Cheers! An Intemperate History of Beer in Canada

Here is an interesting read, the cover will get you drunk by just looking at it. It seems that between wine and beer two social that beer seems to fall on the wayside. Wine is always seen as a snob drink of the rich and beer belonging to the poor class. Fine wine can fetch a pretty penny and beer can be bought in just about any corner shop depending on government laws. Malt making has been around since the Egyptians and popular with European hooligans who are seen as beer bums. Canada’s love for beer in many quarters is a symbol of language and culture. Many fine independent breweries have created many variations of beer and thriving in competition with big breweries. Beer gets more respect in Canada and the proof is in the pudding with the vast brands that exist throughout the land. Cheers! An Intemperate History of Beer in Canada by Nicholas Pashley is an intoxicating read of wit brewed with wry.

The practice of winemaking and drinking has all sorts of fancy names: oenology, both viniculture and viticulture, vinifaction and so on. It is telling that most wine-related words are Latinate words, usually a sign of pretension, while the words that describe brewing tend to come from Old English or German (and sometimes Old Norse) and are more fun to say: malt, hop, sparge, wort, ullage, grist. These are good, honest words for a good, honest beverage. In recent years, beer people have adopted the pleasant word “zymurgy” for what they get up to, though it means, strictly speaking, the science of fermentation in general, not just for the purpose of making beer.