Book Review: Evaluating Beer

During Christmas I got a book from my parents called Evaluating Beer. The gift also included some rhyme about how it should help against disgruntled brewers. We'll just have to wait and see if that holds true in the future. ;)

Evaluating Beer

Available at: Humlegården => http://shop.humle.se/se/art/evaluating-beer-238-sidor-1993.php

Price: 169 SEK

Authors: Charlie Papazian, Greg Noonan, George Fix, Jim Koch, Ron Siebel, David Eby, Jean-Xavier Guinard, Ian Robertson, Ted Konis, Raoul Palamand, Grosvenor Merle-Smith, Morten C. Meilgaard and Ilse Shelton.

The book is written by as many as 13 authors, they both have a section each with some jumping in on several sections.

The book takes on quite a sientific approach to beer evaluation, both as a meassure for home brewers but also for industrial testing for the biggest breweries. The book covers both smell, taste and visual evaluation of beers. They also describe how to train your senses into discovering certain aromas. It also follows up with what causes bad flavours in beer and how to fix it.

To give some critique; the main problem is that there are so many authors that bring up the same thing. After a while it feels a bit unstructured and I think they could have shortened the book down by 50-60 pages if they didn't repeat themselfs all the time.

Another downside is that it focuses a bit to much on macro lager testing which isn't very interesting in my oppinion. It also gives an odd view on evaluating beer as it doesn't apply to other beer styles. But thankfully macro lager isn't the only beer style that is covered in the book. Most of the book covers beer in general and applies to homebrewers as well as large industrial breweries.

However all in all this was a very interesting book. It's fairly short and easy to read as the english isn't overly advanced most of the time. I think most beer enthusiast would find this book interesting specially if you regularly rate beer in one way or the other.

Total: 4/5

The next book I'm going to read is Classic Beer Style Series #7 - German Wheat Beer. We plan to brew a wheat beer in the middle of may and apparently I'm assigned to be brew-leader. So I better read up ;)