The Session: Reading Material

This month's Session is being hosted by the august Alan McLeod of A Good Beer Blog. Alan has asked the question 'What beer book which has yet to be written would you like to see published?'.

Like many of you fine folks that read Fuggled, I spend almost as much time reading about beer as I do brewing and drinking it. Most of the books I have are of a more reference nature and so I dip into them regularly, and often in search of inspiration for my homebrewing activities. Side point, reading reference books is nothing new for me, when I was the shy kid at Sgoil Lionacleit in the 1990s I would spend most lunchtimes sat in the library reading encyclopedias, and even today I am happy to potter around Wikipedia.

When it comes to the beer books that have yet to be written, I think a coming together of my various interests would be my first stop, history and theology being two of them (if you don't already know, I studied to be a minister, though was never ordained). A history then of beer in monastic communities would be interesting, especially if it could go back to medieval times, and included lots of period correct methods for the various stages of brewing. Given that I wrote my BA dissertation on the missionary movements of the Celtic Church prior to the Synod of Whitby in 664, I would be particularly interested in brewing in the monasteries of Ireland and Scotland.

Another book I would love to see published, though it is has already been written, is the 'Geschichte des Brauwesens in Budweis' by Reinhold Huyer, though published in English. The book is a history of brewing in Budweis, which today is České Budějovice, and was published in 1895, the year Budvar was established. Though I have a CD-ROM copy of the text floating around somewhere, the 19th century German typography is a bitch to read, and I'm a lazy git quite often.