He’s quite opinionated, but clearly very passionate, an interested in historical beers. There’s been some collaboration with Kris England. I haven’t read the book, but my guess is that it will be an interesting read, but not necessarily the last word on the topic. My feeling is that the books, self-published as they are via lulu, are all way too expensive.
By the way, I have had some great personal email exchanges with him. His blog is great, but there is a bit of information overload, so a lot of the good bits (including his scathing rants and brilliant sarcastic wit) get a little lost in the sheer mass of it all.
I have glanced over the book and read a little so far.
This is not a book that will teach you about contemporary decoction science or decoction schedules like you find in Greg Noonan’s New Brewing Lager beer or on my site. It is a book that delves into historic data and accounts about historic brewing in Germany and Great Britan. Similar to what I did in my Historic brewing article but much more extensively. There are lots of tables (in various colors which annoys me) in this book comparing different beers. It’s more of a collection of historic brewing accounts and I’ll have to see how much digestion of this data the author actually does.
I don’t think it is a waste of $7 but not quite what I expected. It would have been useful for the author to release at least the table of contents and the foreword. Maybe even some excerpts. But since I do respect his copyright I won’t do that here.
I read a few more pages today and I think I’m done reading now.
The book is basically a collection of a lot of excerpts from historic brewing texts thrown together rather loosely. It’s basically a print-out of his blog. And as a result it is rather boring. What the author lacks is the ability of a good historian to present a compelling and interesting story about brewing in Europe during the 19th century. This task is left to the reader who is unlikely willing to do that. In contrast I love Maureen Ogle’s book Ambitous Brew. This was history book I was not able to put down.
My conclusion is that unless you are interested in some of the data and texts that are usually only available as German originals on Google Books don’t buy this book You’ll be greatly disappointed The rather inviting title is sure to come up in many Google searches.