Brews and grapes go together

Beer! Brewskie! Bia! Suds! Cold one! Beer is the world’s most widely consumed, most likely oldest, alcoholic beverage; it is the third most popular drink after water and tea. The independent beer-making industry (craft beers) has taken off over the last few decades!

Yet, strangely enough, beer is still somehow considered pedestrian compared to other types of alcoholic beverages, especially wine. But now with thousands of types of beers, even the average beer drinker has expanded their palette and have been enjoying and learning all manner of subtleties of flavors and consistencies of their beers.

In fact, now there are many similarities to the experience of learning beers as there are with wines. So, for those who find beer their drink of choice, but find the seemingly-complicated world of wines intimidating, this is where Jim Laughren’s fun and humorous “A Beer Drinker’s Guide to Knowing and Enjoying Fine Wine” comes to your rescue.

Laughren’s book helps you to realize that your taste buds already have the skill sets required to explore this other realm. In just a mere 195 pages, “A Beer Drinker’s Guide” gives you all the basics to understanding what wines are, how they are made, where they come from, and even how to describe them with “wino-terms” (if you ever are in the situation where you need to “show-off”). Great, too, is that along the way Laughren makes comparisons to things that beer drinkers will already be familiar with.

So now when you are invited over for a glass of wine, or to your local wine-tasting event, you’ll be able to prove to your wine drinking friends that you’ve got palette skills and perhaps can beat them on their home court! Then invite them over for a righteous beer-tasting by a rightfully appreciative beer connoisseur — you!

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Ed and Cynthia Justus own The Bookstore in Hanapepe.