All the Changes in the New Beer Bible
The new, 2nd edition of The Beer Bible will be out a week from today. I am busily flogging it as well as the book tour I’ll be doing in October and November to support it. So you may be wondering—especially if you already own a copy of the first edition: what’s new? Did I really need to update the book? I mean, how much can change in the eight years since you finished the first draft? (This also happens to be the first question reporters ask when they’re doing a story on it.)
This post will provide the full answer. But more briefly, yes. It was really necessary. As craft brewing spreads worldwide, we’re seeing huge changes in the breweries making beer, the kind of beer they make, and the way consumers drink it. To put it in perspective, IPAs didn’t become the best-selling craft style in the US until 2011. The phrase “hazy IPA” didn’t exist when the first edition was published. Now they’re made worldwide, along with a raft of new styles. Meanwhile, all that churn has dented the prospects of other styles, which edge closer to commercial extinction. The rework was an effort to address all that. The book length is roughly the same at around 230,000 words, but 50,000 are entirely new content.
a Slightly New Structure
Trying to organize beer in a coherent way poses challenges no matter how you do it. The one request Workman made for the first edition (1E hereafter) was organizing it like this: ales, lagers, wheat beers, and wild ales. That … does not make sense. It’s like dividing animals into fish, insects, mammals, birds, and blue. I actually had to battle a bit on the point for 2E, but we settled on these sections: classic lagers, classic ales, new and unusual styles, and wild ales. It’s more descriptive and less taxonomical—though no doubt one could quibble.
Perhaps in a future edition I’ll organize it by national tradition, a concept that heavily guides the book even in its current arrangement. In terms of understanding beer, that framework does more to unpack where true styles came from and why they’re made the way they are than any I have encountered. (I wrote a full post on it here.)
What’s In, What’s Out
The biggest change in beer over the past 150 years has been the emergence of American craft brewing and the hoppy ales it generated. You can find American-style craft breweries literally everywhere in the world now, and most make an American-style IPA. Meanwhile, a bunch of styles I included in an American Ales chapter have mostly died out or are basically versions of beers made elsewhere. Critically, the way Americans made beer from 1980-2010 (lots of crystal malt, neutral yeasts, neutral base malts, and biting bitterness) has mostly vanished. Even when a brewery makes a pale or amber ale, they’re made differently.
So now all of this is addressed in a veeeerrrry long chapter I called American Hoppy Ales. Words like hazy, juicy, and milkshake are all included. I do my best to describe the bones of this transformation, and I designed it to be a bit more evergreen. I dumped the American Ales and Strong American Ales chapters, too, folding the still-relevant info into the new chapter.
Some styles, already in decline when I wrote 1E, are headed toward extinction now. Brown ales and mild ales, which each got a separate chapter before, are combined now. (The last time I was in the UK, I drank a lot of beer over the course of eight days and saw no (0, zero, nil) mild ales. The style is in real trouble. 😞
Finally, I included a range of different sub-styles in a long chapter on Belgian Ales, and for 2E I demoted witbier and included it with the Belgian brunes, ambers, and strong pales. The fortunes of witbier are also in serious decline since their turn-of-the-century heyday.
One of my favorite parts of the book are in-depth brewery profiles following a style chapter. They highlight the tradition and brewing approach in an applied way. In some cases, it didn’t make sense to replace these profiles (Dupont, Schneider), but in many others it did.
Here are the changes:
[following Bitter] Sam Smith’s replaced by Harvey’s
[IPA] Thornbridge replaced by Cloudwater [Following Pale Ale]
[Porter and Stout] Fuller’s replaced by Guinness
[American Ale] Double Mountain. Chapter removed as is the brewery profile
[Hoppy American Ales] Added Breakside
[Scottish Ale] Belhaven replaced by Traquair House
[Ales of the Rhine] Uerige - no change
[Belgian Ales] Added Brasserie de la Senne
[Rustic Belgian Ales] Dupont - no change
[French Ales] St Germain replaced by Thiriez
[Italian] LoverBeer replaced by Italiano
[Trappist] Orval - no change
[Weissbier] Schneider - no change
[Pale Lager] Budvar replaced by Urquell
[Amber Lager] Added Schwechat
[Bock] Ayinger - no change
[Rauchbier] Schlenkerla- no change
[Lambic] Cantillon and Boon - no change
[Flanders] Rodenbach - no change
[Berliner Weisse] Added Schneeeule
[Wild Ales] Allagash - no change
Other Fun Stuff
Even as I sent the 1E manuscript off, I had regrets. Well, regret. I reduced one of the oldest and most interesting styles of beer, still consumed by millions (unlike mild), to a section in a catch-all chapter. This time around I wanted to do right by sake and give it the full-chapter treatment. (Thanks to Jeff Cioletti for guiding me.)
Similarly, in the years since 1E, Lars Marius Garshol revealed an amazing range of traditional beers in the Baltics and Scandinavia to English-speakers. I traveled to Lithuania in 2019 to see part of this, and wrote up a chapter on these amazing farmhouse ales.
Finally, I hope people dig around and discover the beer tourism section. It’s not new, though it is heavily altered and expanded. One thing I can confirm with iron certainty after my travels through foreign countries is that touring local breweries is critical to understanding styles born there. While it’s true that I tend to get deluxe tours when I visit, I’ve been on plenty of public ones as well, and you learn almost as much on those. Tour breweries! And I don’t mean go to the pubs attached to breweries—get in to the brewhouses and have a look around. I even have some extensive notes on the US for in-country travel, or if you live outside America.
I’m pretty sure I missed a few things along the way, but that’s probably good. I hope you find a few surprises if you pick up a copy. (Please do!)