The Lager Queen of Minnesota

The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal 353 pages

"Two sisters, one farm. A family is split when their father leaves their shared inheritance entirely to Helen, his younger daughter. Despite baking award-winning pies at the local nursing home, her older sister, Edith, struggles to make what most people would call a living. So she can't help wondering what her life would have been like with even a portion of the farm money her sister kept for herself.

With the proceeds from the farm, Helen builds one of the most successful light breweries in the country, and makes their company motto ubiquitous: "Drink lots. It's Blotz." Where Edith has a heart as big as Minnesota, Helen's is as rigid as a steel keg. Yet one day, Helen will find she needs some help herself, and she could find a potential savior close to home. . . if it's not too late.

Meanwhile, Edith's granddaughter, Diana, grows up knowing that the real world requires a tougher constitution than her grandmother possesses. She earns a shot at learning the IPA business from the ground up--will that change their fortunes forever, and perhaps reunite her splintered family?" Summary courtesy of Goodreads

I really liked this book. I enjoyed that the pacing was even and that the characters were realistic and felt like you could know them in real life. The characters are flawed, and I found the one sister to be pretty unlikeable (which made her realistic), and I enjoyed that there were factual details about beer and beer-making woven into the story. I also liked that the story was about women who were very involved in beer-making, especially since throughout history, you don't read about many women in brewing (although today, quite a few women are involved in this industry and craft).  

Four Men

The Four Men: A Farrago by Hilaire Belloc, 149 pages

This is Belloc's tale, or rather tales within a tale, of a man called Myself and his companions, whom he nicknames Grizzlebeard, the Sailor, and the Poet, as they wander the beloved countryside of their home county of Sussex, which we are assured was "the first place to be created when the world was made" and will be "the last to remain, regal and at ease when all the rest is very miserably perishing on the Day of Judgement by a horrible great rain of fire from Heaven."  The four men (who, needless to say, are all variations on the author) pass their time speaking or, just as often, singing sound nonsense and enchanting sense, including the stories of how St Dunstan led the devil about by the nose and how Mr Justice Honeybubble delivered his famous Opinion at the Cricketers' Arms.

We Make Beer

We Make Beer: Inside the Spirit and Artistry of America's Craft Brewers by Sean Lewis, 27 out of 213 pages

The flap copy refers to this book as "an intensive study of beer brewing and...a nation-spanning journey into the heart--and art-- of American beer making." Lewis theoretically looks at different craft brewers across the country and discovers the true soul of craft breweries, the camaraderie, the ethos, the passion behind the requisite beards of brewmasters.

It's a great topic, but Lewis' snobby writing style, mixed with subpar editing, make this nearly unreadable. In the introduction, Lewis goes out of his way to talk down to his readers, defining things that anyone interested enough in craft beer to pick up the book will already know (it doesn't take a brewmaster to know that the foam on top of the draft beer is called the head); he also offers pronunciations that are really uncalled-for (like how to say "wort"). Then four pages later, he's waxing poetic about the "brilliant but delicate" hop profile of a beer, noting that "all it's floral wonders could easily be overshadowed by a hint of sour apple notes from wild yeast or any number of the myriad off flavors that can develop if fermentation temperatures are allowed to vary beyond the yeast's comfort zone." Are we rubes or fellow beer snobs, Mr. Lewis? Cuz you can't have it both ways. I won't even start on the rambling quotes that he includes (it is OK to edit out repetition in quotes, sir) or the flagrant overuse of that vaguest of vague words, "unique."


I really really really wanted to like this book. I flipped through the book and found several breweries I wanted to learn more about, and I considered continuing on, but I thought it safer for the book and my blood pressure to stop. As they say, you don't have to eat the whole apple to know that it's bad.

So avoid this book. Instead, read The Audacity of Hops by Tom Acitelli, which gives a comprehensive history of craft beer and most of the major players in the industry (well, except for those in St. Louis, which is an egregious error, though perhaps not to someone who lives elsewhere).

Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer

Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer

by William Knoedelseder, 416 pgs.

Knoedelseder tells the history of the Anheuser-Busch family, and the scandal that follows five generations of the “kings of beer”.  Formerly an investigative reporter, Knoedelseder is very good at weaving a story that is both fascinating and informative -- an impressive feat for such a dense collection of historical accounts.   When you boil their story down, the A-B family is not so different from the rest of us.  They just have more money, guns, and exotic animals.