Melissa Cole. Let me tell you about beer

It all went wrong when they too out that injunction

I would say this was definitely one of my top ten Christmas presents from last year.  Let me tell you about beer, by Melissa Cole, does more or less what it says on the cover with the aid of plenty of cool pictures of beer, brewing, beer with food, Melissa Cole, Melissa Cole with beer, bottled beers and so on. The layout makes things easy-going, delivering things chunk by chunk in a Randy Mosher (esque) but not quite so quirky sort of style. The dialogue is easy to follow and comes across quite passionate at times and the contents cover pretty much everything a book on beer should (brewing basics, history of beer styles etc).

One of the strong points about this book for me are the beer style categories, which are really well summed up. Here loads of  Cole's favourite beers are in the book exemplifying the different styles covering everything from The Kernel, Great Divide and Mikkeller to Cantillon and Orval to Moorhouses, Adnams and Theakstons and not to mention all those crazy Italian craft brews. So it covers a huge variety of different beers without being one of those 1000 page epics trying to cover every worthy beer on the planet.

In short, its a good book and its approach to the reader is a lot more easy going than a lot of the old CAMRA publications (sorry Protzy, I did nod off a bit during those last couple of books). Basically I can see any beer curious individual taking a lot from this very easily and as an insight to the current world of craft beer, there isn't really anything that's missed out.

So after my strict evaluation of the M.Cole book I have reached the conclusion that its proppa bo!