Michael Jackson's Great Beer Guide

Which beers are the best? Get the inside stories on Czech pilseners, German lagers, Belgian wheat beers and Trappist brews, classic British ales, Irish stouts, and American microbrews. The shelves of the supermarkets are packed with an every-changing array of beers from around the world. Bars, pubs, restaurants, and clubs stock an ever-greater range. Which will suit your tastes? Which is the beer for the moment? Will this beer be light, crisp, and refreshing; this one sweet, that one dry and bitter? TV Beer Hunter Michael Jackson has tasted them all. He describes the flavor and body of each beer, explains why beers taste the way they do, notes their strength and ideal serving temperature. Spot the best beers with aid of superbly shot photographs, each showing the bottle, label, and the properly poured beer in its ideal glass. Never before has beer looked so beautiful.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

Celebration of the primordial liquid gold, 2008-05-26
Being one of the world's oldest beverages, beer was known to Egyptians and Mesopotamians, even written about by ancient Sumerians and still enjoyed to this day, the constant way of reinventing and flavor and introducing new brands can be overwhelming but not with this easy to read guide.

Sometimes there's more to beer than meets the eye. Like tea it's more of a simple, easy and relaxing beverage that lacks the arrogance of coffee and hard liquors and the overly sweetness of cocoa and some wines. Even thought I like all the above beer is still an incredible invention, it's perfect for a weekend afternoon or chilled one or two for dinner when I just don't feel like cooking. I really do drink it because it like everything about it, not to get tipsy and forget everything, people tend to look down on it for some reason, but beer deserves some love and appreciation. Apparently one beer a day is good for the circulation, the hard part is having just one!

This book is more of a large pocket manual, but too thick to fit into any pocket, with each beer in alphabetical order taking places on each page, showing beautiful photos of the bottle, the proper glassware for serving and all sorts of flavor and history information. I can count on this to inform, entertain and show me beers that I will probably never tastes or find but at least I know to be on the lookout! I tend to like lighter beers, and the Asian ones always seem to tickle my fancy, currently Tiger beer just has my heart, and its extremely simple and non fussy I even love the name, which represents my favorite animal. Fruit flavored beers are also fun, but when I feel like something sweet. Currently having discovered great strawberry ale I am in search of new and untested brews.

This is a fun, sort of a mini encyclopedia for anyone who's a fan of the beverage and fan of history and the way different countries can interpret hops, malted barley, wheat, corn or even rice into their own distinct beverages. So yeah you have to do a few more crunches but beer is worth it.

- Kasia S.



5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Out-of-date and out-of-place, 2008-05-05
Books that review wine are renewed every year or so. This is because wines change with the vintage and it's not much use knowing what last year's release of a wine tasted like if it's not the vintage on the shelves in your wine shop today.
Beer reviews need to be renewed for reasons. A particular beer is essentially a recipe and therefore it's reproduceable. Last year's Rowhouse Red should taste a lot like this year's. But recipes do change and in fact the formulation of a beer can change from batch to batch. In the case of hops-driven recipes, this is sometimes a simple matter of the changing availablity of ingredients although marketing decisions and shifts in public tasted can play a part.
Just as important is the fact that new beers are constantly being introduced and old ones being phased out. A list of beers from five years ago will have a few extinct labels, a ten-year old list will have a lot.
Beer is also more local than wine: shipping costs ensure that only some beers will travel far from home. So `World Guides' really need to be modified to `local guides' to be really useful.

Is this book out-of-date and out-of-place? Well, a quick check of my local Foodery shows that out of the first fifty beers, nineteen weren't in this book.
Michael Jackson virtually founded beer journalism and his palate was as sharp as his tongue, but this book no longer serves his public.

Lynn Hoffman, author of The New Short Course in Wine



1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

A great all around book for beer tasting aficianados, 2007-08-20
If you love to read about, and taste, gourmet beer, then chalk this book up as a must-have.

Michael "The Beer Hunter" Jackson (not to be confused with the glove-wearing pop singer of the same name) is (as of this writing) the most well known beer writer in the world.

In his book, TBH (the beer hunter) tours all the major beer producing regions of the globe, and discusses many of their most well known and widely selling offerings. It's a great book to learn about the names and styles of beer from around the globe, and there are lots of spiffy full color pictures and some fairly decent tasting notes.

TBH's books do have minor flaws - the only one worth mentioning (not that it matters to most laypersons) is that MJ is a just a beer aficianado and a paid guest speaker ... he's NOT a brewer. Homebrewers who buy his books in order to learn more about how to make the beers they read about in his books are bound to be disappointed, because MJ often omits the sort of details that brewing geeks like me obsess over ... such as which beers use which hops and (in general) which types of specialty grains; the fact that the secret ingredient of Anchor Brewing's "Old Foghorn" Barleywine is Maple Syrup; and that Mackesson Triple Stout gets it's slightly burnt backnote from slightly scorched brewer's caramel. Such information exists, but you have to hunt around elsewhere for it ... a good starting place is the "Classic Beer Style Series" (IBDoF linkage pending).

Bottom line: This is a great all around book for beer lovers.



4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Rather out of date, 2007-03-29
I bought this book because I was just getting into craft beer and I wanted to gain a better understanding of the different types of beers and their history. This book, however, is really just a directory of beers with pictures and short descriptions. If the beer you are drinking is in the book, then it's nice to read up on the beer. It's especially good for European beers. However, its selection of American craft beers leaves a lot to be desired and passes over tons of the best American craft beers -- even those with wide distribution.

It's a decent book to have in the library, but I probably would not buy it again. If I had previewed it in a book store I would have passed.


2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Not useful, 2007-03-15
Compared with other similar books that help readers understand and select products (e.g. wine, cheese, etc) this book about beers is not helpful at all. I could not use it for the main purpose I had bought it: to help me select beers when I go to a liquor store. Most of the beers featured in the book are absent from the US market (or too hard to find).
I don't think it is a useful book, at least not for me.

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