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Please visit: Books we have enjoyed recently: Title: Good Beer Guide 2008 Editor: Roger Protz Published: September 2007 Publisher: CAMRA Books Price: £13.99 (buy at Amazon -40%) Pages: 800 The annual Good Beer Guide is a real institution, now in its 36th edition (and the 16th edited by Roger Protz). As always the new 2005 edition is a massive reference work, compiled from the local knowledge of thousands of CAMRA (The Campaign for Real Ale) members across the United Kingdom. The GBG is an exhaustive directory of pubs serving real beer, with descriptions, full contact details and lists of the draught beers they offer. Because the guide is compiled by paid-up members of CAMRA the opinions are blunt and admirably to the point. Helpful symbols tell you which pubs have, for example, a real fire in winter, or a beer garden in summer. At the back of the book is another excellent resource: an alphabetical listing of independent brewers, again with contact details and tasting notes for their main beers, bottled and draught. But apart from almost 800 pages of detailed listings, the GBG also offers fresh writing each year, with opinion pieces on the state of beer, news and developments, and food and beer advice, from leading writers. It is a totally reliable and very honorable guide that really is an essential companion. Title: 300 Beers to Try Before You Die Editor: Roger Protz Published: August 2005 Publisher: CAMRA Books Price: £12.99 (buy at Amazon -30%) Pages: 326 I know from chatting to Roger that this book was a Herculean undertaking and a challenge. Identifying and settling on the 300 best beers in the world was one part of that challenge, but each beer is given a full-page or double-page spread of its own in the book. Each comes complete with Roger's authoritative and comprehensive briefing notes on the beer: not just a tasting note, but, with Roger's typical thoroughness, history, background and development are all explained. But 300 Beers is more than just another beer guide book. It is laid out as a project for you to undertake: for some, this may turn into a long-term or even lifetime committment! Against each beer are panels for you to fill in your own tasting notes and assessments once you've tried the beer in question. The back of the book has a one to 300 checklist of all the beers, so that you can tick off each one as you taste it. Half the fun of this book is simply reading it, to discover which beers Roger Protz has chosen to include, and trying to spot those where you agree or disagree with his conclusion. This book could have so easily been a "dumbed down" shopping list of indiscriminately selected brews, but instead it becomes a fascinating tour of the world's great beer styles. But it is a stimulating book that works on the other level too; as a fun and inspiring companion as you set off on your own voyage to discover these beers, and see how your assessments stack upagainst one of the world's great beer commentators. I cannot recommend '300 Beers' highly enough. Title: The Complete Guide to World Beers Editor: Roger Protz Published: September 2004 Publisher: Carlton Books Books Price: £19.99 (buy at Amazon -30%) Pages: 220 Roger Protz's all-new edition of The Complete Guide to World Beer has recently been published by Carlton Books. It is a brilliant and important book, but let me quote an independent source: Andrew Martin's review in the Guardian newspaper: "For a long time it bothered me that I didn't know how beer was made. Roger Protz is certainly the man to provide the answer. The Complete Guide to World Beer includes "The Art and Science of Beer Making", a "World A-Z of Beer", an analysis of the beer business, chapters on the culture and history of beer and more. The sheer beeriness of this book cannot really be overstated. There are recipes, supplied in many cases by beer experts, for dishes to be made with beer and eaten while drinking beer. A brief history of pub signs is supplied, together with accounts of such adjuncts to beer as the game of darts. Protz's account of the production process is all the more readable for being slightly elliptical. A new term comes up, and you think, "No, he's lost me now", only to find that you're rewarded with an explanation in the next sentence. And so you are tugged along through this most amiable of chemistry lessons. The A-Z is relentlessly illuminating. All the breweries in Iran closed when the ayatollahs came to power; skull-splitting Carlsberg Special Brew was first made to commemorate a visit by Winston Churchill to Copenhagen. A "Gazetteer of Pubs, Bars and Taverns" is to be read in conjunction with the A-Z: you can visit the Falstaff in Brussels, but don't go between 5am and 7am because that's when it closes. This is a highly enjoyable guide, one that will bring power to the beer drinker's elbow, and some justification, too". Title: Good Bottled Beer Guide Editor: Jeff Evans Published: September 2004 Publisher: CAMRA Books Price: £9.99 (buy at Amazon -30%) Pages: 288 Thirty years ago the Good Beer Guide noted there were just five brands of bottle-conditioned beer on the UK market. By 1998 the figure had risen to 160, and this new edition of the Good Bottled Beer Guide lists 630. In the past year alone no fewer than 30 brewers have started producing bottle-conditioned beers - a revolution that has gone largely unnoticed whilst the big story has been the inexorable growth of lager. The other story, however, has been the success of smaller, craft brewers and the increasing willingness of beer drinkers to experiment. Bottle conditioned beers are there to be explored and discovered. For that a guide is indispensible and that guide is the one that Jeff Evans has meticulously compiled and built on over the past few years. The latest edition explains what goes to make a bottle conditioned beer and it charts their phenomenal growth. But the most valuable part of the book is, of course, the list of beers. What comes through is not only the surprising number of them but the fantastic variety. There are bitters and lagers, stouts and milds, wheat beers and fruit beers, between them producing a range of flavours that surely rivals what wine can offer. Three of those original five brands are there: Worthington's White Shield, now brewed by the giant Coors at its Burton visitor centre, Gale's Prize Old Ale and Thomas Hardy's Ale, recently revived by O'Hanlon's Brewery. Guinness Extra Stout and Courage's Imperial Russian Stout have been sadly lost. But there are many more. Too many to single out any single beer. Better to buy the book and discover them for yourself. (Phil Mellows) Title: The story of the pint Author: Martyn Cornell Published: June 2004 Publisher: Headline Books Price: £7.99 (buy at Amazon -20%) Pages: 336 I really enjoyed this book, which Martyn Cornell has written beautifully and pitched perfectly, with plenty of humour and human interest sprinkled throughout. Take for example, a chapter headed "A short and totally wrong history of beer" that explodes a whole catalogue of beer myths. Otherwise, the book is a studious but never boring story that follows the development of beer, from its rather vague and much argued-about "invention" (possibly as much as six thousand years ago) through the many cultural and historical factors that shaped the diversity of beer styles we know today. Cornell's research is staggering, and his appetite for the quirky and intriguing aspects of how beer has been made, and how it has been drunk, make the book really quite riveting for what is basically a historical text book. Beer's place in love, life and war is celebrated with excellent historical context and detail. Really, it is hard to imagine any more thorough or more detailed history of beer than this, another absolutely essential part of any beer-lover's library.

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