I really love this beer book and recommend you pick up a copy

Joshua Bernstein's The Complete Beer Course was first released in 2013. He decided to completely rework it for its 10th anniversary and it is as vital as ever.

When Joshua Bernstein decided to completely update (and almost nearly rewrite) his transformative book, The Complete Beer Course, to celebrate its 10th anniversary, I had one of those “holy shit” moments. It made me realize how much the beer world has changed in just the last decade.

Hazy IPAs weren’t really a thing 10 years ago. If you visited your local store, it was pretty easy to grab a bottle of your favorite Belgian import. And on and on.

During this decade, Bernstein has established himself as one of the best beverage writers in the country. His work has appeared everywhere, including The New York Times, and he has published numerous books on the evolution of craft beer.

The 10th anniversary edition of The Complete Beer Course arrives at a fascinating time for craft beer — there is more competition than ever and it’s getting harder and harder to stand out. Plus, traditional style guidelines have seemingly become more fluid as brewers become more and more creative. The book is really an educational guide through the modern beer world. It provides insight on styles, pairings, and many other areas from a huge range of perspectives, too.

So I was honored to chat with Bernstein for a few minutes about his latest work, why he decided to add more than 30,000 new words to his classic book, and where he sees the beer industry headed amid these turbulent times. We had a fascinating and far-ranging conversation that could easily be broken down into multiple editions for the newsletter. (I just adore conversations like that. I only wish we had chatted in person and been able to share some beers.)

The new edition of the book officially drops next month. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

How do you get people to care in an era with information swirling everywhere?

JB: Unfortunately, you almost have to bludgeon people into caring. As a writer, I am not used to bludgeoning people. I’d rather hang out in the background and do my thing and then do more things. But it does not work like that.

(Hence the interview with a WNY beer newsletter writer, lol.)

Why did you decide to update such a well known and beloved book like this?

JB: When the original book came out in 2013, it was such a fun and fizzy era of craft brewing. Everything seemed possible. You could dump fried chicken into a beer and everyone was like, ‘Oh, my god, I can’t believe they’re doing that. That’s amazing!’ It felt like we had that moment, probably for most of the 2010s, when things got crazier and crazier and crazier. When the original book came out, we were still talking about styles and we had this common language. If I said Stone IPA, there’s a pretty good chance that someone in New York City or California or everywhere in between would have a pretty good understanding of that beer. There were a certain set of beers you could go out there and try. You could drink through the Belgians, the European imports. That really changed with the massive growth of craft breweries in America.

Just that beer has gotten so much more regional and so much more local and also all these new styles and approaches. Hazy IPAs went from being an accident to something that is lauded. Bitterness went away. All these new hop varieties really drove new flavors. Pastry stouts. Even spontaneously fermented beers. I think we exalted all these things and not a lot of people like the taste of wild beers because they were too challenging to explain for a lot of people getting into beer. And then along came kettle sours with loads of fruit and then so many wild beers dried up and disappeared.

Taking all these things into consideration, I signed on in 2019 to update the book and then 2020 happened. Thinking about, how do you write a book about a fast-changing industry when the world is changing by the hour, by the day, by the week. I took about a year break from working on the book, because who knew what was going to endure, what was still going to be out there. When things started to settle down and our daughter (who is now nine) was back in school, I picked up the book again.

When all of us just started in beer, it was about these beer pilgrimages. You would need to go to Portland, San Diego, maybe you book a trip to Belgium, maybe you go to this one beer bar in this one city you’ve always wanted to visit, but that changed. How could you recommend people go to all these places when so many had closed down? A book is definitely an object that’s locked in time. It’s not going to evolve. I mean, your gas stations and convenience stores have better beer right now than your best beer stores had 10 years ago. Taking all these calls to actions by being a better beer drinker by going to all these places, we replaced it with people. There is still this really big misunderstanding about what happens in a brewery and who these people are. I really shined a light on all these people and told their stories. Everyone was really more accessible and will help deepen understanding of styles.

What surprised you about this process?

JB: What was originally going to be a quick polish job became really about tearing it down and writing a book for a new world of beer. The original edition was around 95,000 words and the new edition is 125,000 words. You could say there are 30,000 new words. But of the original words, a lot were excised. The original had 10 pages on beer weeks. And nobody cares about beer weeks any more. Of the original words, I’d say at least half were revised or rewritten. There are very few pages in the book without new content.

How much did the pandemic alter and change the craft beer world?

JB: We’re still waiting to see the full repercussions. I think we’re in a burnout phase right now. People are just chugging along and they’re exhausted. Everyone’s PPP money has dried up. We all have an exhaustible supply of energy. It’s not inexhaustible. People are just trying to keep their businesses going and I think we’re going to see a lot more consolidations kicking in, closures kicking in. I think we’re going to see a lot more of this happening. In the book, too, I had to make a lot of conscious decisions about what breweries I would include, what breweries I think will stand the test of time, what beer styles are going to be flashes in the pan. Hazy IPAs have staying power. But in the IPA section, I made it contain a lot more tiny bits about these styles, because I don’t know if cold IPA is going to stick around. Brut IPA fizzled out. I think our trend cycles are so accelerated now that the birth and death of these new sub-variants is just happening so rapidly. Part of that is travel, the internet, and just these cycles that we go through. Part of that is that it seems like people are settling in. It was really exciting for people to try flights of beer and try 100 different beers in a month or whatever. Those days are slowing down a bit — this churn of things coming out every week from a brewery. People aren’t lining up like they used to. Just because you make something new doesn’t mean someone wants to drink it. I think people are settling into old favorites now. It seems like a resting point for some people. They know what makes them happy and they’ve tried all these flavors. We’re in a weirdly pretty good place.

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