Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine Basics
Author: Tara Q Thomas
From Chardonnay to Cabernet, discover the world of wine...
The senior editor of Wine & Spirits magazine helps beginners understand everything about wine from the process to popular varieties, from tips for tasting to advice on buying, and more. She also covers world wine regions and offers tips on wine making, storage, etiquette, wine and food pairing, and entertaining.
• Author is a wine expert with contacts throughout the wine world
• The U.S. is the third largest wine-consuming nation in the world and wine consumption in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past 12 years
• Wine books are consistently strong sellers
Author Biography: Tara Q. Thomas has been a senior editor of Wine & Spirits magazine since 1996. She also serves as the wine editor for the Denver Post where she writes a bi-weekly column. She has served as editor for the 2003 and 2004 Food and Wine guides and has held staff positions at Martha Stewart Living, Vogue, and Kitchen Arts and Letters. She has a degree from the Culinary Institute of America.
New interesting book: Betty Crocker Grilling Made Easy or You Wont Believe Its Vegan
Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer
Author: Maureen Ogl
Ambitious Brew, the first-ever history of American beer, tells an epic story of American ingenuity and the beverage that became a national standard. Not always America’s drink of choice, beer finally took its top spot in the nation’s glasses when a wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid-nineteenth century and settled in to re-create the beloved biergartens they had left behind. Fifty years later, the American-style lager beer they invented was the nation’s most popular beverage—and brewing was the nation’s fifth-largest industry, ruled over by titans Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch. Anti-German sentiments aroused by World War I fed the flames of the temperance movement and brought on Prohibition. After its repeal, brewers replaced flavor with innovations such as flashy marketing and lite beer, setting the stage for the generation of microbrewers whose ambitions would reshape the brew once again.
Grab a glass and a stool as Maureen Ogle pours out the surprising story behind your favorite pint.
Publishers Weekly
Conventional wisdom has it that giant breweries, driven by corporate greed, have flooded the U.S. with inferior-tasting swill, and the only beer worth drinking is from scattered boutique microbrewers. Nonsense, says Ogle: companies like Miller and Anheuser-Busch are actually near-perfect embodiments of the American dream (in which "liberty nurtured ambition, and ambition fostered success")-and if their beers became noticeably blander 50 years ago, it's because consumers wanted it that way. Ogle (All the Modern Conveniences) looks back at the early years of brewers like Phillip Best, Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch as they rose to success making European-style beers for fellow immigrants, converting plenty of native palates along the way. Such men, she claims, should be heralded as captains of industry like Gilded Age icon J.P. Morgan. This material is strong, as is Ogle's analysis of the slow but steady rise of the Prohibition movement, but her narrative loses momentum as she tries to encompass the post-WWII era and add the most successful microbrewers to her list of heroes. Her exuberant musings on the American spirit become distracting, but there's more than enough drama in the family sagas to keep even the soberest of readers turning the pages. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
From kegs to bottles to cans, the making and selling of beer encapsulates in various ways the larger history of American taste and how business catered to it. Once upon a time, writes social historian Ogle (All the Modern Conveniences, not reviewed, etc.), dark ale was the liquid of choice. Then came the peaceful, mid-19th century Teutonic invasion. Occupying brew houses in New York, St. Louis, Milwaukee and wherever else German immigrants settled, Biermeisters began brewing Pilsner- and Budweiser-style lagers. Americans consumed the stuff in sumptuous beer gardens, the amusement parks of the day, and they drank it in the new taverns and in the ubiquitous old saloons. Then came WWI and anti-German sentiment, followed by Prohibition. Brewers suffered, and the happy days ushered in by Repeal weren't quite the same. Industrial beer-makers lost more steam after WWII. They tried vertical integration from cooperage to barrooms; they tried mergers and acquisitions. Drinkers wanted their beer not too malty, but along with its color, the quality of corporate brew faded. Homebrews, watery lites and microbrews entered the market. Ogle gives flavor to her heady portrait of the American brewing craft with vivid descriptions of brew kettles, fermenting kegs, mashing tuns, malt kilns, cellars and more. The spigot flows with human-interest tales of the beer barons and their progeny: the Best, Busch and Blatz families, the Rupperts, Millers and Schaeffers, along with the Greisediecks, the Yuenglings and Uihleins (the last of the late, great Schlitz label). And she's just as adept delineating the frothy stuff's intricate business history. A beer garden of a book that leaves no stein unturned.
Table of Contents:
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE German Beer, American Dreams
CHAPTER TWO “I Must Have Nothing But the Very Best”
CHAPTER THREE “Masters of the Situation”
CHAPTER FOUR The Enemy at the Gates
CHAPTER FIVE Happy Days?
CHAPTER SIX “You Have to Think About Growth”
CHAPTER SEVEN Make Mine Small, Pure, Real, and Lite
CHAPTER EIGHT Something Old, Something New
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENDNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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