topics: |  food | drink | beer | history

This book balances well the dryness of history and the passion of a
beer-lover.  It is concerned with the history of beer brewing, but also the
cultural aspects, and especially tries to find some reasons why it has come
to be considered as socially inferior to wine.

However, there is a strong European tone running through the book and
I fail to see the need for an "European" perspective on this history.

The first stated objective is to establish a separate origin for beer
within Europe:

	It is my intention to show here that [beer brewing] was already
	formulated before AD 1000, and not in Egypt or Mesopotamia, but quite
	independently in Europe. p.1

Next is the intention of arguing for a distinctiveness for European beer:

	As I will argue in this book, though the earliest remains or literary
	attestations of beer come from outside Europe, it is in Europe that
	beer as we know it today originated, namely a brewed malt beverage
	made with hops.   Indeed both the technique of brewing beer and that
	of adding hops to beer are arguably purely European innovations... p.3

I am not sure we need a geo-cultural history of anything as universal as
beer (or for that matter, heliocentricity, or the decimal sysytem).  What we
need is an universal history.  And any effort otherwise is clearly biased.
And will someone tell me what "purely European" might mean?

"Europe", in my view is not a sufficiently separated landmass, nor is it a
sufficiently separated in a cultural sense.  What we know as Europe today is
an invention of the Enlightenment era, which saw a tremendous denigration of
other races and an enhancement of European achievements (e.g. in the work of
Comte de Buffon, see, e.g. Jack Weatherford's
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
or
the inheritor of the Greek mantle (which was largely Turkish and Egyptian
anyway),

The book provides a good overview of beer in Roman and Greek times,
and particularly the Grek prejudice towards beer (the actual account details
the Greek opposition to Dionysius, which may have also included wine
drinking).  Later writers looked down on drinkers of "brutos" of barley wine,
which was most likely beer.  Subsequently, the book claims that beer
disappeared from "Europe" but nonetheless, these prejudices influence modern
thinking (possibly through Arabic translations, perhaps)?

A good chapter on the monastic culture of brewing, with particular emphasis
on the Scottish monasteries.

He may be wrong in associating the Celts with the decline of beer in medieval
Europe.  In Ian Hornsey's far more detailed (and global)
History of Beer and Brewing, Spencer argues
that it may have been the Celts who first brought beer to Europe, and traces
its development in Britain and elsewhere well before the monasteries began to
take interest.  For understanding the history of beer as well, that may be a
better read.