Getting Biblical

Writing books is weird. One works alone for several months, deeply immersed in a subject, and it is invisible to everyone not living between our ears. The book comes out a year or more later, and by that time the writer is well onto the next thing.

So allow me to share the very big news in my life: yesterday I completed and turned in the manuscript for the second edition of The Beer Bible. (No foolin’!) If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to spend a post discussing this project, which has dominated the last three months of my life and kept me working most weekends the past month.

New Content

The length of the book grew marginally, from 235 to 240,000 words, yet there are 52,000 of new content. (That’s less than a quarter of new material, but it’s still longer than my last book.) Within that new material are new style chapters. I added sake, European farmhouse ales (the kviek continuum), and hoppy American ales. That meant nipping others. IPA and American strong ales were reworked in the American hoppy ales chapter. I demoted mild ale and witbier to sections in other chapters. American ales is also gone—largely because the styles I discussed are either fading out or could be discussed elsewhere.

The structure of the book also changed. In the first edition, the one request the publisher made was to divide style chapters into the categories of ale, lager, wheat beer, and wild ales. I didn’t love it at the time, and it became ever more problematic the more I thought about it. The issue with that structure is parallelism: there isn’t any. Three of the sections were organized by yeast type, the last by malt type. (Wheat beers are all ales or tart beers in addition to being made with wheat.) So now we have what I think are more consistent categories of general type: classic ales, classic lagers, wild ales, and new and unusual styles. The book is supposed to be a resource for advanced fans as well as rank newbies, and I hope that’s a more intuitive conceptual map.

There are also more brewery profiles—and I’ve posted versions of some of the new ones on this site. Those are designed to expand on the material in a style chapter and offer a holistic sense of where the style came from, where it is now, and how it’s made—through the lens of one of the most important breweries. So that Harvey’s profile will follow the chapter on bitters; Schneeeule will follow the chapter on Gose/Berliner weisse. There are now 21 of these (and 29 style chapters).

One of the main reasons for needing to do a second edition of the book was to keep pace with what’s happening in the IPA continuum, so that got a totally fresh treatment as well; I assume it will be the chapter everyone flips to first, so good to have it fresh and updated.

What the Beers Said

After every chapter, I offer around ten “Beers to Know.” These are the classic examples or exceptional modern recreations. My main rule is that the beer should be fairly broadly available and have a high likelihood of being brewed for years to come. I offer these suggestions so people can actually track down a bottle and get a sense of the style. For the most part they’re not beer geek “whales”—those much-coveted, extremely rare beers few will ever taste. Obviously, I’m focused on an American audience, so my filter for “broadly available” won’t necessarily apply if you live in São Paulo.

I was curious to see what kind of dispersement I’d managed to achieve and was pleasantly surprised. I have beers from 34 states and 16 countries. There are 257 beers in all, with 42% (108) new this time.

No country has a majority of the beers—though the US is close. I was a little surprised to see the country with the second-most entries—until I thought about it:

United States 47.5%
Belgium 16.3%
U.K. 8.6%
Germany 10.5%
Others 17.1%

Belgium has more styles than other countries, and therefore I needed to use more beers to illustrate what’s they taste like. Germany, no surprise, was second.

The Beer Bible is a bit like the dictionary: it doesn’t endorse, it just reflects. So while I try to put every historically important beer in the book, I also include examples of new stuff. You will find examples of grodziskie and tmavé, but also milkshake IPAs and pastry stouts. (And, the curious thing about writing this book is that I have to learn styles well enough that I appreciate all and like most: I am far less a style partisan for having written it.)

Change

One element that stood out was how much beer changes. In just seven years since I turned in the first manuscript, there has been enormous churn. You wouldn’t think this would be the case for most styles—a bitter is still a bitter, right? In many cases, though, the answer is no. Bitters have evolved, and so have a lot of styles.

For the beers I left in the book, I checked to see that the numbers were still the same. Often, they weren’t. Traditional Scottish session ales had crept up in bitterness. Not much, but a bit, for example from 18 to 22, as in the case of Stewart’s 80/-.

Germans also change their ingredients, even on supposedly unchanging styles. I was seeing more color malts, halting what had been a 20-year trend toward paler beers. Germans are also switching to higher-alpha bittering hops. Not a significant change in one way, but worth noting.

The final and most prominent change is something we’re all aware of. The evolution of hops and their use has transformed beer. In 2012, I was startled when a Czech brewer mentioned making an IPA. Now American-style IPAs are available almost as widely as pale lagers. Everyone dry-hops—even the Germans!

This isn’t a fad—it’s a permanent trend that will continues to inflect brewing for decades. I don’t know how the IPA style in the US will evolve, but I do believe the techniques that characterize it will be used more and more widely in all kinds of styles. It may only be a small dose following the boil to brighten up the beer, but that is significant. The tectonic plates have shifted during Earthquake Lupulin. It’s been remarkable to see it happen in real time.

That’s probably enough from me. The book was originally slated to be out before Father’s Day in 2021, but I’m not sure what the timeline is post-COVID. I’ll let you know—