5 star rating February 20, 2008 Adam W.
159 reviews
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This book is pure genius. I picked it up after hearing Christopher Mark O'Brien, the books author, speak at a Green Festival 2 years ago in Washington DC. He made me realize that beer is so much more than just an alcoholic beverage. While I was already part of the craft brew movement (I made my own beer in my dorm room all through college) he showed me that there is more to beers relevance to social movements than just taste and organic ingredients.

The book begins with the history of beer, and how it was discovered and used by ancient peoples in many cultures. In fact, almost all ancient cultures had some form of beer. Fermentation was a good way to keep nutrients stored without those nutrients rotting as they would in their original forms. Plus, beer was the first "probiotic" food - long before humans learned to milk cows and make yogurt, they made beer from their grains, and thus got infused with those same essential gut microbes that we pay 8 dollars for at Whole Foods today.

O'Brien then goes on to demonstrate how beer helped create ordered societies by establishing a need for a public house for people to gather in, and how it empowered women, since they were the ones originally making the beer. He even talks about societies in which women refused to make beer until their husbands stopped making war. Beer = Peace!

O'Brien then demonstrates how beer went from being made by women in communities to earth destroying behemoths like Budweiser. O'Brien does however end on a positive note - he tells us how the modern craft movement is bringing people back to the origins of beer, and how that is helping all of us as communities, as communities, and as residents of the planet earth.

Read this book! I seriously cannot recommend it highly enough.

Adam's keywords: brewery, beer, book, beeractivist, brewing, beverage

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