Small beer
Alan Brien
Beer and Skittles Richard Boston (Collins £3.50)
Warning us of some of the miseries likely to counterbalance the splendours of pub-life, Richard Boston notes: Recent years have seen the emergence of a new breed, the beer bore . . . It is not their enthusiasm for real beer that is objectionable. On the contrary, it is admirable. It is rather that they are interested in, and can talk about, nothing else but beer and carbon dioxide ...
Guardian readers over the last three years. faced with a weekly Saturday column. 'Boston on Beer', may sometimes have fancied the author of this authoritative, information-packed book was himself occasionally in danger of a bronze in the Small Bore Olympics.
One of the warning signs of the bore is unconscious repetition. Beer and Skittles partly recycles some of these old columns. and the sediment returns from time to time, topping up the barrel. We are told that gYPsum in the Burton-on-Trent water is ideal for pale ales, while London water was better suited for stouts, and porters on page thirtYfour, and on page fifty-three, and again on page sixty.
Mr Boston decorates the story of beer through the ages with occasional foray into social history of which such remarks as 'The seventeenth century was an age of song; the eighteenth was one of drink' are not untypical. And surely the record' breaking beer bore can rarely have overtopped his passage on being taught to drink Guinness by a master-brewer ("It was rather like being taken round Chartres Cathedral by Kenneth Clark') with the 'infinite darkness' at the bottom ("Black is beautiful ), 'the tumult of ascending and descending bubbles' and 'the phenomenon of surge'. Nevertheless, this is a splendid and potent work with which to out-bore any beer bore with great incidental pleasure to yourself. The triumph of the real-beer drinker over,. the purveyors of maltade; the renaissance °I the small local brewers whose beer is not only better but cheaper; and especially Boston's waspish impalement of LollVaizey, an economist called in to put his, principles into practice on the future. 0' brewing and getting almost all possible options wrong, are lively and cheerful reading even for those who never touch the stuff. As Mr Boston says, the message is: 'Y°u can stand in the way of progress'. Where.' what and how to drink beer; how to cook. with it (excellent recipes); games to play ana roles to adopt ; if you want a book on beer' this is it.
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