Travels with Barley

I just finished reading "Travels with Barley" last night. In the book, author Ken Wells takes a trip through the US along the mighty Mississippi river, which he dubs the river of beer, trying to find the perfect beer joint. I had been intrigued by this book for several months and finally got it for Christmas.

My marketing tagline for the book would be "This book is like having a conversation with someone who is high on marijuana, it may take diversions but it will eventually pull together to produce a coherent story." Half of the book (every other chapter) explored beer culture, mostly from the homebrewer and microbrewer perspective. There was some interesting beer history and brewing methods explored in these chapters and they tended to be the more entertaining chapters. The chapters where the author was travelling along the river of beer were not as intriguing. He seemed proud that he did no planning of his trip and ended up closing his eyes and pointing at a map to find out where he was going to drive the next day. Once there he just asked people where he could go to get a beer. Sometimes this resulted in success, but mostly it ended up in some sort of ramshackle shack with few customers and much filth. It didn't seem like he really found one great beer joint, mostly just a collection of off-the-beaten-path bars, which are fine but not the reason I was interested in reading the book.

Mostly, this book was a disappointment, but it was mildly entertaining and the subject matter, beer, is always interesting.

Next up is "The Tipping Point", by Malcolm Gladwell. I really enjoyed "Blink" by the same author and my expectations for "The Tipping Point" are high.