Beer Culture with Des de Moor

Around Bruges in 80 Beers by Chris Pollard & Siobhan McGinn

There’s a particular challenge to writing guidebooks. You need to include as much information as possible for people putting them to practical use, but all those data — addresses, opening hours, venue facilities — are otherwise deadly dull. Somehow the book needs to be presented in a way that provides a satisfying read to the majority of users who are highly unlikely to visit everything you list, as well as the armchair travellers that make up a significant part of audience.

One rare solution is to find a new format, departing from the tried and trusted geography-and-theme order of the genre, which is just what Chris ‘Podge’ Pollard and Siobhan McGinn did when capturing their extensive knowledge of the beers and pubs of the West Flemish city of Brugge (Bruges) in 2006. The result was Around Bruges in 80 Beers, one of the first publications from Cogan & Mater, an imprint founded by Tim Webb, editor of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide Belgium and one of the key figures in the development of the British beer consumer organisation’s publishing activities. The book had a page for each of 80 beer outlets in the city — pubs and bars, restaurants, shops — with each entry describing the outlet and selecting one of the beers on sale there for detailed background and tasting notes.

It seemed a little arbitrary — why 80, other than the not especially relevant allusion to Jules Verne’s Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days)? and why just one beer in each, given the venues stretched from locals with just one beer of interest to beer geek honeypots stocking hundreds? But as most poets will tell you, disciplining yourself to work within a strict formal structure can prompt some of the greatest flights of creativity. For the reader, it wraps the local beer scene into a convenient and satisfying story, and the fact that 80 places of beery interest can be found in a relatively small place like Brugge is eloquent testimony to the flourishing beer culture of this part of the world. The format proved appealing and a second edition of the Brugge guide appeared in 2009.

Around London in 80 Beers by Chris Pollard & Siobhan McGinn

If you know the city in question, there’s the added delight of seeing how the authors have gone about solving the puzzle, which was one of the things I enjoyed about Podge and Siobhan’s sequel, Around London in 80 Beers, in 2008. Perhaps partly inspired by the work of blogger-turned-landlord Jeff ‘Stonch’ Bell, an early chronicler of London’s zythophile geography who provides a preface, this helped demonstrate quite how much there was of interest in a city that then lacked a strong reputation as a beer destination, and in including surprise entries like Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes and the Roxy cinema alongside CAMRA-friendly real ale specialists like the Market Porter and the Wenlock Arms, highlighted the almost unnoticed spread of the craft beer aesthetic in the UK capital. I freely admit to having plundered it for possible entries in my own The CAMRA Guide to London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars, as well as being inspired by its eclectic approach.

Around London just predated the current explosion of interest in craft beer in London — indeed it probably contributed to that resurgence, but as a result it’s dated perhaps more rapidly than similar guides, with several handfuls of key venues opening since it was published. The majority of its inclusions are still worthy of a visit, however, and its authors’ insights into them continue to make for an enjoyable read. Beer entries are identified by miniature flags, delightfully described as “the flag of the nation state or mindset from which the beer originated” — though I’m puzzled as to why, if Cornish beers get St Piran’s rather than St George’s cross, the Belgian tricolour subsumes all that country’s beers. You surely couldn’t get two more distinct national mindsets within one set of borders than those represented by the Flemish lion and the Wallonian cockerel.

Around Brussels in 80 Beers by Joe Stange and Yvan de Baets

From London the series caught the Eurostar for 2009’s Around Brussels in 80 Beers, by US expatriate beer writer and blogger Joe Stange (since relocated to the rather less beer-blessed climes of Costa Rica) and Bruxellois brewer Yvan De Baets, of Zennebrouwerij/Brasserie de la Senne. While the realities of a ‘Belgium Beer Paradise’ dominated by big breweries initially provoked pessimism among the compilers, in the event they found they had a hard time narrowing their list down. The listings rang from obvious specialist haunts like Bier Circus to delightfully unexpected suggestions like the CBBD comic strip centre, the recommended venue for an Orval. Brussels is a city I think I know quite well, but the majority of Joe and Yvan’s recommendations were new to me, and the book is also strengthened by a generous introduction to both the city and Belgian beer styles, complete with some suggestions for crawls.

Around Amsterdam in 80 Beers by Tim Skelton

Another anglophone expat, Tim Skelton, followed with Around Amsterdam in 80 Beers in 2010 — overdue recognition for the Dutch capital, already famous for many other reasons, as a beer drinking city, although strictly speaking the book cheats by including eight entries in nearby Haarlem. It assembles another varied collection of pubs, bars and beer shops, from historic bruine cafés to grand contemporary venues, and, as with London, respondsto the city’s cosmopolitan drinking scene by pairing them with international beer suggestions. In fact only 23 of the listed beers are Dutch, the others originating mainly in Belgium or Germany,  but there’s a nod to local brewing with the inclusion of several beers from brewers like ‘t IJ and Prael. A less extensive introduction includes a fair summation of the strengths and limitations of the local food.

Around Berlin in 80 Beers by Peter Sutcliffe

This summer Berlin has become the latest capital to receive the treatment with Peter Sutcliffe’s well informed Around Berlin in 80 Beers. At 112 pages, the book is notably thicker than its predecessors, with extensive introductory material on the city’s turbulent history, brewing and beer culture and German beer styles alongside a suggested marathon pub crawl. Again this must initially have seemed a challenge, especially as Peter resolved to limit himself to German-brewed beers — the country’s beer scene is notoriously regionalised and since reunification the city has seen all its historic breweries coalesce into a single plant and a single company, Berliner-Kindl-Schultheiss, owned by big brewing group Radeberger. But happily, now the old Prussian capital is once again the national seat of government and therefore attracting residents from across all 16 Bundesländer, the retail trade has responded with a panorama of regional brews that’s hard to find elsewhere. A new wave of brewpubs, including one in the shell of the former Berliner Kindl brewery, adds further interest.

I understand the author, who splits his time between his London home and a Berlin flat, originally wrote a much more straightforward beer guide to the city which was then shoehorned into the format, and it shows, but not to the disadvantage of a very insightful and interestingly written book. It ranges all over the city, including old-fashioned basic corner boozers, huge beer gardens, innovative new brewpubs, ultramodern bars, restaurants and the odd beer shop. Perhaps more so than its predecessors, it places its chosen city’s beer culture in the context of its broader culture and history, and with such an extraordinary place as Berlin, the stage on which some of the key world historic dramas and traumas of the 20th century were played out, this is especially welcome. So evocative is it of the Berliner Luft that it’s made me want to revisit the place to explore further, and I can think of no higher praise for a guidebook.

• Chris Pollard and Siobhan McGinn 2008, Around London in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-2-7, £7.99/€11.95
• Chris Pollard and Siobhan McGinn 2009, Around Bruges in 80 Beers, 2nd edition, ISBN 978-0-9547789-4-1, £7.99/€11.95
• Tim Skelton 2010, Around Amsterdam in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-6-5, £9.99/€13.95
• Joe Stange and Yvan De Baets 2009, Around Brussels in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-5-8, £8.99/€12.95
• Peter Sutcliffe 2011, Around Berlin in 80 Beers, ISBN 978-0-9547789-8-9, £9.99/€13.95

All available from www.booksaboutbeer.com.