Tom Acitelli
Autore di The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution
Sull'Autore
Tom Acitelli, a 2016 James Beard Award finalist who has written about alcohol for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg View, is the author of the acclaimed beverage histories The Audacity of Hops and American Wine. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Opere di Tom Acitelli
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- Altri nomi
- ACITELLI, Tom
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The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft… di Tom Acitelli
Those who know me know that I love a good beer, and a good beer story. The history of craft beer in America is full of such stories, and it's fun to stumble upon some of your favorites while reading this book. That said, I wish it had been a little shorter, it feels like it could have used tighter editing and some trimming here and there. Also, I think it would have been a more fun read if it had a little more humor to it. For a book about the joys of beer, it could be a bit dry at times.
Stopped at p. 84.
This book was just too easy to put down. It begins with collections of brief sketches of different breweries starting up and very gradually you start to see connections between them. The sections were so brief that I couldn't keep anyone straight and wasn't invested in their stories.
I think I would have liked this more if the focus more macro over the whole craft beer industry rather than skipping between so many individual stories.
This book was just too easy to put down. It begins with collections of brief sketches of different breweries starting up and very gradually you start to see connections between them. The sections were so brief that I couldn't keep anyone straight and wasn't invested in their stories.
I think I would have liked this more if the focus more macro over the whole craft beer industry rather than skipping between so many individual stories.
I like craft beer, and I like history, and I really like the clever play on the title, so this seemed like it would be a great read. But, Acitelli says upfront
This book is not a tasting or style guide nor a guide to breweries (there were more than two thousand in the United States by June 2012, more than at any time since the 1880s), and it is not a history of American beer before the craft beer movement arose. Instead, it is a book on how this movement, with the odds stacked against it, survived and thrived to dominate the world’s conception of beer and to change the American palate forever.,/blockquote> And he's right. If you want to know the startup troubles of Tony Magee and Lagunitas, or Sam Calagione and Dogfish Head, Jim Koch of Boston Beer and those that came before, then this is your book. But be warned, it gets deep into dull minutia for a bit of it. A few revelations and a lot of tedium.… (altro)
Amidst the at times slow history of the craft world, you'll find out how Big Beer (AB mostly) put a lock on distribution that nearly strangled Boston Beer and others. How AB has a long history of going after crafts, and are still at it (evidence their 2015 Super Bowl ad). How Sam Calagione ripped "reviewers" (think Beer Advocate) for the negative threads on supposed overrated breweries. How some crafts had to make the conscious decision to stop distributing to some states because they couldn't keep up with demand and didn't want to sacrifice quality. Lots of tidbits like that pepper the monotony.
A few quibbling points:
- Acitelli says it's not a book about styles, but when he does talk about beers, he spends way too much time on lagers, and calls out very substandard euro pilsners and German beers in general as "good", only brushing a tad at the real beer world of ales and their variations. That's my editorial...I'm so not a fan of lagers.
- in one snippet, he said the Wall Street Journal was the "defender of the free market". Snort.
- he referred to crafts in cans as "innovative", citing Dale Katechis of Oskar Blues for pushing that"boundary". I beg to differ on the "innovative" adjective
One more takeaway for me: I will call a beer how I taste it. I have probably been harsh in the past on more than a few (a couple of Calagione's bizarre concoctions come to mind, and pretty much any Jester King I've tried...) I try to be more understanding of the small guys, but not always. I should extend a courtesy of the understanding that they are trying. And while the bigger crafts should be able to do better, that courtesy should extend to them as well.
After all, who else will be able to take down the BudMillerCoors of the world?
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
For those who don't know, instead of doing one or two New Year's "resolutions" at the beginning of each year, I actually chart out an entire new year-long "plan" for myself, containing 40 to 50 new things I want to try or old habits to break, which is why it seems sometimes that I'm constantly referencing an endless list of them here at the blog as the year continues. One of these items in 2016 was to finally teach myself more about wine, not to a sommelier level or anything, but just enough so I no longer embarrass myself at restaurants; and so that's had me not only doing professional-style tasting notes of the world's twenty most popular types of grapes at my pop-culture blog all year, and renting out every single movie Netflix even carries on the subject, but also checking out a lot of wine books from my local library, especially brand-new ones which the Chicago Public Library system seems to be acquiring at a faster-than-usual rate these days.
American Wine: A Coming-of-Age Story is the absolute latest, an informative and fact-based look at how the US went from producing zero public wine at all during Prohibition, to becoming the world's leader in both production and consumption by 2000, a scant 70 years later. The answer, it turns out, is a long and fascinating one, and also nicely serves as a mirror for the entire Postmodernist Era to begin with: from the post-war Europhiles of the 1950s who dreamed of a day that Americans would have the casual yet sophisticated relationship to wine that they saw in France and Italy while overseas; to the daring California hippies of the 1960s and '70s who aimed for the so-called "impossible" goal of making wine just as good as the French (SPOILER ALERT: it's not impossible); to the yuppies of the '80s who made the American wine industry both mainstream and lucrative; to the Gen-X foodies of the '90s and '00s who brought a whole new level of refinement to the market, as well as embracing wines from such interesting new places like Seattle and Portland; to the Millennials of our own times, comfortable with the casual screw-tops and hipster labels of 21st-century fine wine, even as they present a challenge to the American market because of their embrace of the so-called "New World" wines of Australia, South Africa, South America and more.
Tom Acitelli presents this entire 70-year history in an engaging, anecdote-filled way here, an informative yet fun-to-read manuscript filled with the kinds of details and deep backstory that makes the history finally understandable. (Just for one example, many of us already know about the 1976 so-called "Judgment of Paris," in which a bunch of American wines beat a bunch of French wines in a blind tasting and became a major global turning point for the industry; but Acitelli devotes an entire chapter to who the guy was who set up the tasting and why that's so important, how it got covered by the media and why it made that particular tasting so influential, etc.) The whole book is like this, a parade of famous and infamous figures combined with a detail-oriented look at the winemaking process, how the historical selection of grapes by these wineries (as well as the technological innovations of the Mid-Century Modernist years) influenced this process, and how the popular culture going on around these winemakers shaped and influenced this history. (It's impossible to understand the rise of American wine, for example, without understanding the rise of the macrame-making, yoga-posing, James-Taylor-listening middle-class hippies of the 1970s, and Acitelli devotes a lot of his page count simply to looking at what the Americans with discretionary income were doing with their time in each era to influence the wine market in those years.) Easily one of the best books on the subject I've read this year, American Wine: A Coming-of-Age Story is a lively and wide-reaching account of a subject that's often hard to pin down, and it comes strongly recommended whether or not you're particularly into wine yourself.
Out of 10: 9.6… (altro)
For those who don't know, instead of doing one or two New Year's "resolutions" at the beginning of each year, I actually chart out an entire new year-long "plan" for myself, containing 40 to 50 new things I want to try or old habits to break, which is why it seems sometimes that I'm constantly referencing an endless list of them here at the blog as the year continues. One of these items in 2016 was to finally teach myself more about wine, not to a sommelier level or anything, but just enough so I no longer embarrass myself at restaurants; and so that's had me not only doing professional-style tasting notes of the world's twenty most popular types of grapes at my pop-culture blog all year, and renting out every single movie Netflix even carries on the subject, but also checking out a lot of wine books from my local library, especially brand-new ones which the Chicago Public Library system seems to be acquiring at a faster-than-usual rate these days.
American Wine: A Coming-of-Age Story is the absolute latest, an informative and fact-based look at how the US went from producing zero public wine at all during Prohibition, to becoming the world's leader in both production and consumption by 2000, a scant 70 years later. The answer, it turns out, is a long and fascinating one, and also nicely serves as a mirror for the entire Postmodernist Era to begin with: from the post-war Europhiles of the 1950s who dreamed of a day that Americans would have the casual yet sophisticated relationship to wine that they saw in France and Italy while overseas; to the daring California hippies of the 1960s and '70s who aimed for the so-called "impossible" goal of making wine just as good as the French (SPOILER ALERT: it's not impossible); to the yuppies of the '80s who made the American wine industry both mainstream and lucrative; to the Gen-X foodies of the '90s and '00s who brought a whole new level of refinement to the market, as well as embracing wines from such interesting new places like Seattle and Portland; to the Millennials of our own times, comfortable with the casual screw-tops and hipster labels of 21st-century fine wine, even as they present a challenge to the American market because of their embrace of the so-called "New World" wines of Australia, South Africa, South America and more.
Tom Acitelli presents this entire 70-year history in an engaging, anecdote-filled way here, an informative yet fun-to-read manuscript filled with the kinds of details and deep backstory that makes the history finally understandable. (Just for one example, many of us already know about the 1976 so-called "Judgment of Paris," in which a bunch of American wines beat a bunch of French wines in a blind tasting and became a major global turning point for the industry; but Acitelli devotes an entire chapter to who the guy was who set up the tasting and why that's so important, how it got covered by the media and why it made that particular tasting so influential, etc.) The whole book is like this, a parade of famous and infamous figures combined with a detail-oriented look at the winemaking process, how the historical selection of grapes by these wineries (as well as the technological innovations of the Mid-Century Modernist years) influenced this process, and how the popular culture going on around these winemakers shaped and influenced this history. (It's impossible to understand the rise of American wine, for example, without understanding the rise of the macrame-making, yoga-posing, James-Taylor-listening middle-class hippies of the 1970s, and Acitelli devotes a lot of his page count simply to looking at what the Americans with discretionary income were doing with their time in each era to influence the wine market in those years.) Easily one of the best books on the subject I've read this year, American Wine: A Coming-of-Age Story is a lively and wide-reaching account of a subject that's often hard to pin down, and it comes strongly recommended whether or not you're particularly into wine yourself.
Out of 10: 9.6… (altro)
Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Utenti
- 113
- Popolarità
- #173,161
- Voto
- 3.9
- Recensioni
- 7
- ISBN
- 25
- Preferito da
- 1