BOV Book Club: Fermenting Revolution

I went into Fermenting Revolution (Christopher Mark O’Brien, 2006, 288 pp) with fairly high hopes. I like beer! I’m fairly fond of the planet. If I can indulge my wannabe hippie ways and have an excuse to buy and drink beer, well, that’s about as good as it gets.

Unfortunately, I finished the book and didn’t really come away with anything new. He has essentially three main points:

• Beer is awesome
• Local is better
• Big corporations care more about profits than the environment or quality of their product, which isn’t true of smaller brewers

I’m not saying any of those are wrong. It’s just that, well, I knew that going in. It’s why I bought the book. There seems to be a catch 22 involved in that the only people who care about his message are already converted, which was a similar complaint (among others) I had with Fahrenheit 9/11 (except Fermenting Revolution contains less references to books about pet goats).

The book starts with a history of beer, but I think O’Brien gets carried away in his enthusiasm because most of it comes off as unsubstantiated cheerleading. I like beer as much as — actually, who are we kidding? Far more than — the next guy, but I don’t need to make every event in the history of humanity about beer. He claims that early humans started settling down in agrarian societies so that they could grow barley for beer, which is an interesting interpretation that may be true but which is harmed by much of the rest of his history, which seems to fall victim to ‘if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ What really got me was the assertion that George Washington harvested ice to bring back to Mt Vernon to cool his beer. I know the founding fathers liked beer, and some even brewed their own, but are you really trying to tell me that beer is the only reason people needed ice in the late 18th century?

There’s also a lot of the standard craft beer lover rhetoric about how the evil corporations removed the soul of beer which is only now being restored by the Kochs and Cagliones and Cilurzos (Cilurzi?) of the country. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you feel good about drinking beer, and much of the talk about the history and tradition of our favorite beverage made me feel this odd, almost religious notion which I’ve begun to call ‘communing with beer,’ which I experienced  in Chicago.

There was some good material towards the end regarding the health benefits of alcohol and beer in general (in moderation: he cites studies that show that overconsumption raises the risks that moderate consumption lowers), and while scientists have a habit of contradicting each other every five to 10 years (are eggs good or bad for you today?) it’s still good to know that there are those who think that a daily drink has medicinal benefits. One report mentioned says that it’s not the amount that you consume that matters but rather the regularity, so a beer a day is better than two every other, which has led me to try to always fit in a beer somewhere in my routine (a chore, to be sure).

One thing that has to be said, though: Dude. The puns. They have to stop. Globeerization. Beerrevolution. Don’t think the italics are mine, either. I generally like plays on words, but there are so many and they are so constant that they began to set my teeth on edge. The books is about beer. We get it. Now please stop before God kills another kitten.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing offensive in Fermenting Revolution. There just isn’t too much that people reading this will find new or enlightening. If you hate dirty hippies talking about that global warming myth then you’ll find nothing of interest here, and if you hate evil conservatives bending mother earth over the counter then you’re already doing everything O’Brien says. If you’re in Buffalo, I’ll make it easy for you: buy Flying Bison.