Monday, April 26, 2010

“HOT KNIVES’ GREATEST SIPS”

This thing's not a book per se, and is more a cherry-picked collection of blog posts from the outstanding HOT KNIVES site. These two fellas - Evan & Alex - have been wordsmithing purveyors of vegetarian cuisine, jujitsu-style veggie cooking, and most importantly, craft beer drinking for some time now. I discovered their Hot Knives blog a while back, and it has been a favorite read for years – again, tickling my pleasure centers primarily when they write about the world’s great beers in their quote-unquote inimitable style. They did one of these DIY publishing deals recently, where they gather their best writings on beer, throw in some Xeroxed photos of said beer, hit the “publish” button – and voila: an instabook. I just read it this weekend, and boy did it make me want to get my beer on.

It’s called “GREATEST SIPS" and before we get too far, I should let you know it’s available for purchase here for a mere $10. It is without hyperbole that I can proclaim it’s the best writing on beer – a subject littered with some of the most abominable, hackneyed writing imaginable – that I have ever read (or for that matter, contributed to). Alex Brown and Evan George are kings of metaphorical forays into the heart of beer, and when they want to tell you something is delicious, it’s not simply going to be a rote recitation about hops, malts nor lacing on the glass. It’s all about context, location, and extemporaneous things that might be only vaguely related to the get-down matter at hand – and yet all the while, they’re able to give a note-perfect rendering of what, say, a DUCHESSE DE BOURGOGNE tastes like. The writing is truly fun, somewhat breezy and upbeat, while possessing more than a few five-dollar words. And they claim to listen to some pretty rad music while doing their sampling and reportage, ranging from Augustus Pablo to Psychic TV to Black Flag. I was on a self-imposed 7-day beer hiatus that was shattered not even 2 days into it, thanks to this fine little book. That’s how good these guys are, and that's how crucial it is that you pick a copy of this up posthaste.