Amazon.com Review

Take a Look Inside The Oxford Companion to Beer:

Barley Wine: The strongest of beers. While not always literally approaching the alcohol content of wine, they are often brewed to alcoholic strengths of 10% ABV, and sometimes more. CHARLES FINKEL

Barrel-aging: A brewer at the Avery Brewing Company in Colorado prepares a blending session for barrel-aged beers.
JONATHAN CASTNOR PHOTOGRAPHY

Britain: A team of horses delivers beer from Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery, founded in 1758, to citizens of Tadcaster, England. Horse-drawn drays are still used to this day for many deliveries. MERCHANT DU VIN

Glassware: Photograph, c. 1933, illustrating various classic beer glass shapes. Prohibition caused a lack of public knowledge of how to serve alcoholic beverages, an issue addressed in this nationally syndicated photograph. PIKE MICROBREWERY MUSEUM, SEATTLE, WA

Insert, page 7: Home-grown and hand-picked Cascade hops and barley ready for homebrewing in Connecticut. The popular Cascade hops has become a signature flavor of many North American craft beers and is known for its grapefruit-like profile.
ERIC S. MCKAY

Insert, page 16: A collection of antique beer labels ranging from 1920–1950, from countries all over the world. While bottling has been around for millennia, the attachment of labels only gained general usage in the mid-19th century. PIKE MICROBREWERY MUSEUM, SEATTLE, WA

Review

"The Oxford Companion to Beer is like having an assortment of 24 terrific beers in one box. Pick one out, pop the cap, turn to a page, savor the beer, enjoy the random read. There are
more than 1,100 terrific companions for your beers." --Charlie Papazian, president of the Brewers Association and author of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing

"If scholarly detail and accuracy for brewing is your thirst, this book will be your definitive goto over and over again. Like a perfect pour, beer lovers will be able to appreciate this book for its artistry, craftsmanship and precision as well as its endless source of inspiration."--Mario Batali , acclaimed chef and restaurateur

"Beerlike baseball statistics or action movie quotesis one of the many things guys act like they are experts on, but oftentimes are actually clueless about. This book is for anyone, male or female, who has ever wanted to know the once-and-for-all real facts about ales, ambers, porters, and lambics but was too afraid to ask. It's the clearest, most user-friendly guide to hoppy heaven I have ever come across and in my opinion the only 'beer book' you will need."--Adam Richman, host of Man V. Food Nation and author of America the Edible

"Garrett Oliver has become widely acknowledged as an expert not only in making beer, but in tasting it, pairing it, and talking about it."--New York Times

"[E]ncyclopedic in scope . . . In putting together the 'Oxford Companion' now, Mr. Oliver has captured the blossoming of a global beer culture at a thriving moment. . . . [A] definitive resource not just for beer enthusiasts but for amateur brewers, professional brewers and the thousands of restaurants that serve great beers but are staffed by people who may know little about them. . . . The 'Oxford Companion' is simply a wonderful resource for what, even when it's complex, unusual, unfamiliar or strikingly different, is still just beer, regardless of how it is dressed up." --Eric Asimov, The New York Times

"The Oxford Companion to Beer [is] an unprecedented compendium that encompasses global hops history, new-wave brewing techniques and anything else you could possibly want to know about the world's most popular alcoholic beverage." m--Time Out New York

"Demand for the Companion has already exceeded supply, and the book has sold out its initial print run. The 'dark ages of beer' seem to be over." --New York's "Grub Street"

"[The Oxford Companion to Beer] promises to be a comprehensive resource for those in the know and those hoping to get there some day." --SF Weekly.com

"We live in an amazing time for beer lovers. With more than 1,700 American breweries and counting, Oliver's massive reference book is a timely masterpiece that will make the perfect companion for craft beer's meteoric rise." --Mobile Press Register

"[W]ith the publication of The Oxford Companion to Beer we now have 920 pages of serious beer writing each page of which alone will trigger any number of arguments, plenty of scurrying for further sources and the occasional drifting of the book across the room, hopefully missing the lamp. This is a very good thing." --AGoodBeerBlog.com

"The most essential beer book you can buy . . . You open a page at random and you start reading, and you lose yourself in trivia, history, and bits of brewing science you always wanted to know but never got round to asking . . . Just about everything any sane person could want to know about beer is in this book . . . if you write about beer, study it or brew it, you simply cannot do without this book" --Pete Brown's Beer Blog

"At the end of the reading I felt buzzed. Not from beer, but from the amount of knowledge I had acquired. I have never considered myself to be a beer enthusiast, but after Garrett Oliver conveyed his passion for beer, that just might change." The CU Independent

"[T]he largest amount of knowledge about beer ever assembled in one book."
--Huffington Post

"The rise of craft beer has meant a lot of happy developments for beer lovers -- more quality breweries, more great bars and, lately, lots of interesting books. Among the most ambitious beer books is The Oxford Companion to Beer." --Chicago Tribune

"[T]he volume is encyclopedic in both scope and detail, and though I've spent hours looking through it, I've barely made a dent. What I have read, though, has been consistently fascinating." --Chicago Reader

"If ever you were in need of knowing every single fact there is to know about beer, this is apparently where to find it." --TotalBeerEnlightenment.com

"A book every beer lover must have . . . This is the new beer bible: the Encyclopedia Beertanica . . . You must have this book. It is magnificent. Whether you are an aspiring beer geek, an avid home brewer, or a professional brewer, you must have this book. It is the beer book." --Washington Beer Blog

"[A]ll sorts of fascinating beer-related facts have been poured into this 920-page everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know beauty of a book that has the answer for everything . . . In all sincerity, the book is terrific. It looks good, thanks in part to 16 pages of beautiful color photographs and hundreds of tasteful black-and-white images. It's got the heft you'd expect from a $65 scholarly tome. And it covers all the bases-from the variety of agricultural commodities that go into beer to the vast number of ways it can be brewed, with each method imparting its own taste and texture." --Fortune.com

"Thoroughly illustrated and beautifully typeset, the book is precisely what a companion should be: an engaging, subjective, erudite guide to the interested novice and, at the same time, a quick reference for the initiated. As a dedicated drinker all but ignorant of the chemistry behind brewing, I feel I've already learned a lot -- and I've only read through the five entries that start with 'acid-.'" --TheAtlantic.com

"So far I've read only a tiny fraction of what's in this book, and already my beer education has taken great leaps forward." --BostonGlobe.com

"Now, beer's faithful have their bible. The Oxford Companion to Beer, a formidable 920-page volume, chronicles the drink's history, from its birth more than 5,000 years ago in the grasslands of ancient Iraq to the modern craft-beer movement." --Globe and Mail

"And now the movement has a book so fine that it isn't likely to need another for a millennium or so. The Oxford Companion to Beer is, first of all, so handsome as to border on the pornographic . . . [It] is like a pub with enough taps to satisfy every variety of drinker . . . [Oliver] deserves unqualified praise for what is a huge achievement."
--TheNewRepublic.com

"The major release of the year . . . highly-anticipated." --Esquire.com

"[T]he only book you will ever have to read, from this point on, to survive. The Oxford Companion to Beer is your new BFF." --USAToday.com

"[W]ithout a doubt the most comprehensive educational resource on beer available . . . like any inexhaustible resource, it'll be with you for life." --Men's Health.com

"This may be one book that beer-lovers can't live without." --Culture: The Word on Cheese

"The Oxford Companion to Beer joins the drink-book canon as perhaps the most important tome on the subject. Why? Because it offers serious scholarship on everything from the details of the German hop industry to the controversy of California's 'steam beer' designation . . . a remarkable work. Even if you think beer is better drunk than contemplated, you'll find yourself cross-referencing this into the wee hours." --San Francisco Chronicle

"simply an incredible resource that every beer lover should have on the shelf."
--BayAreaCraftBeer.com

"This massive tome has the power to turn you from beer lover to beer connoisseur."
--ModernMan.com