JEFF ALWORTH THE BEER BIBLE WORKMAN PUBLISHING • NEW YORK For Sally, to whom I owe the world— or, at the very least, Italy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS W HEN YOU LOOK at the cover of a book, there’s usually just one name there. Often an author will mention some folks who supported him or helped along the way. In the case of The Beer Bible, it would have been literally impossible for me to complete the book without the help of dozens of people. Folks like the English writer Zak Avery, who helped me contact British breweries to set up visits. Or importers Wendy Littlefield, Matthias Neidhart, and Michael Opalenski, who did the same for me in France and Belgium, Germany, and Italy. Wendy and Michael were wonderful in sharing their impressions of the Belgian and Italian brewing worlds, helping educate me as well as connecting me with brewers in Europe. I want to give a special děkuji to Max Bahnson, who spent two days giving me a tour of Prague, and another to Patrick Emerson, who not only joined me on the trip around Great Britain, but had the courage to take the wheel of the Vauxhall. I had personal advisors who used their years of experience to illuminate and guide me on this long road: the writer Stan Hieronymus, who has done more to advance our understanding of beer than anyone in the past decade; brewer Alan Taylor, the hardest-working man in beer at Pints Brewing, Ponderosa Brewing, and (soon to be) Zoiglhaus Brewing, who helped me overcome my fear of lagers; and Portland, Oregon–based chef Paul Kasten, who revealed some of his alchemical secrets. You spent far more time than you needed to answering what must have seemed like obvious questions. Another revolution in our understanding of beer has come thanks to a cohort of exceptional historians. These folks have looked at primary sources in the brewing record going back centuries, and have help loosen our attachment to persistent old myths. I’m thinking especially of Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson, both of whom graciously agreed to look over my history sections to prevent any howlers from getting out in the world. Richard Unger and Ian Hornsey have also done indispensable work. Closer to home, Maureen Ogle’s history of American brewing has been essential reading. If you look at the end of the book, you’ll see the names of more than fifty brewers who took the time to speak with me about the beer, of which three dozen took me on tours of their breweries. Some of those names are the most esteemed in the business, and one of the enormous pleasures of writing this book was spending time looking inside mash tuns and up at towering conditioning tanks. In České Budějovice (Budweis), Adam Brož guided me by flashlight through a brewery darkened by electrical work. Standing with John Bexon under Crown Street in Bury St Edmunds, England, in a tangle of pipes running to the bottling line, conspiratorially, he said, “Not many people have been down here.” Showing up on the wrong day at Belgian brewery Rodenbach and having Rudi Ghequire give me a tour, anyway. Standing in the mists made by hot wort pouring into the cool ship at Cantillon, drinking aged Vintage Ale in the cellars at Fuller’s, dining with the folks at Lambrate, sampling sticke alt from the tanks at Uerige, smelling the fresh yeast of open fermenters at Schneider, meeting Teo Musso’s mom, discussing German guilds at Schlenkerla. These memories (and many more) are treasures I’ll carry a lifetime. The list goes on. James Emmerson not only manages a large American brewery (Full Sail), but he checked my technical sections for accuracy. Evan Rail made sure I didn’t get Czech beer wrong. Jo and Jerry Lane, Gene Alworth, and Sally Alworth all remember the fitful progress that led to this book—coming in on two decades now—and were there to hold my chin up along the way. Finally, I want to thank the folks at Workman Publishing for entrusting me with The Beer Bible. I worked closely with Kylie Foxx McDonald for a year before signing the contract to write the book and for the nearly four years it took to bring it to publication. I thank her especially, but also all those who were guiding things along behind the scenes. Whatever richness you find in this book, think of them when you appreciate it. I do. Portland, Oregon May 2013 CONTENTS Acknowledgments How to Use This Book PART ONE KNOWING BEER Finding Your Bearings From Gruel-Beer to Black IPA in 10,000 Years How Beer Is Made Tasting Beer Like a Brewer PART TWO ALES Bitters Pale Ales India Pale Ales Mild Ales Brown Ales Porters and Stouts American Ales Barley Wines and Old Ales American Strong Ales: Double or Triple IPAs Scottish Ales Ales of the Rhine: Kölsch and Altbier Belgian Ales Saisons and Rustic Belgian Ales French Ales Abbey and Trappist Ales The Beers of Italy Fresh-Hop Ales Lesser-Known and Emerging Styles Traditional Regional Ales PART THREE WHEAT BEERS German Weizen Belgian Witbier Tart German Wheat Ales: Berliner Weisse and Gose PART FOUR LAGERS Dark Lagers: Dunkel, Schwarzbier, and Czech Tmavé Czech Lagers Pale Lagers: Pilsner, Helles, and Dortmund Export Amber Lagers: Märzen and Vienna Lager Bocks Mass-Market Lagers Lesser-Known Lagers PART FIVE TART AND WILD ALES The Lambic Family The Tart Ales of Flanders Wild Ales PART SIX ENJOYING BEER Serving and Storing Beer Pairing Beer with Food At the Pub Beer Tourism APPENDIXES Glossary Style Origin Maps Hop Varieties at a Glance Bibliography Tours and Interviews Index Credits About the Author HOW TO USE THIS BOOK I N 2001, the wine educator Karen MacNeil published a book called The Wine Bible. A conceptual triumph, it manages to take more than nine hundred pages of information and put it into a form that is instantly understandable by even the layest of laypeople. MacNeil’s steady voice, lyrical and accessible yet authoritative, guides you through the rolling hills of Italy’s Piedmont and the Maipo Valley of Chile. Wine is a drink of place, the grapes that make it defined by the heat of the sun and elements in the earth. MacNeil acts as an expert guide on a world tour. Beer is a little different. It is also a drink of place, but not in the same way. Culture and history exert at least as great an influence as where the barley and hops are grown. Beer types or styles are manifestations of these influences, and act as the organizing principle of The Beer Bible. Mostly. It turns out movement is also the nature of beer styles. Porters jump seas and become stouts; pilsners cross borders and become hellesbiers. Places like the United States, Italy, and France pick up brewing almost from nothing and rebuild it like immigrants do, borrowing this, dumping that, scrambling x and y. Styles mutate and change. Remember that as you read about these styles, and recall that even though we wouldn’t dare to question the legitimacy of Munich’s famous helles beer now, once a pale lager was so radical that the city’s brewers nearly had a civil war over it. Today’s abomination is tomorrow’s treasured tradition. WHERE TO BEGIN Some people who come to this book will be new to beer, perhaps enticed by the burgeoning world of craft beers; others will be old hands who want a little more information about their favorite styles. Whoever you are and whatever your reasons, you’ll thumb around and drop into sections that interest you. The book is designed to be read in pieces; Karen MacNeil had the insight to structure The Wine Bible that way, and I happily followed her lead (though this book is segmented by style, not region). The first part of the book will give you some of the important background to understanding beer, but you might prefer to dip into it elliptically, to backfill as necessary. You may not be compelled to read through descriptions of the strange flavors of beer, for example, until you encounter something unexpected. Or perhaps the history of beer won’t be interesting to you until one afternoon, as you’re sitting behind a pint of abbey ale, you wonder what in the world monks have to do with brewing. If you prioritize any sections of Part One, I recommend “Tasting Beer Like a Brewer,” starting on page 58—that’s where you’ll find the concepts and terms important to the sensory experience of beer that are repeated in nearly every chapter. WORLD BREWING TRADITIONS I’m an American, but this is not a book solely or even centrally about American