Product Description

The most comprehensive guide to ales and lagers sold in the United States: More than 2,700 beers are described and rated, based on tens of thousands of reviews on RateBeer.com, the country's foremost beer judging website. "We found RateBeer to be the most reliable," says Men's Journal. Includes bonus food-pairing guide by award-winning beer writer Stan Hieronymus, as well as descriptions of major beer styles. Makes a perfect -- and highly affordable -- gift for the beer geeks on your list. Updated October 2007.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63615 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-09
• Released on: 2006-10-15
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Review
Brutally honest, it has a good deal of hilarious commentary and studying it can only improve your Beer IQ. Brilliant food-to-beer guide. --Dayton Daily News

Review
A handy reference guide to beers from around the world, its 2,700 reviews are by Rate.Beer.com's top evaluators. Each entry includes the beer style, brewery information and a description of the beer. --Celebrator Beer News Magazine

Review
The Beer Guide has a great beer-food pairing cheat sheet. --Joe Six-Pack, Philadelphia Daily News

Customer Reviews

Excellent!
I bought this for my fiancee for Christmas and he likes it so much he wants to take it into beer stores with him to evaluate what beers he wants to get. For the beer lover this is a great buy. Well worth the price paid too.

Should be in every beer geek's back pocket
The perfect guide to bring into a wide-selection beer shop. To be sure, it's the beer geek's view of the world, so the hoppier the beer, the better. But no other guide is so comprehensive. Similar to a Zagat restaurant guide in approach, its ratings are based on consumer responses. And with this in hand, you'll never have a disappointing ale or lager again. The food-pairing guide alone is worth the cover price.

A decent, but not definitive guide ...
The Beer Guide offers a brief, non-pictoral look at over 2,700 imported and domestic beers. If you're looking for a quick reference guide, this one is decent enough, but there are a a few inconsistencies with the book that make it less than stellar. First of all, several well known craft beers are missing from the book altogether (Troeg's Nugget Nectar, for example), other beers are "questionably categorized" - old ales are sometimes labeled barleywines - and the rating system they devised for this book, a 1-5 point system, is utterly useless and arbitrary. Several good, but not great domestic craft beers, like Smuttynose Shoals Pale Ale, are rated a 5 ... the highest rating, right alongside beers like Westvleteren 12 ... and rated higher than beers like Three Floyds Dark Lord ...! I know beer ratings are a subjective art, but c'mon.

All in all, this is a very good beginners guide and the problems inherent in the book may only bother a true beer geek. Despite it's limitations, I've enjoyed thumbing through it.