The Beer Bible Released Ten Years Ago Today

My photoshopped image of the Mona Lisa popped on Facebook last week, reminding me that The Beer Bible was officially published ten years ago today. It was a big deal in my life, but it also marks a wild time frame in the history of brewing. If you’ll indulge me a bit, I’d like to meditate for a moment on the personal and professional as I glance back in time.

The thing most of us probably remember is that 2015 was about when the hazies arrived. That was one of the biggest stories in the entire craft era, and the style would dominate the decade. In brewing terms, they were a symbol of the trends that came together in that moment, when hoppy American ales began to deemphasize bitterness and amp the juice. The IPAs of the day were so hot that breweries had lines running out their doors of people waiting to pay $20 a four-pack (which was a lot then!). Ten years ago, beer was entering the center of the cultural zeitgeist, and, momentarily, surfaced as something more than a niche trend. It turns out it wasn’t a terrible time to have a 230,000-word reference guide hit the market.

Although big breweries had been buying small ones for a few years, 2015 was also the Year of the Sale (TM). The year started with AB InBev buying Elysian and immediately slagging them off in a Super Bowl ad. They would make four more purchases that year. But the biggies were Heineken’s half-billion dollar investment into Laugunitas, and Constellation’s astonishing billion-dollar bet on Ballast Point. All of those purchases and the glam craft beer was generating suggested IPAs might soon be supplanting mass market lagers—or at least act as viable competitors. In retrospect, 2015 was less the debut of small beer’s power than the peak before its fall—which is a lot easier to see in retrospect than it was at the time.

American beer fans know this history very well, and I think they would endorse my two-paragraph recap as capturing the main trends of the era. My own experience with the past decade is somewhat different, if no less bittersweet. I started writing The Beer Bible in 2011 and turned in the manuscript in the spring of 2013. (Workman publishing, now owned by Hachette, lost their founder during this period and apparently fell apart internally—which was not awesome for me. The book should have come out at least a year earlier.) It was the hardest work I ever did, and the most professionally rewarding thing I’ll ever do. Writing that book was an immense education for me. And as I look back, what I see is how much of that education happened outside the United States.

In the four years I was writing and waiting for the book to be published, Americans were fascinated by foreign beer. Belgium was the most seductive, but people were starting to get their lager on, so Germany and Czechia were attracting attention as well. It was a period of expanding consciousness and discovery. I was not the first writer to tromp around Europe to see the great breweries (or thousandth), but I don’t think very many people have ever toured so many in such a compact time frame. A decade ago, Americans were very interested in European brewing traditions, and they soaked up the info I brought back. It was a glorious confluence of interest in the very thing I was doing at the time.

In a few years we entered an age of insularity I don’t think we’ll ever exit. It’s not surprising—in fact, I long predicted it—and it’s actually a good thing. When a country starts developing its own unique ingredients and weird ways of brewing, it is in the process of developing a national tradition. The project to breed American aroma hops, and our breweries’ decade-long effort to figure out ways to use them in our unique hoppy ales (and the subsequent development of hop products, terpene extracts, theorized yeast and all the rest) was a manifestation of our maturing beer culture.

Because, while it’s true that “craft brewing” long ago plateaued in the US in production numbers, its cultural force has continued to grow. Today everyone knows what an IPA is, at least in general category. And that cultural force has more or less vanquished interest in foreign beer. Americans drinkers are still fairly open-minded with regard to style. They’ll happily try a Czech-style amber lager. But their interest in actual Czech amber lagers is mostly gone. A decade ago, a meet-up among beer nerds wouldn’t have been complete until someone pulled out a bottle of Cantillon or Westvleteren. Now I’m not sure how many beer nerds would even recognize those breweries. (Though they would have all seen bottles of “spon” beer and Belgian-style strong dark ales.)

I wouldn’t trade this rising interest in American beer for anything. I’ve been writing about beer for almost thirty years, and most of that time, local breweries were little more than a curiosity. I feel very fortunate to have been present at the moment the United States developed its own tradition of brewing. In historical terms, very few people are lucky enough to see history being born. And yet, and yet. A decade after my big book landed with a satisfying thump on bookshelves, I so wish more people cared about those wonderful places I visited, and all that I learned when I walked through their wondrous old breweries.

If you would like to buy the book, the second edition is still available and in print. It does help support my writing life, and I think you’ll like it. (1100 ratings on Amazon, and nothing below three stars!) Despite the name, it’s full of a lot of excellent, advanced information on the history and craft of beer. It might even spark a little interest in those old breweries. Happy anniversary to me!

PS. They say that the older you get, the faster time moves. That has not been my experience! When I saw the Facebook memory with this news, I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that it could only have been a decade. But they also haven’t lived through a pandemic and two Trump terms, so what do they know?