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American Craft Beer delivers craft beer news, entertainment and lifestyle 24/7, and because we do we’re occasionally sent books to review. And we recently received a book from one of beer journalism’s best writers that takes on craft beer’s most popular style and delivers.
Complete IPA: The Guide to Your Favorite Craft Beer by Joshua M. Bernstein is a love letter to the IPA and a contemporary guide to the best India Pale Ales in the world. Given the style’s enormous popularity, and its importance as a driving force behind craft beer’s worldwide growth today, this book is as timely as it may be essential.
First a little about the book’s author, Joshua M. Bernstein, who unlike many who’ve taken to writing books on beer, is both a passionate fan and crack writer. A critically acclaimed Brooklyn-based beer, spirits, food, and travel journalist, Bernstein has already authored two of our favorite beer books, Brewed Awakening and The Complete Beer Course – and with the release of his latest, he’s done it again.
“Complete” is the operative word for this exhaustive new “guide to your favorite craft beer,” which comprehensively runs the gamut from the IPA’s early beginnings to what it’s become today.
The best English IPAs are deftly showcased and their historical importance explained, as are a vast selection American IPAs, all divided by the regions that can influence them. Some of his selections are well-known and widely celebrated – others are sleepers from small breweries that you might not have heard of.
Bernstein tackles the art behind brewing a serious session IPA, and gets into the double, triple and quadruple IPAs that might warrant any beer lover’s attention.
The author chronicles the IPA’s many emerging variations – the red, white and black IPAs, the rise of the Belgian IPAs, the rye and wheat IPAs – as well as the growing world of dry-hopped sours. And he writes about everything in a refreshing manner that’s never elitist and always engaging.
For those of us who love IPAs (and really, who doesn’t?) Joshua M. Bernstein’s Complete IPA is the most comprehensive guide to the subject that we’ve ever seen – and it’s a truly entertaining and enlightening read.
