Travellers' Checks | Beer gets the National Geographic treatment in new guidebook, but it’s more for your coffee table than your pocket
Billed as ‘the ultimate beer lover’s guide to the world’, new volume has a rival in equally heavyweight The World Atlas of Beer; both are useful if you want to discover what’s beyond your hotel minibar
Beer – unlike wine and spirits – is a drink that most countries seem to be able to produce to at least a drinkable standard, and sampling a local ale can be one of the more sociable ways of connecting with a culture when travelling. Many of the world’s finest brews can be found in the new National Geographic Atlas of Beer, by Nancy Hoalst-Pullen and Mark Patterson.
Commissioned by National Geographic to be a less academic version of another work by the same authors, titled The Geography of Beer: Regions, Environment, and Societies (2014), it promises to be “the ultimate beer lover’s guide to the world”.
Containing more than 200 pictures and 100 maps, it also claims to be “the most visually stunning and comprehensive beer atlas available”. This, of course, suggests that there is another, similar volume on the market, and that would be The World Atlas of Beer, by Tim Webb and Stephen Beaumont, which was published in a revised and expanded edition a year ago.