Thank you to everyone who has pledged to support 'What Are You Drinking?' in its first week or so. It can be daunting to launch something like this because of how foolish I'd look if no one was interested. You're prevented me from looking foollish. So thanks again.
If this is your first experience of Unbound, I hope you like the concept and have found some other books that might be of interest.
The Author's Shed is a place where it's suggested that I share updates and insights behind the book. I can choose whether to make posts here public or just available to subscribers. For the time being, I think I'll keep things between us. Having helped fund the book being published, you may also get a chance to influence its content and direction!
I thought I'd kick things off by going into a bit more detail about how this book came about.
As I've written elsewhere, mainstream publishing is pulling me away from beer. My agent and my most recent editor both agree that in terms of making a long-term career out of writing books (which is a silly idea to start with) I should broaden out and not just stick to one subject. I agree up to a point, and will hopefully have news of another book about something completely different to announce very soon. But I still spend most of my day in the beer world, meeting beer people, drinking beer, thinking about beer and, yes, writing about beer. But recently I've ended up doing the majority of my beer writing for the beer and pub trade press. That's great, but as a kid I always wanted to be an author, not a trade journalist. I'm not ungrateful at all for the work that pays the mortgage and keeps my knowledge up to date and keeps me in the brilliant and bonkers world of beer, but I miss writing books about it. I miss the adventure and losing myself in the big concept of a book.
And then I look at what's happening in beer from a broader perspective, and I miss it even more.
Hops & Glory - my last book that was properly about beer - was published in 2009. Since then, the whole beer world has gone mental. The craft beer revolution wasn't around in the UK back then. Mainstream people didn't drink good beer - it was still very much a hobbyist thing. And hardly anyone was getting books about beer published. There as maybe one a year, and they were all pretty similar.
Now, everyone is writing about beer! There are so many brilliant books on the subject, the size of my beer library has doubled in the last couple of years. About 400 new breweries have opened in the UK since I wrote Hops & Glory. That book started off with my quest to find the flavours of American hops in British beer. That's pretty easy now - even easier than finding those American hoppy beers in British pubs, bottle shops and supermarkets. There has never been a better time to be a beer drinker. What about being a beer writer?
This was all very much in the back of my mind over the last year or two. I had one or two ideas for new beer books (which are still on the cards if this one works) but other projects always took priority.
Then two things happened quite close together.
The first was that I visited the Kent Green Hop Festival. In case you don't know (and this will be in the book) when hops are harvested they have to be dried within hours or they will start to rot. But an increasing number of brewers in hop growing areas have started to make special green hop beers (also known as wet hop or fresh hop beers). To get this right, the timing has to be perfect. Some brewers have told me that they start a brew in the morning knowing that the hops are about to be picked, and have a van waiting at the hop field to get the fresh hops back to the brewery at just the point they need to be thrown in the copper.
In my experience, green hop beers are not more intensely hoppy, which is what I expected, but the flavour spectrum of the hops is wider. There are more earthy, spicy notes, hints of wild garlic and onion, in addition to the flavours you'd expect.
The Kent Green Hop Festival saw around half a dozen of these beers being made and exhibited together. I was part of a group of journalists invited to the Goods Shed in Canterbury, a wonderful farmers' market-cum-restaurant, to taste them, and then we got to spend the afternoon in a museum hop collection with Peter Darby, one of the world's most passionate and knowledgeable hop experts.
I couldn't stop writing notes.
I wrote up that visit for a trade press article which you can read here. But that 700-word piece only captured a fraction of what I'd been thinking in the hop fields. I'd made some interesting observations, got some quite lyrical language, been told some stuff I thought was amazing, and had loads of questions I wanted to follow up. But none of this felt like a longer article elsewhere. It felt like something different. And because I didn't know what to do with it, I never wrote up the notes.
I've had this experience several times before. This latest one reminded me of a trip I made in 2007 to Chmelfest, in the Czech Saaz hop-growing region. (All the google hits on this insane event are in Czech, but here's a YouTube video that at least gives you a flavour of what it's like.) I had no idea what to do with the notes from that one, and I was busy, and before long I was onto another notebook and I forgot about it. It's too good to be forgotten.
I was out walking the dog - a few days after the green hop fest article was published - and remembered Chmelfest and thought, 'Hang on, I wonder if I could write a book in the style of Three Sheets to the Wind (a book about beery world travels) and make it all about me going around the world looking at hops, all the different varieties, where they're grown, the people who grow them, the differences they make to beer...'
And then I thought 'Why just hops?'
The idea for the book appeared in the next instant, pretty much as described in the synopsis you read before you signed up. My visit to Slovenia was another one that had been filletted for a trade press piece and had more to offer, so I wrote that up for the sample chapter, and thought: 'Yes, I really want to do this.'
And then the second thing happened.
My wife - who runs a literary festival and therefore knows about everything that's happening in the publishing world - pointed out Unbound and how successful it was (bestsellers, Booker shortlists) and suggested it might be a way of publishing beer books. "You should drop them a line," she kept saying. I kept replying that yes, I would.
But before I had a chance to do so, Unbound dropped me an email instead. Or more specifically, its latest hiring did.
Jason Cooper was the editor at Pan Macmillan who bought my first book, Man Walks Into a Pub. He edited that book, and helped make it the success it remains today. He certainly taught me more about how to write a book than anyone else has before or since. And then he suggested I write a beer travel book, and that became Three Sheets to the Wind, and he bought, edited and published that book too. He then left to take a senior position with Faber, but we kept in touch sporadically, and I know he remained very proud of Man Walks into a Pub in particular. In November 2014 - a few weeks after I'd had the idea for this book - Jason took a new job at Unbound, and in his first week there he emailed me to ask if I happened to have any new ideas for beer books, because they really wanted to add beer to their list and thought the subject would work very well for the Unbound model.
And so, here we are. Because you can't ignore fate. I am delighted to be working again with the person who started my career as an author, and delighted to be writing about beer again.
In the next few months I'll be adding to the trips I've already done over the years, filling in the gaps, going to places I've always wanted to, but not had the excuse for, until now.
I hope you'll enjoy coming along for the ride.