One of the really nice things about having a column with a big circulation is that people send you things to review. Sometimes, it’s not even beer.

At one point about a month ago, three books cropped up. One of those was Pete Brown’s Shakespeare’s Local, referred to here by its proper name as the transatlantic marketing efforts take away from the character of the thing. “I know,” said some crackerjack in the marketing department on a Friday just after a lengthy lunch, “we’ll call it Shakespeare’s Pub. That’s what people in America call pubs right? They have pubs there, surely? What’s that Bob? Bars? That’s not quite as homey.” This neglects the fact that Pete Brown is a deeply British man and that reading his prose you wouldn’t mistake him for anything else. There’s a lengthy digression on authenticity and the Sugababes, for God’s sake.

They have those in America, right?

Anyway, that’s a very good book (BUY THE BOOK!), but I’m here today to review two other books which I have been sent.

A YEAR IN FOOD AND BEER

This is a book by Emily Baime and Darin Michaels who run Community Tap and Table in Sacramento, California. The idea here is a good one, and it focuses on providing recipes that fit into the four seasons of the year and take advantage of the beer traditions those seasons represent while managing to fit in seasonal ingredients where obligatory.

There are some very good ideas in A Year In Food And Beer including a very clever treatment of crabs in the spring section (I agree with them here that you want the pairing to take the sauces into account and for that reason they’ve provided three sauces and three beer pairings.) I quite like the look of the Mango Caprese in the Summer section and may try that at home at some point. Fall has a tempting Pork Loin with Celery Leaf and Green Peppercorn Cream recipe that I think is a very good idea. There are also sections on Cheese and Chocolate that present cogent explanations of the information that you need in order to pair them properly.

It’s a very good attempt, but it has to be said, if you approach it with a critical eye rather than from the traditional blogger as cheerleader role, that there are some problems inherent here that have mostly to do with regionalism.

One of the reasons I couldn’t have reviewed this book for Sun Media is that it is specific to the experiences of Emily and Darin. From the small amount of interaction that I’ve had with them, I can tell you that they’re competent and enthusiastic. However, they are from Sacramento.

One of the things Garrett Oliver gets exactly right in The Brewmaster’s Table is to focus on classic examples of styles. He waxes rhapsodic about Saison Dupont. This may have been because that book is nearly a decade old at this point and there simply wasn’t the selection of American Craft Beer at the time that there is now. Some of the selections in this book would be pretty hard to find outside of California. In much of Canada, they simply don’t exist: Lost Coast, Russian River, Ballast Point, The Bruery. World class beers all, but not available for purchase.

Also, I think that the difference in climate results in an odd conceptual translation of a winter menu to something comprising comfort foods. I imagine there’s always fresh produce in California. In Ontario, if it’s February, we got turnips.

It’s a good book to purchase if you’re really into the beer and food pairing idea and you’re able to lay hands on some interesting American beer. If you’re in Alberta, this might work out better than it does in Ontario. It is also a good book to purchase if you enjoy chapter spanning metaphors featuring an orchestral jazz saxophonist. On the whole, it’s a good effort even if it sacrifices some authoritativeness for regional applicability. 

CRAFT BEER REVOLUTION: THE INSIDER’S GUIDE TO BC BREWERIES.

Written by Joe Wiebe, who writes under the pseudonym of the Thirsty Writer for various publications, this is an attempt to chronicle a specific period in the development of British Columbia’s craft beer scene. Typically, when you get a book like this that catalogues all of the breweries in a geographical region, you get a pretty bare bones sort of approach to the subject as a result of the temporal constraint. You want to get everybody in the book, and that means even the newest members of the scene. If a brewery opens a month before your comprehensive guide is released, that sucker had better be in there.

Having written a book and having some understanding of deadlines, this would be pretty hard to do. In fact, writing a guide of this sort is becoming more or less impossible due to the scale of the industry and how quickly it is growing. There was a week in Ontario this summer where three breweries opened. Imagine submitting your book the week before that happened. Immediate obsolescence is a bummer.

Joe has gotten around this by listing five breweries that are slated to open, guaranteeing that this book will not be out of date until 2014. Clever boy.

That said, this is not merely a guide to the breweries as they stand. It doesn’t rank them; it appreciates their better qualities. More importantly, perhaps, is the reason that this approach has been taken. Wiebsy has been around the craft beer industry in B.C. for quite a while and has known the majority of these people for a while. His writing conveys a sense of not only why each brewery is important, but why they’re important to him. I suspect that he more or less effortlessly has a sense of everything that’s going on in the B.C. scene.  This is a fine quality to have in a tour guide.

He’s also managed to surreptitiously work a nuanced history of craft beer in B.C. into the brewery listings. You get a really good picture of the scene and how it evolved from John Mitchell to Gary Lohin and of all of the interceding steps. He charts the migration of brewers around the scene and the fall of once popular breweries. He treats the entirety of the subject with respect, which is nice to see.

Whether you’re looking for a simple guide to the best place to get a pint in Vancouver or Victoria or an in depth history (without really realizing that you’re getting one), you’re going to want a copy of Craft Beer Revolution. Joe has managed to do as well as one could possibly do with the format while maintaining a personal, peripatetic kind of feel.

They sent me coasters with the book. That was a nice touch.