsey is certainly in a celebratory mood at the moment and so, it seems, are flocks of male gawkers who have assembled..." (more)
Key Phrases: craft brew movement, beer quest, beer movement, New Orleans, New York, River of Beer (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Thoreau said, "The tavern will compare favorably with the church." Following this premise rather closely, longtime Wall Street Journal writer and novelist Wells (Junior's Leg) searches for his preferred house of worship: the "perfect beer joint." Setting out to follow the Mississippi River, Wells writes, "I would begin in Minnesota among folk who, geographically speaking, are practically Canadians and by reputation descended from good beer-drinking Swedes and Germans. I would slide down soon enough into the Great Beer Belly of America, for, by lore at least, Midwesterners are presumed to be the mightiest of U.S. beer drinkers." Full of profundities ("One thing you can say about lagers: the good ones don't make you work very hard to like them"), the book also lends historical, scientific and cultural insights into the $75 billion industry—from the likes of beer behemoths like Budweiser to newfangled Extreme Beer, which has bottle values comparable to fine Bordeaux. Along the way, Wells encounters quirky characters, and the pages he devotes to describing brewers, bar proprietors, bartenders and plain ol' beer drinkers prove he's more interested in beer people (84 million Americans drink beer) than the industry itself. Wells's storytelling abilities complement his journalist's eye for stats and facts, making this a humorous, lively and informational tour.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

This account of journeys through the soft beer belly of America exudes that expansive happiness that springs from a guy who is truly enjoying his bottle of brew. Wells, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has crisscrossed the U.S., visiting breweries and bars to find out just what makes beer the nation's leading adult beverage. In the wake of the "lager wars" that drove so many midsize breweries to extinction in the late twentieth century, Wells finds newly prospering microbreweries. He visits the deceptively down-market Flora-Bama Lounge on the Gulf Coast to find out how it maintains its record consumption levels. He travels the length of the Mississippi to assess the heartland's appetite for brewskis. Wells delves into the history of the giant breweries such as Anheuser-Busch with its trademark Clydesdale draft horses and Miller with its phenomenally successful campaign to encourage that quaffing of "light" beer. As one would expect from a reporter of his background, Wells focuses his eye less flatteringly on the economic, social, and political role of beer, whose powerful lobbyists jealously guard industry prerogatives. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (October 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074323278X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743232784
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #106,818 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #64 in

  Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Drinks & Beverages > Beer

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Read, October 15, 2004

By	PozzumJim (Memphis) - See all my reviews

I'm not much of a beer drinker but this is a terrific book. Wells is an entertaining writer and also a good reporter and observer of human nature. You learn tons about the beer industry but he is clearly most interested in beer people, the quirkier the better. By the time you finish the chapter on Extreme Beer, you will understand practically all you need to know about the microbrew business but also why it attracts the kind of people who could be running companies in Silicon Valley. I had no idea I would want to read an entire chapter about beer yeast but I couldn't put it down. The trip down the River of Beer meanwhile is fun and a nicely paced travelogue. He ends up in one of my favorite cities New Orleans and his essay about its drinking proclivities is very, very funny (and true.) I highly recommend this book. It will make a great stocking stuffer this Christmas.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Smooth Ride on the River of Beer, October 8, 2004

By	JJ the Beer Guy (New York, N.Y.) - See all my reviews

Wells is smooth writer with a good sense of humor and a talent for telling a good story. I'll admit I'm what he calls a beer geek but you don't have to be a beer geek to enjoy this book. He ambles down the Mississippi River searching for The Perfect Beer Joint but he finds some nice slices of the real America along the way. His encounters with various "Beer Goddesses" are pretty hilarious. He peels off the river and discovers a place called Beervana and people who spend their free time poaching beer yeast. The book is full of good travel writing. And if you do like beer and are interested in the subject, this is a great book to get up to speed on beer in America as it stands today. Wells is a real reporter and the book is filled with stats and observations but never in a dull way. You'll learn about the evolution of the beer joint, why Budweiser rules American beer and why the Mayflower REALLY landed at Plymouth Rock.

25 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great idea, mediocre execution, April 3, 2005

By	Thomas Reiter (Washington DC, DC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have borrowed the title for this review from another reviewer, who I completely agree with.

First, the book is fairly entertaining and has a lot of info about beer, the beer industry, the popularity of home-brewing, etc.

That said, the book suffered from the following major flaws:

1) the author was supposedly seeking to find the "perfect beer joint" and drove down the Mississippi from Minnesota to New Orleans to conduct this search. Actually this "search" was totally perfunctory and uninspired--he essentially drove to a new town every day, stopped in one or two bars, usually in the middle of the day when no one was around, asked the same question ("what is the perfect beer joint?" to whoever he happened to bump into there, and then moved on to the next town. Often the people he met said things like "you have to come back tomorrow to go to bar x or meet person y", but no matter, he was on an expense-account determined schedule and would leave the next morning for the next day's tedious "adventure". I didn't count, but it sounds like in the course of this "search" he went into maybe half a dozen bars at night, on a weekend, where you might have any expectation of finding something interesting to write about.

2) While I can't say that the book is dry or overly boring, it is almost completely devoid of actual humour, which I found difficult to believe. When you're writing about beer, bars, and drunks, it seems inevitable that some pretty funny stuff would creep in, but such is not the case.

CONCLUSION: This book was evidently conceived and executed as a quicky, check-the-box type of exercise rather than a true labor of love. This is a book that begs to be written by someone like Bill Bryson.

TMR