The Golden Age of Beer: A Year of Styles, Stories, and Trivia
The Golden Age of Beer: A Year of Styles, Stories, and Trivia
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Overview
A stunning beer lover’s companion from today’s leading beer expert, Tom Acitelli, distills what you need to know to select the ideal beer for every week of the year, and reveals how to drink, entertain, and enjoy like a pro.
All hail the golden age of beer! Today there are nearly nine thousand breweries in the US alone, brewing an enormous range of styles from Russian imperial stouts to triple India pale ales, golden pilsners, briny melon goses, and much more. But while this breadth can delight the tastebuds all year, how does one best choose what to drink without feeling overwhelmed or going for the same default brews again and again?
In this uniquely timely and high-end volume, acclaimed beer expert Tom Acitelli presents a fifty-two week guide to choosing the perfect beer to complement every week of the year. With tasting notes, specific brew recommendations, a guide to how to best serve, sip, and savor (naming glassware, temperatures, and pairings), plus fascinating backstories and trivia, Tom distills what beer lovers actually care about and reveals how to appreciate the best that the golden age of beer has to offer.
The Golden Age of Beer embraces Tom’s inviting, accessible voice and is complemented by color photographs throughout of beers, breweries, brewers, and more. Additional insider info dives into home brewing, beer icons, today’s industry game-changers, and more. So go ahead and ditch that old, out-of-date beer textbook; instead add class to your beer game by drinking and entertaining all year long with this lush, inspiring, and reliable guide that focuses on your enjoyment and what you actually care about.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781954641273 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Apollo Publishers |
| Publication date: | 01/14/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
About the Author
Tom Acitelli is a journalist and author widely regarded as an expert on beer and the beer industry. He has written extensively about beer for outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Eater, and been interviewed on the subject by NPR, BBC Radio 4, and Fox News. For five years, Tom was the history columnist for the trade magazine All About Beer, and he has also been a guest speaker or moderator at several brewery events and festivals, including the Great American Beer Festival, the world’s largest beer tasting, and consulted on the permanent brewing exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Tom’s prior books include The Audacity of Hops, American Wine, which was a finalist for the James Beard Award for best food and drink book of the year, Whiskey Business, and Pilsner, which the North American Guild of Beer Writers voted the best book of 2020. He lives in Watertown, MA.
Tom Acitelli is a journalist and author widely regarded as an expert on beer and the beer industry. He has written extensively about beer for outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Eater, and been interviewed on the subject by NPR, BBC Radio 4, and Fox News. For five years, Tom was the history columnist for the trade magazine All About Beer, and he has also been a guest speaker or moderator at several brewery events and festivals, including the Great American Beer Festival, the world’s largest beer tasting, and consulted on the permanent brewing exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Tom’s prior books include The Audacity of Hops, American Wine, which was a finalist for the James Beard Award for best food and drink book of the year, Whiskey Business, and Pilsner, which the North American Guild of Beer Writers voted the best book of 2020. He lives in Watertown, MA.
Read an Excerpt
Introduction: Welcome Michael Jackson to the Dance Floor
Beer is old. Beer style is not.The earliest version of what we’d come to call beer was brewed at least four millennia before the common era in the mountains of present-day northwestern Iran; though there might be an even older candidate in what’s now southeastern China. Either way, beer is an old beverage. The version we all recognize—made with malted grain, usually barley, fermented with yeast, and flavored with hops and a handful of other, lesser ingredients—is about five hundred years on.
On the other hand, a lot of people reading this were around for the invention of beer style. It’s all down to Michael Jackson. No, not that one. Jackson was a plump, jolly English journalist who favored owlish glasses and loud ties, and whose frame of curls ringed a face that seemed always on the verge of laughter. He looked like some telescreen writer’s quick sketch of a literary academic, bumbling yet loquacious, fun to be around. Which he was, in large part because he was the world’s greatest beer writer.
The job was wide open when Jackson landed it in the mid-1970s. Beer by then was defined by what it lacked: flavor, body, heft, distinction, aftertaste. It had evolved commercially into a monochromatic fizz—Jim Koch, the force behind Samuel Adams, once described beer to me back then as “alcoholic soda pop”—with little kick and virtually no flair beyond the marketing. Indeed, what people likely remembered most about beer back then were the taglines and the commercials: Less Filling, Tastes Great; the Champagne of Beers, Head for the Mountains of Busch, This Bud’s for You.
There were several reasons for this. Beer’s more diverse landscape before Prohibition in 1920 was a lot less diverse after its repeal in 1933. A consolidation in the industry, with the big breweries gobbling the smaller, had hastened that. So had the dominance of German-American brewers and customers, and their many descendants, who preferred lighter-tasting beers. And speaking of light, Miller Brewing introduced the first successful mass market light beer, Miller Lite, in 1975, tapping every would-be dieter and health nut’s subconscious to create the biggest beer sales category to date. There were also a number of supply issues and engineering changes that also speeded the homogenization of beer. In the end it came to pass that by the 1970s a handful of breweries made most of the world’s beer, and they made it taste largely the same. Who cared about style when everything tasted largely the same?
Enter Jackson. He had been working as a reporter for Fleet Street newspapers, and in production and writing for television when he picked up a dropped contract for a book on English pubs. Jackson had had a taste for drink—beer in particular—since he was a teenager growing up in Yorkshire. Now he could get paid for it. The English Pub came out in 1976, and it led to a second book in 1977: World Guide to Beer. In its richly researched, yet easily readable pages, Jackson toured a landscape of beer that scarcely seemed fathomable. There were names like lambic, kriek, porter, pilsner, rauchbier, altbier, roggenbier, barleywine, gose, geuze, bock, eisbock and India pale ale. There were regions and local traditions, festivals and folklore, fire-powered equipment and specially shaped glasses. It was a whole universe of beer—hidden in plain sight and on the verge of extinction in some cases—that seemed well beyond the latest commercial for Bud Light. It would be no surprise that many a beer industry veteran would cite Jackson’s World Guide to Beer as their bible for the beverage.
That was only the half of it. The other half—and the one we really care about in this book—was that Jackson did what no one had thought to do before: define beer style literally and then spell out various styles. Other writers and industry pros had spelled out “types,” “varieties,” and even “species.” These were usually broader descriptions too: “dark beer,” “golden beer,” “sweet beer,” etc. Jackson instead mined the history and the science, and reemerged with the defining characteristics of what he very literally called the “style” of different beers.
Techniques and ingredients defined these styles. It all broke down to how the brewer made the beer, how long the brewer might take, and what ingredients the brewer used, particularly when it came to hops, beer’s traditional bittering agent, and grain, the fermentation vehicle. (Grain is to beer what grapes are to wine.) Maybe it was the old newspaperman in him, with that industry’s style guides to writing, or maybe it was just luck. But Jackson’s categorization of beer into different “styles”—twenty-four in all in that first edition of World Guide to Beer—changed everything.
It couldn’t have come along at a better time either (this was definitely luck). Organizations on both sides of the Atlantic—the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in the United Kingdom and the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in the United States—had both sprung up in the 1970s; the AHA in 1978, the same year The World Guide to Beer was published in the US. These were essentially underground movements through which the people fed up with the alcoholic soda pop that beer had largely become gathered and shared information. It didn’t hurt Jackson’s book either that Congress legalized homebrewing at the federal level in 1978. (It had somehow escaped the notice of officials following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.)
The effects of all of this began to spill over into the commercial realm. Breweries started opening. In 1976, the year before World Guide to Beer first came out, there was only one independently owned brewery in the US making beer with traditional ingredients and methods (more on that one later). By the early 1980s, there were around twenty, some so small the brewery was just one or two people with a license to brew and some secondhand equipment—usually including a manual bottler. The rest of the few dozen breweries in the US were wheezing regionals and mega-corporations such as Miller and Anheuser-Busch that all made that same type of beer.
The rest is history. Breweries multiplied and styles blossomed as brewers spun new interpretations on the originals that Jackson wrote about. By the year of Michael Jackson’s death in 2007, there were more than fifteen hundred breweries in America and that year’s Great American Beer Festival included judging in seventy-five different style categories. By 2022 there were nearly ninety-five hundred breweries—the most ever at once—and ninety-eight style categories, not including subcategories (for instance, Scotch ale was divided into “peated” and “unpeated”). Things have changed so much just in the past fifteen years!
Yes, it’s a golden age—really, the golden age—to drink beer. The fruits of Jackson’s labor on styles and of the commercial efforts of those he inspired have left a never-ending banquet behind of variety and taste. So where to begin to make sense of it all?
This book!
The Golden Age of Beer will break down the style landscape in beer. It will provide descriptions and background on fifty-two distinct and essential beer styles, one for each week of the year based on the time of year. Beer has long been a seasonal beverage. Certain styles just work better at certain times, and, in the old days, people could only brew beers when particular crops were ready and the temperatures were just right. So this book will be organized along those lines. More importantly, it will explain how to enjoy and appreciate each one. Each entry will include examples of the style readily available to sample. Because who wants to read all about a deliciously enticing style, only to find it isn’t on a nearby shelf or tap?
This isn’t a history book, though there will be plenty of that—remember, beer is old—and it’s not meant to be so dense that only the initiated will enjoy it. Instead it’s meant to be accessible and fun. (We could all use some fun after the last few years.) Michael Jackson will be our muse. So will all of those brewers, big and small, crafting all of those styles. Finally, so will the consumers—the drinkers, like you!—living and fueling this golden age of beer.
“The world always knew that beer was a noble and complex drink, but, for a moment in history, that was forgotten,” Jackson wrote in the first line of a 1988 edition of his World Guide to Beer. “Now it is being remembered.”
Beer in Winter
“Winter beers are as much a state of mind as a style.” —Michael Jackson
Jackson nailed it with that observation in the 1990s. There was—there is—something about the heartiness and heft of winter ales and lagers that draws drinkers to them in the colder, darker months. It’s the warmth provided by the generally higher alcohol certainly, as well as the richness of the brews that can complement winter’s sweeter treats.
On a more subconscious level, beer in winter harkens to the preindustrial age (another observation of Jackson’s). Many brewers were farmers or vice versa, and beer was enwrapped in agriculture and its seasons. The barley harvest in August meant beer aging by October and ready for the solstice in late December. And, because the industrial age would perfect techniques that render beer lighter and brighter than ever before, the darker beers of winter recall the epochs when that was the only hue of all. It’s something primal then: To hold a mug of thick grog today, the likes of which would’ve been recognized on a cuttingly cold eve centuries before.
First Week in January
This Week’s Style: Barleywine
#barleywine
Photo examples
Sierra Nevada Big Foot
Anchor Old Foghorn
Jack’s Abby Babymaker
Why Now?
Because the days are short and the nights are long. And earthy, abundant barleywine is a particularly complex style fit for contemplation. There is so much to it taste-wise.
Backstory
The anonymous author of a 1736 book called The London and Country Brewer wrote of different strengths of ale that could be found around England at the time. These included a particularly strong one that “should not be tapped under nine months” and “is the most healthful.”
“And this I have experienced by enjoying such an amber liquid that has been truly brewed from good malt, as to be of a vinous nature,” the author wrote, “That would permit of a hearty dose overnight, and yet the next morning leave a person light, brisk and unconcerned.”
In other words, this was one strong beer that could really knock you back as you knocked it back. (The bit about being “brisk” the next morning—we’ll have to take the seventeenth-century author’s word for it.) The reference is perhaps the first to a style that would be the only one named explicitly after wine.
By the late 1700s, the in-house breweries of England’s great estates were noted for their vinous brews. These estates were about the only places that could afford to make such an especially robust affair. Within a century, though, English breweries such as Bass were brewing barleywines; and the style has been in and out of wide commercial circulation ever since.
In the US, barleywine was more out than in until 1975, when San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing introduced its Old Foghorn. That was the first new barleywine by an American brewer since Prohibition ended in 1933. Sierra Nevada would stomp into the space in 1983 with its Big Foot barleywine.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Brewing, Beer Lingo, and Glasses
Beer in Winter
Beer in Spring
Beer in Summer
Beer in Fall