Book & Booze Project

The book & booze project began as a way to stay creative during the long evenings of the early pandemic. The premise is simple: one book, one drink. I’m neither a literary critic nor a cicerone, so the reviews are intended to provide people with basic reading recommendations rather than deep literary analysis, and the booze reviews are just to add a little levity to an otherwise anxiety-ridden era. Now that the world has opened up a bit more, I’ve expanded the project to include interviews with booze-industry folks about what they’re reading, drinking, and making.

I’ve included a limited selection of posts below, and you can find the project in in its entirety on my Instagram.

Hurricane Season and Budweiser

Today I’d like to discuss “Hurricane Season” by Fernanda Melchor, and attempt to drink an abnormally large can of Budweiser.

This book is so fucking good. Hurricane Season is the English-language debut of a Mexican novelist who we are lucky to have access to. It concerns the gossip and reconstruction of events, from multiple points of view, surrounding the murder of a witch in a squalid Mexican town.

Structurally, this is an incredibly ambitious novel. It only has eight paragraphs, and many of the sentences are multiple pages long. Entire lives are contained in one sentence, without any drag in tension, making reading the book an intense and absorbing experience, you really can’t put it down. The characters–destitute, hateful, and uncommonly flawed people, are rendered somehow lovable, or at least palatable, by Melchor’s empathy to the utter powerlessness they inhabit and the violence they have inherited. This is a town rife with superstition, unbridled machismo, femicide, addiction, and crushing resignation to the greed and corruption that consumes it. It is one of the most violent-and certainly the most vulgar-books I’ve ever read. It is also one of the best. If you can stomach it, this is a book of staggering talent by a writer I can’t wait to read more from.

I should also give a shout out to Sophie Hughes for the incredible translation, whose command of profanities, among other things, is admirable.

Okay, the Budweiser. Bud’s alright. As cheap beers go, I kind of like it, as long as it’s cold. But that’s the problem with this can. This can is 740ml. It took me an hour to drink it and by that time it was flat and warm, so, unappealing at best.

The only reason anyone should make a can this big is to take advantage of surface area to volume ratios in order to conserve aluminum. But here’s a neat fact about aluminum: it’s infinitely recyclable. That’s right, it does not degrade. One can could make another identically sized can, in perpetuity. Neat, right? So we don’t need to conserve aluminum by making abnormally large cans of mediocre beer, we just need to get better at recycling what we currently have.

This can is too big.

The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, and bottled margaritas.

We’re going to dip into some layman’s ornithology today with “The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America” and “The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World,” by Matt Kracht. And then we’ll try bottled margarita.

I bought these books for my pal Jack, a birder, for his birthday, but then I flipped through them on the way home and they were so good I decided to keep them for myself. Sorry Jack. Happy belated.

Kracht’s guides are affectionately disdainful, profanity-laced, and laugh-out-loud funny introductions to some of the most common feathered idiots that plague the earth. Kracht, a designer and art director, endured a fourth-grade bird-watching assignment so traumatizing it spurred a lifelong obsession with talking shit about birds, and bird-watching in general.

Not only are these books smart, hilarious, and easily digestible, but they’re also useful. After reading through them, I surprised myself by correctly identifying an American Goldfinch on a hike the following day. If you are, like me, occasionally struck by the notion that you should know more about birds, but lack the fortitude required to slog through a taxonomic bird book, these sarcastic (yet practical) pocket guides may be just what you need.

Alright, pre-made margarita in a jug! It’s not half bad. It’s a little too sweet, and in my mind a mezcal margarita with fresh lime and a chili salt rim is a near-perfect drink. So this is a poor substitute for that. But it’ll work if you need margaritas in a pinch. Like an emergency margarita.

So if you’re in the throes of the next unprecedented disaster and the gas lines are ruptured and on fire and your neighbour limps over from the rubble to tell you the roads are washed away and no more fresh food will be getting into the city and despite, or because of, the immediate existential threat of the situation you think to yourself, “A margarita would be nice right now,” then, good news bucko, this shit is shelf-stable.

I don’t plan on buying this regularly but I will finish the bottle and then purchase one more. It will be perfect for my earthquake kit.

21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, and Molson Canadian.

Today many people uncritically celebrate Canada Day, so I’d like to talk about “21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act” by Bob Joseph, and subject myself to Molson Canadian.

The Indian Act has governed the relationship between Canada and First Nations people from 1876 to today. It is a punitive piece of legislation whose aim is the elimination of Indigenous peoples through assimilation, disenfranchisement, kidnapping, and poverty by design. But most settlers know shit-all about it.

Between 2008 and 2012 I took every class in Indigenous relations offered at McGill, and I was still surprised by 11 of the items in this book. In the interest of fairness, I fell asleep in most of my classes and only did ⅔ of the homework. But the point stands: our education system is eurocentric, and our resulting ignorance breeds injustice. This book is a clear, succinct, and critically important work for the path to reconciliation, and it should be in the high school curriculum.

So, the Canadian. It tastes like a bad music festival, but that’s not my problem with it. My problem is how many people put more energy into Molson-style patriotism than they do into engaging with the complexities of living in a colonizing country.

Our popular culture is Hockey Night and Timmie’s and Out for a Rip. To be clear, I have no problem with Out for a Rip. I love ripping down forestry service roads-hacking darts and crushing beers-as much as the next dud. And that’s okay. It is okay to love and be grateful for aspects of your culture (yes, even when that culture is whiteness), but that doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility of figuring out what parts of that culture perpetuate harm to other people, and then ceasing to do those things. Like, for instance, shooting off fireworks to celebrate Indigenous genocide.

But for the purposes of this review, let’s pretend Canada is perfect, and lazily adhering to brand nationalism is the best we can do as a country. Then can we at least pick another beer? Because this one tastes like carbonated bathwater and I want to think we can do better.

Chattin’ books with booze industry folks.

Matt Beere, of Beere Brewing

H: Tell me about your book

M: It’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake. It’s about how mycelia are everywhere, underneath the forest is an entire network of communication. It blows my mind, every page. You’re not going to get real nice words out of me, it’s trippy as fuck.

H: Do you think there’s a reason both brewers I’ve interviewed are big into fungi?

M: It’s not a coincidence. I bet if you interview a lot of brewers they’ll all bring their mushroom books. Maybe it’s a DIY thing. Maybe we like getting dirty. Yeast is a fungus. And brewers are nerds, to know about the multitude of things mushrooms can do is very interesting. Some will kill you, some will make you see stuff, some will eat plastic. It’s very current, talking about mushrooms is in vogue right now, isn’t it?

H: You started brewing at 19. How’d you get into it so young?

M: My grandparents got me a Mr. Beer homebrew extract kit. I tried it and it was terrible. No offense to them. Don’t record that. But it got me thinking, could I do this better? Having the chance to improve something was very satisfying.

H: You have a baby. Is being a new father with a hospitality biz in a pandemic as relaxing as it sounds?

M: It’s super relaxing! No, it’s not. I’m more tired, for sure. I say tired and it makes me tired, thinking about it. But the baby thing has been amazing. With the brewery and the pandemic, it was just fine. This community was so supportive. We closed the tasting room and people lined up to get off-sales.

H: Your favourite beer style to make?

M: Lagers. When you make so many hazy IPAs and fruit sours, you try it all, and eventually you just want something clean and crispy. The pursuit of making a very good lager is exciting, because it’s harder to really excel at.

H: Why are there so many sours and hazy IPAs?

M: People like them. I like them too, and I like to make them. You can be very inventive, especially with the weird fruity shit. Your imagination is the limit. But when it comes to slugging one back, lagers. But nobody cares about them. You could make the best lager of your life and people will be like, “cool.”

Jeff and Nathaly of Windfall Cider, Part One

H: Tell me about your books!

J: Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. I was in my first year of university. I came out of high school having read the Communist Manifesto and about socialism, and you get affected by it. Then you get into university and start figuring out your place in the world. When I read this, the theme of social justice, the haves and the have nots, how the world is skewed in such a way as to make it very difficult for those that want to do the right thing, to do the right thing. It touched me in such a way that I hadn’t been touched before by a book. I cried. I have not been caused to cry by a book since, nor had I before.

N: Us Conductors by Shaun Michaels. He’s a Canadian author, a music writer. He got interested in the story of Lev Termen and wanted to do a biography on him, but got creative and did a fictional biography. This is the 1920s, Termen is a Russian inventor who came to the US and invented an electronic music device called the theremin. We think of electronic music now as if it’s nothing, but the beginning was disruptive. There is a spy component to the book, that he fell into because of his immigrant status. As an immigrant I identify with his story, the deals that sometimes you have to do when you leave your home. It’s a love story, an inventor story, there’s spy shit. I love a book that can take me to a place in time, and to a very niche place. Nobody plays the theremin anymore, but if you’re a music lover, you know what this device did.

H: How was this cidery inspired by a trip to Mexico City?

N: Jeff had not really been exposed to craft cider.

J: I made cider at home for a long time, but I thought that it had to be sweet, because that’s the kind of cider you find here.

N: So we went to Mexico City, and we had dinner with a lovely couple. She was celiac. So I ordered Spanish cider for the table, Jeff had a try of it, and he was blown away by what craft cider could be, how pairable it could be, how complex it was. So we got home and he started experimenting with his ferments, in the drier craft style, and we thought, there’s probably a market. We did some research, got excited about it, and decided to start Windfall.

Read part two

Azlan Graves of Main Street Brewing

H: Tell me about your books.

A: I brought two. All That The Rain Promises and More, it’s a pocket guide to western mushrooms by David Arora. It’s quirky, it’s weird, it has a lot of fun anecdotal stories, but mainly it’s a good way to find mushrooms that are either edible, or will kill you.

Then Mycelium Wassonii, a graphic novel by Brian Blomerth. It’s about the North American discovery of magic mushrooms. It’s got really beautiful psychedelic pictures. He’s almost developed a language for the mushrooms, and he’s really well researched. It’s something I go back to regularly and keep picking out neat little intricacies.

H: So you’re a mushroom guy.

A: It’s something that developed when me and my partner got together, it gives purpose to a forest walk, just to discover things.

H: Is there a link between mycology and brewing?

A: I’ve tried to link it together for sure. I made a turkey tail saison with a friend. The turkey tails gave it a really nice classic mushroom umami character, but also this neat cinnamon note. I’ve heard of people doing beers with chantarelles or chaga, but if I’d picked enough chantarelles to make a beer I’d probably rather eat the chantarelles.

H: What’s your favourite part about working in the beer industry?

A: There’s a lot of satisfaction about seeing my own beer on shelves. And the industry has a really good sense of community here in Vancouver.

H: Your least favourite part?

A: I’d say all the cleaning but that can be rewarding in its own way.

H: If money weren’t an issue, what would be your dream beer to make?

A: Some weird historical beer that I can’t find a commercial example of. I’ve been interested in Keptinis. It’s Lithuanian, they bake the mash until it’s blackened on top, and then mix that back in and pour that off. But I don’t know if I’d want to drink more than a couple glasses of it. There’s so much cultural experience assigned to taste, and it’s like, ah, I’ll never be able to experience that, maybe I can try to replicate it and get a better idea of it.

H: Absent the cultural experience, do you think it would still be fun?

A: I’d probably be like, this is gross and weird, but interesting.