Cheers to Beer!

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If you think that beer is low brow and does not deserve to exist in the same sphere as gourmands, go tell that to the Oxford University Press!

This highly esteemed academic publisher, the smarty-pants folks behind the Oxford Latin Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, also know a little something about fine food and drink. To brush up on your culinary facts, consult their Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford Companion to Wine, and the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. (Six years ago they were planning to compile the Oxford Companion to Cheese, for which I wrote six entries, but--alas--it looks like it’s never coming out. You’ll just have to come to the Sickles cheese department to get your fromage facts!)

With their recent publication of the Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, this historic fermented beverage is finally getting the credit it deserves. There are over 900 pages in this encyclopedic tome to convince you that beer is something worth thinking about, as well as drinking. You’ll learn that it’s the third most popular beverage in the world after water and tea and its production predates the baking of bread.

Despite these credentials, an unfair perception of beer persists that it comes in only one style, the one that’s easy to drink at barbeque's (when those days return!), baseball games (those days are fast disappearing!), or on the sofa while watching football on Sundays and Mondays (lots of those days ahead!).

There is much to discover about beer. One hundred and seven distinct styles are covered in the Companion, ranging from abbey beer to ale, from dubbel to sour beer. That will keep your taste buds dancing. There are rich regional and seasonal differences, too. There is no reason, then, to keep picking up the same six-pack from your liquor store or to eschew beer because it’s one dimensional.

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Each style of beer, like wine, requires a different glass shape (but you certainly don’t have to, if you don’t want). Think beyond pint and pilsner glasses and steins and envision heavy goblets for heavy, Belgian ales. I first cued into the variations of beer glasses during a talk about the science of beer at the New York Academy of Science, by Professor Charles Bamforth, a small but enthusiastic English man who is the token beer guy at University of California-Davis, renown for its  esteemed wine program. He told a story about visiting a colleague in Belgium, a premiere beer country, who had a different glass for each style of beer, right in his own house. Beer is indeed a complex beverage, full of wide-ranging flavors.

Also enticing is that, like the cheese, there are a lot of exciting things going on in the beer world, as folks reclaim it from the insipid, homogenized industrial model. Craft beers, as the ones conscientiously produced by small breweries are called, are making such headway into the market that, according to Eric Asimov of the New York Times, sales of the mass-produced swill are stagnant and even on the decline. As an example, there’s the very local Carton Brewing in my hometown of Atlantic Highlands and the Twin Light Taphouse in nearby Highlands that is a showcase for local beers along the East Coast. There, you encounter passionate people but no snobbery, even if there’s the Oxford Companion to Beer lying about.

Enjoy beer!

Cheers!

Diana Pittet the beer-swilling cheesemonger