It's Here!
This is why I love Amazon.com. I have their Prime membership and everything ships with 2 day delivery free (well, I pay for Prime...). But I ordered 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die yesterday at 9:01am and it arrived today while I was at lunch. How wonderful is that? Next day delivery even though it was supposed to come tomorrow.
But the book, in short, is beautiful. It is gigantic with 960 full color, glossy pages and the beers are organized first by type, then alphabetically. It breaks beers up into the following categories: Amber, Blond, White, Dark, and Specialty. After the preface, they have an Index of Beers by Country and then at the end, after a short glossary, they have an Index of Beers by Brewery. This makes it especially easy to pick out beers that will be included in the beer. For example, I figured the Aprihop wouldn't be in the book, and looking at the index, I find these are the only beers from Dogfish Head Brewery: 90 Minute IPA, World Wide Stout, Midas Touch, and Raison D'Etre. Similarly, I can go to my favorite brewery at the moment, The Bruery and see that they have two beers listed: Orchard White and Saison Rue (I'm assuming this book went to print before both Black Tuesday and Oude Tart were released - especially Black Tuesday since Three Floyd's Dark Lord Imperial Stout made the list).
But either way, I'm immediately going to go make a photocopy of the beers by brewery, shrink it down to a wallet size, and then carry it with me wherever I go to make sure that if there's a beer on tap, in a bottle, or in a can that is on the list, I'm going to try it. I will try beers I know I won't like (Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier) and then try everything else I hope I will like. It'll be tough to track a lot of these down I reckon, but with some determination and hopefully trading via the Internet, I will find a way! It is my destiny!
