100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die! [Paperback]

Despite the alarming cover - one that reads '100 Beers You Die' in dim lighting - this new book is a necessary part of any beer lover's library. Actually it's more than that - I'd go so far as to say a necessary part of any drink lover's library. Anyone who hasn't already become a convert to the deeply lovable and labyrinthine mysteries of Belgian brewing, but loves a fine burgundy, for instance (or even a supermarket screwtop Chilean) should rush to purchase this before their omission is discovered and public shame ensues. Belgian beer is something everybody should know about. It's a "Little world, an everywhere", as is the (much misunderstood and maligned) country from which it springs. Buy this book and rush over there. Stay in a rustic cottage by a watermill, where cows swish their tails in meadows and painterly arrangements of fields and houses disappear into the treeline, and get on your bike or into your hire car and go taste those beers. Alternatively, go to Sainsbury's and hold a kitchen tasting.

It's all here - the breweries, the beers, the tasting notes, but what separates this from the (frankly dull) run of the mill beer volume is not only wisdom but WIT. Joris Pattyn, a Belgian beer writer/activist is partnered here by the superlatively talented Tim Webb, without doubt Britain's most readable beer expert - see also his GOOD BEER GUIDE BELGIUM.

"100 Belgian beers to try before you die" is at once opinionated, witty, informative and one of the best books on beer (Belgian or not) published for several years.

The format is easy on the eye, with the beers well described; sometimes there are as many as five beers from the same brewery (Cantillon in Brussels and Dupont in Hainault take the honours here), while the new-brewer-on-the-block, the Senne Brewery, is represented by their three best beers - an astonishing achievement for a new brewery which has only brewed for two years.

Listings of UK and USA beer importers, and information on visiting Belgian breweries are all helpful. The "head of the glass" for me is the stunning photography: not the photos of bottles and other "easy" shots, which anyone with a digital camera can take these days, but the really atmospheric double-page "action" photos of the interiors of La Porte Noire, Moeder Lambic and Deliriumcafé in Brussels: photos of the very highest quality, taken in specialist "temples of beer" of equally high quality.

Beer fans with long (or out-dated) memories will look in vain for commercial or industrial beers. Hence no beers from the people who put the Grim into Grimbergen, nor the highway Brigands, while In-Bev is, of course, not at all listed as they gave up brewing beer a long time ago.
Authors Joris Pattyn and Tim Webb have shown that there is life after Leffe, and the reader will surely be encouraged to order NOT their usual beer, but one of the hundred beers recommended in this book - maybe a beer fresh, hoppy, spritzy and full-flavoured; words which well describe the book itself.

this is a very comprehensive list with excellent information about each beer. the only problem is "will i get through them all???"