Top brewer recommends the beer experience
WHEN it comes to admiring the aroma of beer, rabbits and dogs have the edge over the average member of the Campaign for Real Ale.
They have 100 million and 220 million nasal receptor cells respectively. Your CAMRA man has just six million. But he does have one big advantage. He likes beer and can put it into words.
He might be able to do that even more effectively after consuming Alex and Diane Barlow's All Beer Experience, a users manual on how to identify and describe beer flavours and tastes. At 19.95, it could be your answer to a Fathers Day gift.
"Beer is very much the up and coming thing, particularly in times of recession. People are not splashing out on wines as much," says Alex, aged 43, a master brewer based in Broomhill.
After years of working for breweries – including William Stones' Cannon and Hope & Anchor breweries – he's taken his expertise around the world.
He's recently been brewing in Bosnia and he's no stranger to eastern Europe. Back in the Nineties he was the first English brewer at Starpromen in what was then Czechoslovakia. He's also advised the Abbeydale Brewery.
The All Beer Experience comes in a bag with a guide, recently awarded a silver medal at the Independent Publishing Book Awards in New York, scratch and sniff aroma cards for hops, malt taste sachets and a glass but sadly no beer.
The couple – Diana is a Hallam University business graduate who was a non-beer drinker before she met her husband – decided to publish themselves after being unable to find someone to do what they wanted.
They hope it will give people confidence to go outside their beer comfort zone. "There can be 200 different beers on sale in a supermarket but people will stick to ones they know," says Alex.
The book is a step by step guide to analysing beer by sight, smell, taste and feel (body, carbonation etc).
Alex says in a foreword: "Beer is so much more than a drink, it is a pleasure-giving, thirst-quenching, heart-warming blend of art and alchemy, of passion and precision."
Alex, who has advised the BBC Good Food Show and Ready Steady Cook, has made and drunk a lot of beers in his time but won't be drawn on what he prefers.
"I love all different styles of beers and will have a different favourite depending on the time and what I am eating," he says.
Diane, keen to plug the local angle – the book is illustrated by local artists and city pubs make photographic backdrops – adds: "There are some local ones which are world class beers."
Some hint on Alex's taste is given by his tasting notes which give a top flavour score to Worthington White Shield.
Available at Mooch, Broomhill; Famous Sheffield Shop, Ecclesall Road; Valentine & Whicker, Ecclesall Road South; Country Book Store, Great Longstone, Archer Road Beer Stop and online at www.allbeer.co.uk
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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