Apologies to everyone who was hoping they might have my next beer book in time for Christmas, but the good news is that the book is now finished, edited, and now just has to go through final proof-reading before being typeset and sent to the printers.
Now I've delivered the book, the team at Unbound (and me) all have a much better idea of what the book is and how it should be presented. It's not moved too far from the original pitch, but it has become a bit bigger in scope. Also, when you're writing, certain themes and motifs come through that were always buried in there but weren't necessarily apparent in the early stages.
So increasingly, 'What Are You Drinking?' has felt like the wrong title for this book. It was snappy and worked well when we came up with it, but now feels like it doesn't do justice to the story within.
One of those themes that has emerged is that when you first come to beer, it feels like each of the four main ingredients contains a miracle. For much of our existence, beer must have seemed genuinley miraculous: we knew how to brew, but we had no idea why what we did worked. The most obvious one is the action of yeast, which was called 'godisgoode' in the Middle Ages because no one had any idea how fermentation worked. But before you can brew, you need to malt your barley, and in some ways that's just as incredible: barley grains must be 'modified' before their sugars can turn into alcohol, in a process that activates enzymes in the grains that break down big blocks of starch into simpler sugars. Scientists only identified the existence and role of enzymes less than 200 years ago. But evidence suggests we could have been malting barley for over 10,000 years. How did we work that out?
These questions and discoveries happen throughout the entire book. So we've now renamed it: MIRACLE BREW, with the subtitle, 'Hops, barley, water, yeast and the nature of beer.'
With that sorted, we could get on with the cover art. Of all my books so far, my favourite cover has been for Hops & Glory, the story of my attempt to recreate the famous sea journey of India Pale Ale from Burton on Trent to Calcutta (shit, it's ten years this week since I had that idea...).
In my old job in advertising, it was my role to give creative teams a sharp, focused, single-minded brief from which they could write successful and impactful ideas. The brief I gave Neil Gower, the artist my previous publisher Pan Macmillan commissioned for the cover of Hops & Glory, is the worst brief I've ever given anyone. It would have driven my old advertising colleagues to physical violence, it was so bad. I said, "Yeah, the cover needs to look like a beer label, but it also needs to be a bit Indian-y, kind of Victorian, but also modern."
It was an impossible brief. But somehow, Neil managed to meet it:
As soon as I saw this, I begged Pan Mac to allow Neil to redesign my previous two books, updating the text of Man Walks into a Pub as we did so:
This gave us my 'beer trilogy.' Since then I've expanded from straight beer writing into social history, cider, pubs from a cultural perspective rather than a beery perspective, and food and drink more broadly. Incredibly, 'Miracle Brew' will be my first straight 'beer book' in eight years. The design of those other books has moved around quite a bit. I didn't want this one to look exactly like the trilogy: the writing has moved on, and I'm with a different publisher now. But I did want it to link back thematically to those first three books, so I knew immediately that I wanted Neil to do the design. He's aced it yet again:
The general release of the book is sheduled for May/June. As subscribers you'll get your copies earlier. I'll post again when I have a more definite idea of the date.