Around the world in a weighty daze

Pete Brown is the Stella marketing man who walked into a pub with a book of the same name a couple of years ago. Some members of the Campaign for Real Ale were unamused by his thoughts on the organization, an antipathy possibly exacerbated by his work with the famous Belgian lager.

That was then though. With Three Sheets… Pete takes his self-admitted obsession with beer into the whimsical travel world occupied by the likes of Bill Bryson and the late Pete McCarthy.

Here he travels round the world to watch and drink with those who would say that they have the best beer on earth. If you want a book full of tasting notes, abvs, IBUs, mash tuns, nice pictures of US IPAs and obscure Trappist beers, then this is not it. On the other hand if you want a rollicking, thirst-inducing, engaging, often touching and always hilarious voyage in search of the best beerdrinking known to mankind, plus a few pertinent points on how beer is perceived in polite company, then read on.

It all starts when a work trip to Prague makes the writer wonder why it is that Czechs drink a lot of beer but never get into fights, unlike a lot of Brits whose reputation for a lager- or ale-fuelled punch-up is as well-known around the world as the Beatles.

Then there’s the Congress of Beer in Prehistory and Antiquity in Barcelona, which reveals beer’s chic appeal on the Iberian peninsula as well as the fashion crime of wearing a laurel wreathe on the head.

Madrid has a late night bar where Brown decides that h.....

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By Adrian Tierney-Jones

Section : Book Reviews

Page number : 15