Following my announcement last night about my new crowdfunded beer book project, we go live today – and here’s the idea I’m working on.
Beer is many things.
It’s often cold, always wet, usually refreshing. It’s democratic, straightforward and accessible, but can also be complex and challenging. It can be blond, brown, red or black, strong or weak, light and spritzy, creamy and zesty, rich and fruity, chocolatey, coffee-like, spicy, piney, citrusy, caramelised, sour, or even salty.
Beer’s unique balance of exciting diversity and easy-going approachability have made it the most widely drunk alcoholic beverage on the planet. Only water and tea are more popular. In the twenty-first century, the global craft beer revolution is spreading beer’s astonishing palate of flavours and styles to people who previously thought it could only be fizzy and tasteless.
But behind all the excitement around the renaissance of the world’s most popular alcoholic drink lies an extraordinary fact: very few beer drinkers have much of an idea of what their beverage is made of.
Do you?
We all know that wine is made by fermenting pressed juice from grapes, and cider comes from doing something similar to apples. But what creates the flavour and texture of beer? Do you know what makes it that colour, or where the alcohol comes from? What creates that inimitable heady rush on the nose or that crisp, dry finish at the back of the throat?
For all its straightforwardness, beer is a complex drink. The typical drinker might mumble vaguely about hops without having any clear idea of what hops are, or they may even talk about ‘chemicals’.
And that’s a shame, because each of the four main ingredients of beer has an incredible story.
‘What Are You Drinking?’* is a journey into the four main ingredients of beer. The book will tell their stories and uncover the little miracles in malted barley, hops, yeast and water, and how each of these contributes to the massive miracle that is beer.
Mixing travel writing, nature writing, history and memoir, this book picks up four natural ingredients that are usually only ever discussed in technical brewing manuals and takes them for a spin through time and across continents.
From the lambic breweries of Belgium, where beer is fermented with wild yeasts drawn down from the air around the brewery, to the aquifers below Burton-on-Trent, where the brewing water is rumoured to contain life-giving qualities, this book won’t just describe what each ingredient is; it will tell the full story behind how and why it came to be in beer and why that matters.
It’s a story that’s aimed at the general reader and curious drinker, but even brewers and hardcore beer fans will find facts and stories they didn’t know, or at least have them presenting in a refreshing new light.
‘What Are You Drinking’ will explain why hops grown in different parts of the world have such dramatically different flavours; it will give an eye-witness account of how the process of malting changes a humble barley grain into so much more, and will explain as much about the behaviour of yeast as you can handle without a degree in biochemistry.
We’ll travel from the surreal madness of drink-sodden hop-blessings in the Czech Republic, to Bamberg in the heart of Bavaria, where malt smoked over an open flame creates beer that tastes like liquid bacon, and to the hop harvest in the Yakima Valley in the Pacific North West of the United States. We’ll explore the history of our understanding of fermentation, the lost age of hallucinogenic
gruit beers, and the evolution of modern hop varieties that now challenge grapes in terms of how they are discussed and revered.
Along the way, we’ll meet and drink with a cast of characters who reveal the magic of beer, and celebrate the joy of drinking it. And, almost without noticing, we’ll learn the naked truth about the world’s greatest beverage.
The ‘Brewing Elements’ series of books published by the US Brewers’ Association does cover these four ingredients, but they are strictly only for brewers and the most hardcore beer enthusiasts. (The one on water even comes with a health warning discouraging you from reading it unless you from reading it unless you are a trained brewer with at least a high school level of education in chemistry.) This will be the first time a whole book has been written about the components of beer in a way that will be interesting, educational and entertaining to the general reader who enjoys drinking beer, but had no idea how special it was – until now.
The book is now open for pledging at
Unbound.co.uk.
The book has its own page, where there’s a video from me talking more about the ideas in the book, and
an exclusive excerpt from one of the chapters I’ve already written, about a visit to the hop farms of Slovenia where I learned about the effects of
terroir on hop aroma, and the effects of salami on the human body and soul. There you’ll also see a range of different pledging options if you’d like to get involved. There’s also a Q&A section where I’ll answer any questions you have.
We need around 750 pledges in total. If you like the sound of this book, if you would like your name printed in the back of the book, and if you’d like a special edition of it that is unique to subscribers and will never be available anywhere else, pledge now. The quicker we meet the target, the sooner it will be published!
If you want to find out more about Unbound and how their hybrid model of crowdfunding and mainstream publishing works, see my previous blog post
here.
This is going to be an exciting adventure. Hope you’ll hop onboard!
* The title is a work in progress. It might change if we can think of a better one.
