Jonny Garrett is celebrating winning the drink book category at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards with The Meaning of Beer: An Alternative History of the World.
Jonny at the awards ceremony. Photograph: Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty Images
It’s a revisionist history of humanity, claiming that beer is among its greatest inventions, along with fire and language.
Since its invention 13,000 years ago, our love of beer has shaped everything from religious ceremonies to advertising, and architecture to bioengineering, says Jonny.
The people who built the pyramids were paid in ale, the first fridge was built for beer not food, bacteria was discovered while investigating sour beer, Germany’s beer halls hosted Hitler’s rise to power, and brewers yeast may yet be the answer to climate change. Ultimately, it’s not a book about how we made beer, but how beer made us.
The Meaning of Beer tells the stories of these incredible human moments and inventions, taking the reader to some of the best-known beer destinations in the world — Munich and Oktoberfest, Carlsberg Brewery’s historic laboratory, St Louis and the home of Budweiser — as well as those lesser-known, from a 5,000 year old brewery in the Egyptian desert to Arctic Svalbard, home to the world’s most northerly pub.
