San Francisco

Style: IPA

ABV: 7.6

Review: The color of the beer pairs nicely with the toasty, toffee nose. Has a very earthy, spiciness in the nose and a pleasant citrus hop. With a medium to light mouth feel, the hops support the malt, although the malt leads on the nose. This beer has a toasted, nutty flavor, with a strong lemon accent.

Frederick, MD

Style: Belgian-style dark ale

ABV: 10

Review: The nose has prune and molasses as well as vanilla and dates. The color is a beautiful amber brown. Very highly carbonated, with a little fig in the taste, finishing with a hint of heat.  St. Eadman is sweet, with a dried fruit taste. We recommend letting it warm up a little to get some of the carbonation out.

Bedford Park, IL

Style: Latin-style Witbier

ABV: 4.3

Review: Light and hazy in color, with a strong scent of passion fruit on the nose. Very tart and exotic in flavor, but also creamy and refreshing.  The citrus, lime, and tart flavors would go really well with big bowls of stuffed dishes. Other great food pairings include fish tacos, spicy chicken, grilled shrimp and other types of spicy food.

Escondido, CA

Style: Barley wine

ABV: 11.6

Staff Review: Every other year Stone breaks out their odd-year release. This one is a twist on their famed Old Guardian Barley Wine. The nose smells almost like mom’s breakfast, bacon and brown sugar. Right away we can tell that the hop bitterness is competing with the smoky malts.  As the hops try to give way the smoke takes over. This beer is a more of a tug of war with two very distinct flavors.  Lay this one down for a year or so and drink again when the hops mellow out.

Frederick, MD

Style: Imperial IPA

ABV: 10

Staff Review: This beer pours a dark gold color, slightly lighter than most Imperial IPAs, however. The nose is very bright with lemon and grapefruit. Upon first sip, you get a slightly bready and grainy flavor. The hops hit intensely right away with the same citrus notes in the nose. This big boy finishes with some heat and huge bitterness that hangs on.

Juneau, Alaska

Style: Kölsch

ABV: 5.3

Staff Review: Straw color, slightly herbal and fruity nose. Taste is slight biscuity malt with hints of pear up front. The mid-palate is slightly dry with some hint of herbal hoppiness. This thirst quencher finishes mildly dry and slightly fruity, as you would expect for a perfectly crafted, balanced Kölsch style. We’ll have another, please!

Thanks to Tom Acitelli, I can scratch number three off that list. He’s done the job and with verve, common sense and the requisite butt-in-the-chair hard work. (That last cannot be underestimated. Here’s an insider secret about books: Each one represents thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours of work on the part of the author.)

Acitelli, a journalist, brought three valuable tools to his project: a reporter’s nose for story, a writer’s ear for pitch-perfect prose, and a historian’s mania for accuracy and context. As impressive, he hacked his own path through the terrain. Rather than rely on the work of other writers, Acitelli started from scratch. He interviewed dozens of people (in most cases drawing from them details that, thus far, no other historian of beer has extracted, presumably because the right questions had not been asked). He tracked down people no one else had thought to talk to. He scoured newspapers, trade papers, magazines and websites. (His documentation of that last is extraordinary: It’s easy to forget how much the visual and technical structure of our online world has changed in 15 years. He reminds us.) As a result, The Audacity of Hops is rich with small but telling details on which historians rely—details that, when stitched together, weave a tapestry that tells us humans who we are and how and why we do what we do, details that make, in other words, what we call “history.”

As important, however, Acitelli pitched his authorial tent outside the craft beer bubble. That outsider’s perch allowed him to fold craft beer’s history into a larger national (and even international) context, and his story is better for it. He recounts the impact of the short-lived but powerful media role played by “yuppies” in the 1980s. The big “shake-out” of the 1990s gets full treatment, but he lays it out against the backdrop of that decade’s startup/dot-com culture, which inhaled every last jot of investment dollars, leaving little for nondigital entrepreneurs and thus stalling craft brewing’s momentum. He details what it’s easy to overlook (because we’re so surrounded by it now): the way in which digital media (a byproduct of the ’90s tech boom) altered craft brewing’s course, pushing it beyond its early infrastructure of Boulder-driven conferences and festivals into a larger arena. The result is a rich, fully fleshed history of the people and ideas that drove (and still drive) the creation of the American craft brewing industry.

If there’s a flaw, it’s the one that haunts every writer who breaks new research ground: the urge (OK, more like a mania) to record and thus preserve every last bit of who-what-where. As a result, at times the book is a bit too inside-baseballish. Make no mistake: As a historian, I stand with Acitelli in erring on the side of excess. His careful work has preserved what might otherwise have been lost: names, dates, crucial connections between and among the founders and the succeeding generations who built the industry.

And, too, while Acitelli gives the dons of beer writing, Michael Jackson and Fred Eckhardt, their due, there are others who’ve slogged in the trenches nearly as long. I would have liked more about them and the way in which, over the years, they, too, helped invent beer writing and not only spread the craft beer gospel but shaped its content, too.

But those are quibbles. Acitelli’s book is a first-rate piece of front-line history, and this is the book that craft beer fans have been waiting for. If you run into Acitelli somewhere, buy the guy a beer. He deserves it. (Hey! There’s a project for collaborative- and theme-crazed craft brewers: Acitelli Ale, anyone? Audacity Amber? Hopped History?)

Ask those who started brewing their own beer at home back in the early ’90s who their go-to source of technical information was, and it’s likely they’ll point to Dave Miller. It was Dave Miller’s Homebrewing Guide that went on to become one of the most influential books on homebrewing ever published.

In the 20 years since writing his seminal work, Miller made the jump to professional brewing: first as brewmaster at the St. Louis Brewery, then at Blackstone Restaurant and Brewery in Nashville, TN. Along the way, his beers were frequently recognized in prestigious competitions such as the Great American Beer Festival (nine awards) and the World Beer Cup (five awards).

In his latest work, Brew Like a Pro, Dave returns to his roots with another book that is destined to inspire a generation of at-home brewers who yearn to follow in his footsteps. Dave’s professional insights and acumen, coupled with his homebrewer’s practicality, make brewing like a pro a very attainable goal for his readers.

This book is not particularly dense at 272 pages, but it packs a lot of good information into every chapter. Best of all, that information is presented in clear, concise and easy-to-digest language. Even in the most technical of passages, Miller breaks down the weighty details into simple explanations.

Looking over the table of contents, there’s an obvious path for the reader to follow. Miller’s plan is to draw on the similarities between brewing professionally at a small-scale commercial brewery and brewing at home for fun.

After a perfunctory review of the beer-making processes at the homebrewing level, Miller transitions in the next chapter to an insider’s view of a pub brewery. Here he does a walk-through of the equipment and components found at typical small brewery and how they function in the beer-making process. From there, he devotes the largest chapter in the book to providing detailed options for building a similar, but smaller, brewery in one’s home.

Add three more chapters on brewing materials (ingredients), homebrewing operations and advanced techniques, and you’re on your way to homebrewing heaven. Throw in “A Handful of Recipes” for a dozen standard beer styles, and you’re good to go.

Of greatest interest to the brewing nerds out there is the chapter on “Projects” for do-it-yourselfers. These six projects include making a lauter tun and hot liquor back, a two-stage heat exchanger and a pump speed control, among others.

All of this information is aided by a smattering of graphs and sidebars, and a lot of nicely rendered line drawings (although I found their faux sepia color a bit unusual). The one and only photo in the book is of the author in his early commercial brewing days.

In first looking this book over, I got only five pages in before concluding that I was going to like the remaining 267. It took only his explanation of why, when getting back into homebrewing after so many years away from the hobby, he didn’t want to just buy a complete pre-made brew system. Miller writes:

“I wanted to do something different. I’ve always had a minimalist streak, which I suppose is a euphemism for being cheap. I blanch at the prices of these ‘ready-to-brew systems.’ I wanted to demonstrate, first of all to myself, that you don’t need all that to make first-class beer.”

I think that pretty neatly sums up Miller’s homebrewing philosophy as well as one of the guiding objectives of his new book. Check it out.

Seattle, WA

Refreshing and complex. The high fermentation temperature used with the Belgian yeast strain allows it to add its unique characteristics to the flavor without the addition of spices.

ABV: 6.3

ABW: 4.9

COLOR: 7.3

BITTERNESS: 20

ORIGINAL GRAVITY: 1056

AVAILABLE: WA

Ertvelde, Belgium

[Imported by Global Beer Network, Middleton, MA]

The beer has an amber red color, has a round and spicy taste with full fruit candy like flavor, offset by a dry hoppy-ness.

ABV: 7.0

ABW: 8.8

COLOR: 22

BITTERNESS: 20

ORIGINAL GRAVITY: 1065

AVAILABILITY: AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, HI, ID, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MS, MO, MT, NE, NV, NH, NJ, NM, NY, NC, ND, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, WV, WI, WY