How to Have a Beer

By Alice Galletly

Beer — it's the world's favorite alcoholic drink and its popularity is soaring. It has only four key ingredients but fearless brewers are adding countless others, from chocolate and coconut to beardgrown yeast, seaweed and stag semen. As Alice Galletly surveys the growing array in a supermarket, she makes a spur-of-the-moment decision: she will drink and blog about a different beer every day for a year. While writing her blog Beer for a Year Alice becomes not only a beer nerd and enthusiastic member of the beer community, but briefly a brewer, with a bizarre medieval concoction that contains ? Read this entertaining book and find out. Alice's stories and her tips on how to get the most out of every glass of beer will make you roar with happiness, pain, and thirst. Best read with hops on hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Awa Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781927249352

Book preview

Vance

For Tom

ALICE GALLETLY is a freelance journalist, dedicated beer-drinker, and author of the blog Beer for a Year. She has written award-winning travel stories for AA Directions and was formerly deputy editor of Dish magazine. As well as drink­ing 365 beers in 365 days, she has worked as a beer server at craft beer bar Brothers Beer. She was born and raised in Wellington and now lives in Auckland.

I would kill everyone in this room

for a drop of sweet beer

HOMER SIMPSON

365 bottles of beer

NINETY PERCENT of what I know about beer, I learned in the course of one year. Bet­ween Aug­­­ust 9, 2011 and August 8, 2012 to be exact. I realise that doesn’t bode particularly well for the contents of this book. Perhaps now you’re wondering if you should have bought 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die instead. Sure, it’s out of date and full of beers that no longer exist, but at least it’s hardcover; it would have looked great on the shelf.

The good news is you’re in safe hands. My beer education might not have been long but it was really intense – like a 365-day beer boot camp. Was I getting a PhD in the science of brewing? Living as a Trappist monk? Travelling the world with a copy of the afore­mentioned 1001 tome? No, something way better.

I was blogging.

At this point the penny is probably starting to drop. You may have flipped back to the cover and realised that – hang on – that name looks familiar. Yes, I am the one who wrote that beer blog everyone was always talking about. The one that got your mum into IPAs and your buddy called ‘the best thing on the internet since lolcats’. It’s natural to feel a little star-struck.

Or… no? You’ve never even heard of me? Weird. I guess I’ll have to explain then.

My blog was called Beer for a Year (the catchier A Year in Beer was taken) and I came up with it while I was walking through the booze aisle of my local supermarket. I was on my way to pick up a bottle of heavily discounted shiraz, as one does, when I was struck by how big the craft beer section had become. The familiar boxes of big-brand lagers were squashed together down one end, while a motley crew of colourful single bottles was taking up metres of shelf space. There were at least a hundred different beers, some from the UK, USA and Belgium but most made here in New Zealand. How long had they been here? I wondered. What did they taste like? What the hell was an ‘IPA’?

At the time I had been planning to start an offal blog as a way to practise writing, and had even registered the domain name Offallygood.com (now free, in case you want to use it). I wasn’t sure of the exact angle I would take, only that it would feature recipes and a lot of bad puns. But standing in the beer aisle in front of all these mysterious bottles, I realised I had a more compelling – and let’s face it, more appealing – subject in front of me. There and then I made a decision. An offally good one, looking back.

The premise was simple: I would drink and write about a different beer every single day for a year. That was it. The entire plan was formulated between the beer aisle and the deli, which is another way of saying it was not particularly well thought out.

For the next 365 days I consumed beer, and it in turn consumed me. When I started the blog I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal, that I could slot it into my life without too much disruption. Ha! I guess that’s what people think about babies before they have them. What I hadn’t factored in is that I would turn into a raging beer nerd, and being a beer nerd is hard work. There was the blog to look after, sure, but on top of that there were weekly beer launches to attend, breweries to visit, politics and industry scandals to tweet about. Beer was no longer just a beverage, it had become a lifestyle.

For friends and family, my new lifestyle was a pain in the arse. If I met someone for a drink we had to find a place that had a beer I hadn’t blogged about, then I’d spend the first half hour taking photographs and notes. This meant conversations would go something like this:

Friend: Did you hear Jane is having a baby?

Me: A baby – wow. Hey, can you smell aniseed in this?

Friend: Uh.... maybe. So anyway, apparently she’s not sure who the father is–

Me: Oh WOW.

Friend: Crazy right?

Me: No, I mean – I think it’s got fennel in it!

I managed to weed out a lot of my less committed friends that year.

To be honest, I never truly believed when I started Beer for a Year that it would last the full 365 days. I had good intentions, but I knew how many other projects I’d started with gusto only to abandon two weeks later. Weaving, jogging, gardening, vegetarianism – you name it, I’ve hit it and quit it.

But something happened that made Beer for a Year harder to give up on: to my amazement, some people other than my parents actually read the blog. It didn’t really make me famous, or even internet famous like the cat that squeezes into the tiny boxes, but I gathered enough of an audience that giving up would have been embarrassing. Some nice readers even sent me special beers they’d picked up overseas, and bottles of their home brew wrapped up like newborn babies. Ordinarily I wouldn’t drink something sent by a stranger on the internet, but they all had such adorable homemade labels, how could I not?

I took the rules I’d set for myself incredibly seriously, sometimes to my detriment. One night I was drifting off to sleep when I realised I had plain forgotten to have a beer that day, and had to jump out of bed to get one down before midnight. Chugging room-temperature, toothpaste-tainted stout alone