Boak and Bailey, Brew Britannia: final thoughts

After all that, what do I think? Would I recommend you get this book?

In two words, Hell, yes! (Other expletives are available, but you get the idea.) Absolutely definitely. Get it now. I haven’t got a huge beer book library – before I acquired this book it consisted mainly of Amber, Gold and Black (Martyn Cornell), Beer and Skittles (Richard Boston) and Pulling a fast one (Red Rog). Brew Britannia fully deserves a place in that company. If you’re only going to buy one book about beer, if I’m being brutally honest it should probably be Amber, Gold and Black, but this one’s not far behind. (Anyway, why would you only buy one book about beer?)

So what’s so good about it? Four main things, I think. I’ll put down my thoughts in the form of a numbered list, a device I’ve recently had great success withused.

1. It tells a story… You know the criticisms I put forward in the previous post? They’re not (for the most part) criticisms, not in the sense that “the book’s too long” is a criticism – they’re disagreements. The authors don’t tell the story I would have told, but why would they? What’s important is that they have got a story to tell, and they follow it through from the first encounter with the Society for the Protection of Beers from the Wood to… well, the final encounter with the Society for the Protection of Beers from the Wood (much later and in a very different world). You know those books you read sometimes – particularly books by bloggers or newspaper columnists – which are basically just a lot of disparate bits pulled together? This isn’t one of those; if anything, it gives the impression that the authors’ blog is just somewhere to put offcuts from the book.
2. …and it tells it well. It rattles along, frankly. One of the things I would have done differently would actually have been to slow it down, brake the narrative and put it on pause for a while in a number of places. But that’s not the way the authors have written it – and the way they wrote it does work. Everyone won’t be equally interested in all the subject matter – personally I started to glaze over a bit somewhere between Belgo and Mash – but there’s always something different round the corner; the book moves along quickly enough that you won’t get bored.
3. The ruthless efficiency of the freelance journalist. Some beer books are like poems, with a blast of green hop suddenly striking the nose as a door opens somewhere and a waft of air carries jaunty fragments of shop talk and banter, familiar yet incomprehensible, while the beer itself slips down casually, almost unnoticed in the golden afternoon haze of sub-clauses and (cont’d p. 94). Some are the record of a personal quest; some are more about the writers than they are about the beer; some are encyclopaedic reference works; some tell you nothing you don’t already know from reading blogs. This isn’t any of those things. As I said earlier on, the authors write like freelance journalists – they’re readable, reliable and above all efficient. If you’ve got to make your writing pay and you don’t know where the next commission’s coming from, you develop a certain way of working. You find out what you don’t know, get the facts and get it down; then you cut it to shape, then you move on. It makes for a good, solid read.
4. The interviews. Saving the best till last – the interviews! Michael Hardman, Graham Lees, Christopher Hutt; David Bruce, Alastair Hook, Brendan Dobbin (Brendan Dobbin!); Stuart Ross, Jeff Rosenmeier, Justin Hawke… With a couple of exceptions (wot no Protzie?) the authors seem to have spoken to everyone who is anyone, who’s still around and has a story to tell. I was really impressed with the range and number of people they’d managed to track down and talk to. Especially Dobbin, obvs.

It’s not a timeless classic; it wouldn’t be my desert island book; it hasn’t changed my life. But it’s a fine book, and if you’re interested in beer (i.e. if you haven’t arrived at this page completely by accident), you should definitely contact the publishers about a review copy, they were really nice about it when I askedbuy a copy with money (here’s a link).

[Personal to RB and JB: OK, guys, that’s your lot – you can come out now. Seriously, I’d be really interested in your reaction to any of these posts.]