A round-the-world tour for beer fans
Without much risk of spilling the glasses of brew at their sides, craft beer aficionados can visit the world’s best breweries from the comfort of their armchairs as they leaf through Lonely Planet’s Global Beer Tour.
The new hardback jumps onto the booming popularity of beer not just in the U.S. and Canada, but also in 30 other countries.
Those even include North Korea, the national beer of which, the reader learns, is a lager named for the Taedonggang River that comes from the country’s first brewery, started in 2000, and credited to Kim Jong-il. The book profiles Rakwon Paradise Microbrewery in Pyongyang: “Based in the Rakwon department store, Paradise is the city’s oldest microbrewery, serving pale lager, a pretty good wheat beer and some unusual fruit-infused ales. But when you have a story as good as ‘drinking in a North Korean microbrewery,’ who really cares what the beer tastes like?”
The guide gives “Things to Do Nearby” (including bowing before a colossal statue of the Dear Leader and taking a guided tour of the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum), plus other tidbits such as “How to ask for beer in local language?” and “Local bar snack?” (Ojingeoche — dried squid).
Even if you have had many of these breweries’ brews at your house, a main point of the book is that beer doesn’t travel well, and some of it doesn’t travel at all, so travelling to it is the way to go.
Like a well-funded beer tourist, the book goes from breweries you might have at least heard of, such as the Czech Republic’s Pilsner Urquell (only at the brewery can you try a fermented-on-wood oldstyle lager) and Japan’s Hitachino Nest (it has a tasting bar and soba noodle restaurant), to many you haven’t but will yearn to visit anyway, plus recent mashups such as the Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens in Berlin — one of American craft beer’s first footholds in Europe.
The book only skims the surface of the U.S. craft beer landscape, profiling just 36 of what’s now more than 5,000 breweries. Perhaps future editions will make room for Pittsburgh, especially if the city does get Brew: The Museum of Beer, which aims to be a national beer destination.
In the meantime, everybody can have fun arguing about the book’s short list of America’s “Top 5 Beers,” Europe’s “Top 5 Beer Towns” and other provocative picks and instructive bits.
True beer lovers might wish they had a shot at the companion brew, an Indian pale ale called Travel Notes, that’s being released in cans this month as a collaboration with Lonely Planet, Northern Monk Brew Co. in Leeds, U.K., and Fieldwork Brewing in Berkeley, California. But the limited-edition brew looks to be released only in a few select places in the U.K. and Europe and Northern California.
As this 267-page book colourfully drives home, there’s plenty of other beer out there.