Book Review: The Brewer's Tale by William Bostwick

More Interesting As Travelogue And Memoir Than History. This is one of those more Food Network type shows where the real action is in the personality traveling and talking to people cooking things then experimenting back in their own kitchen with versions of those things over a more History Channel more history-first look with perhaps a bit of modern flair. Read in this manner, it works reasonably well. Come into it expecting the History Channel version... and you're going to be disappointed.

I read this on my near daily March For My Health walks in the week before Halloween 2026, so I can't speak to its bibliography at all, but my own experience with it was good enough. The travel and the personal experimentation were reasonably interesting, and the history was accurate enough in the areas I knew - and in at least some instances coincided pretty tightly with the vastly more History Channel miniseries type book I had read just before this book, Drink by Iain Gately, which was about the history of human consumption of alcohol more generally than with about beer more exclusively, as here.

Narratively, this book takes almost a Canterbury Tales type approach looking at different types of beers through different types of people and their experiences with that type of beer, and I thought that approach worked well for what this book ultimately was.

Overall a pretty decent book on the subject, and one that I can personally attest will work well as an audiobook while on at least normal workouts where you just need something interesting to occupy your mind for an hour or so at a time.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Brewer's Tale by William Bostwick was originally written on [Date].