"Mikkeller's Big Book of Beer" by Mikkel Borg Bjergso and Pernille Pang

You can say what you like about Mikkeller, but damn, that is one successful brand. The beers are great, albeit with a few conceptual mishaps along the way. This book is similar, in that overall it's quite inspiring, but not without a few niggles.

There are the usual potted histories of beer, both ancient and modern, with a surprising (to me, anyway) hat-tip to the formation of CAMRA being a key point, as well the familiar story of the roots of American craft brewing. A big portion of the book is given over to a whistle-stop tour of the world's classic beers styles, along with a couple of Mikkeller beers that sit within that style, along with a couple of other examples. It's fair to say that most of the beers mentioned in the book are at the geekier end the spectrum, but equally there are mentions of Pilsner Urqell, Hoegaarden and Guinness as style exemplars.

There's a bit about ingredients, a bit about the brewing process, and then a load of recipes for homebrew versions of some of the beers the book. And not just the obvious Mikkeller beers - All Other Pale, Jackie Brown - but some of the trickier beers too - Beer Geek Bacon, anyone? A nice bonus is the inclusion of non-Mikkeller recipes - Firestone Walker Wookey Jack, Kernel Imperial Brown Stout, De Molen Hemel & Aarde will no doubt have brew kettles boiling everywhere.

Sure, there are a few howlers. Popular beer myths are retold. Almost every page had something that made me scurry off and check facts or assertions. In the homebrewing section, oxygenation is referred to as oxidation, which I'm assuming is just a remarkably unfortunate mistranslation. And no matter how many times I read this section on sour ales (exemplar: Rodenbach Grand Cru), I couldn't tell if was a deft linguistic game of logic, or just something that never got edited properly:

"As its name implies, a sour ale tastes sour like a lambic but, unlike a lambic, it is fermented with a traditional ale yeast and only then does get a mix of lactic acid bacteria and wild yeast added. Unlike sour ales, wild ales are not necessarily sour. A subcategory of sour ales is wild ales, which are often paler and have Brettanomyces added. Unlike sour ales, wild ales are not necessarily sour"

Er, OK, let's just get to the summary, shall we?

This book is beer porn, a fetished, partial view of the beer world from one of its most successful niche operators. But equally, it's hard to know who this book is for. Beer historians and home-brewers may well wince at parts of it, but I guess it's not meant as a reference book or a how-to manual. It's the story and summary of an obsessed amateur's transition to an obsessed professional. Mikkeller have undoubtedly produced some amazing beers, and will continue to do so, albeit in the rarified upper strata of the beer world. It's Mikkel's view of the world of beer, and given his success, who am I to criticise?

Brew Britannia: The Strange Rebirth of British Beer

There they are, the seldom-seen kids, Boak (left) and Bailey (right) in full flow at North Bar. Except they're not really kids any more - they're properly grown-up and have just published a meticulously researched book about the last 40 years of British brewing. So precise has some of this research been that I half expected them to appear in white lab coats and carrying clipboards. But no - smart casual it was.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved the pen sketches of all the major protagonists of the Society of Preservation of Beers from the Wood, of the early Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale. A lot of the early players have reached almost mythological status, burnished to an aged sheen by long nights in smoky, coal-fired public bars. But as the zoom is pulled back to nearer the present day, the characters seem curiously less fully-formed, less sure of themselves, or just less engaging

Could it be that the major players and the key points from 40-odd years ago have had their histories validated more by being told and re-told, and passing almost into folklore, while the nearer you get to the present day, the less entrenched are the stories of the key players? Or is it that the major players in the recent history of beer simply aren't as interesting as those of even 20 years ago? Or perhaps their motivations are different, less concerned with a wider culture and more interested in some 21st century Cult Of The Self. After all, it's better to have someone tell stories about you than have to do it yourself. Or put it another way - Michael Hardman got an MBE for services to beer - can we see that happening to James Watt in 30 years time?

There's no doubt that this is a character-driven book, and this is it's great strength. The beer industry was (and is) full of great characters, and Boak and Bailey give the impression that many of them did it for the craic, for shits and giggles, and, in the internet age, teh lulz. Indeed, the more precarious the story - David Bruce and birth of the Firkin chain, Sean Franklin driving a taxi during lean times - the more engaging it becomes. More recent parts of the story seem to lack a bit of definition, but given that history is written by the victors, and the craft wars are still being waged, this isn't surprising.

Boak and Bailey are undoubtedly meticulous archive-diggers, but the recent present isn't particularly well archived yet. The modern story hasn't been told enough times that it can be re-told with any certainty or clarity, so at some point, this book stops being a record of what happened, and becomes part of the making of the story itself. How very meta.

If you're even vaguely curious about why you can get a beer that is as good as Brewdog Punk IPA in almost every supermarket in the UK, then this book has the answers. It's a fascinating tale of peculiarly British pluck and pioneering spirit, all washed down with lots of great beer. What more do you want?

It's about how British beer has turned half circle. The really interesting question is, where next?