Thank you so much!
What Are You Drinking is now 104% funded, so it's full steam ahead. Thank you for believing in the book and expressing your support for it. I'm sure you won't be disappointed when you finally get your copy.
There's still an awful lot of work to do, and I've been travelling pretty constantly over the last couple of months from harvest to harvest, festival to brewery to laboratory. The book is really taking shape, but I've got lots more to do - in the coming months I'll be visiting the laboratory in Norfolk where brewers keep thier yeast strains cryogenically frozen, talking to Guinness in Dublin about water and barley, heading to the Czech Republic to get close up to Saaz hops and artesian well water, and in March I'll be in Australia at the southern hemisphere hop harvest, doing a green hop beer with Galaxy hops!
2015 is also the 500th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot - the Bavarian purity law that stipulated beer could only be made from hops, barley and water and, when it was discovered, yeast. It would be a crime to do a book on these ingredients and not include this, so the celebrations in Germany next spring will probably form the climax of the book. This means I'll probably be submitting a finished typescript in early May. I'll let you know when the release date is confirmed. But the good news is, as subscribers, you should get your copies a couple of months before it hits the shops, as a thank you for your patience.
I'll update this blog with more news of the research for the book. I just got back from the US hop harvest in the Yakima Valley and will post a story about that as soon as my feet touch the ground and I have time to unlock my suitcase. Later, in the New Year, I'll start posting some exclusive preview passages available only to subscribers.
Thanks again! Now to work.
Cheers
Pete