I have not yet gotten on to the great reviewing list out there even if I am on the great beer news PR consultant list. That’s OK as I pretty much like most beer books that are put before me including this one.
Travels With Barley: A Journey Through Beer Culture In America, published in 2004, intregued me as soon as I saw the title. When I created the half-begun and definitely past deadline Journal of Culture and Brewing, ISSN 1715-7811, I had an idea that there was something in and around beer that had not really discussed much, something that I encountered in relation to baseball through the Cooperstown Symposium which looks at baseball as a cultural event and not just a sport. The call for papers for the 2006 Symposium stated:
Proposals for papers are invited from all disciplines and on all topics. For the 2006 symposium, preference will be given to those submissions which focus on the relationship of baseball to the African-American and other minority communities. Papers on baseball as baseball are not encouraged. Submission is by abstract only. Abstracts should be narrative, limited to three type-written pages and a one page vitae…
So what would a study of beer not for beer’s sake look like? For author Ken Wells that means hunting for the best beer joint in America following the track of the Mississippi river from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Wells is a Wall Street Journal writer and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, according to the dust sleeve, and his writing style shows it. A good read. Light but substantive.
I am only fifty pages in but, hey, I’m the guy who wrote the paper on the six discourses of Descartes after finishing the third one…it was Friday afternoon, what do you expect? So far I am liking this book. I don’t know if it will come to any conclusions about beer and culture on the big river and maybe that is OK. What I like is it is not an atlas, not a history and not a style guide. It is a travel with beer that takes beer serious as a travel mate. I will give more notes as I work through it.
[Original comments…]
Alan – March 5, 2006 7:39 PM
I am about half way through now and find the structure of the book very interesting. Every second chapter is about the travel down the Mississippi and is a road book with bar room conversations interspersed with local history. The alternate chapters are sidebars into beer’s history, a meeting of beer wholesalers and conversations with the guy behind Dogfish Head beer. Still liking it and recommend it more highly. Somewhile back, beer writer Martyn Cornell did me the honour of explaining some of the background issues that go into writing a beer book and I am thinking that Travels With Barley is succeeding with me in the same way – it is not only a book about beer but a book about a particular experience in relation to beer. In Martyn’s book it was pure history, whereas Travels With Barley is something of an examination of the personal relationship thought the medium of travel.
dranktank – March 7, 2006 12:47 PM
http://www.dranktank.com
I ran across your blog looking for reviews of this book. I’ve ordered it and expect to get it this week. Looks like a good one.
Alan – March 7, 2006 1:03 PM
I am about 30 pages from the end. I think this book through its structure provides an enertaining and interesting way of entering many aspects of the culture of beer in America. Hopefully you will enjoy it, too, DT – drop a note when you are reading it.
Donavan Hall – July 5, 2006 2:39 PM
http://beer.donavanhall.net/
Alan- I’ve been attempting this book for a couple of months, but it’s only just now grabbed me. The opening two chapters just didn’t capture my attention and I put the book down and kept finding other books I wanted to read more, but over the long holiday weekend I settled onto the couch and pushed through about a hundred and eighty pages. Now I can’t wait to get back to it and finish it. What is remarkable about Wells’s perspective is that he writes like an anthropologist examining all of beer culture in America. As a craft beer guy, I am so steeped in the craft beer culture, I know very little about the larger beer culture out there that genuinely loves American Light Lager. I admit that the places that Wells seeks out would not be high on my list of beer joints because for me the quality of the beer is everything; but I find myself now questioning my prejudices. All of the more interesting and colorful episodes in my beer travels involve people—what they say, what they do—, not beer. I’ll write up a Long Island beer culture piece ala Wells and see how you and the other Good Beer Blog regulars like it.
Alan – July 5, 2006 3:24 PM
The odd thing for me, Donavan, is that beer plays a huge part in the economy and culture of North America and this is the only book I have come across like, as you say, an anthropologist’s view. I was quite pleased with it once I got into it, too.
That is a good idea – you share your own findings as well and I will see what I can come across.