About the Book

Jonny Garrett, cofounder of the YouTube sensation Craft Beer Channel, travels in search of the deeper cultural impact of brewing—how it has become one of the world’s most important inventions and shaped our lives for millennia.

What’s the oldest and most consumed alcoholic beverage on earth? Beer, of course. And it might just be one of our more important inventions.

Since its creation thirteen thousand years ago, our love of beer has shaped everything from religious ceremonies to advertising, and architecture to bioengineering. The people who built the pyramids were paid in ale; the first fridge was built for beer, not food; bacteria was discovered while investigating sour beer; Germany’s beer halls hosted Hitler’s rise to power; and brewer’s yeast may yet be the answer to climate change.

In The Meaning of Beer, award-winning beer writer Jonny Garrett tells the stories of these incredible human moments and inventions, taking readers to some of the best-known beer destinations in the world—Munich and Oktoberfest, Carlsberg Brewery’s historic laboratory, St. Louis and the home of Budweiser—as well as those lesser known, from a five-thousand-year-old brewery in the Egyptian desert to Arctic Svalbard, home to the world’s most northerly pub.

Ultimately, this is not a book about how we made beer, but how beer made us.

Critical Praise

Praise for The Meaning of Beer
 
“Tantalizing, enlightening and the best reason to raise another glass of beer." —Olly Smith, award winning wine expert, columnist and author
 
“Garrett shares his huge knowledge about beer and its history with joyful enthusiasm and wit. This book will make you laugh, it will make you smarter and it will make you want to drink more beer.”—Ned Palmer, bestselling author of A Cheesemonger's History of the British Isles
 
“Annoyingly good. Jonny Garrett succeeds in doing what all good beer writers should: taking a subject that can seem geeky at times and making it compelling to the general reader."— Pete Brown, bestselling author of Man Walks into a Pub
 
“As fascinating as it is funny, The Meaning of Beer is full of revelations about beer’s vital role in the world.”— Robbie Knox, presenter of the JaackMaate Podcast & Soccer AM
 
“This is one of the most important books ever written about beer.”— Mark Dredge, TV presenter and author of A Brief History of Lager
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Product Details

• ISBN: 9781335230836
• ISBN 10: 1335230831
• Imprint: Hanover Square Press
• On Sale: 11/26/2024
• Pages: 320
• List Price:41.00 CAD
• BISAC1 : COOKING / Beverages / Beer
• BISAC2 : COOKING / History
• BISAC3 : COOKING / Beverages / General

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