Built like a guide, the book has chapters that are divided by beer styles and offer detailed tasting notes along with examples of beers commonly available in the marketplace. Then Fletcher notes the detailed nuances of cheese that pair well with said beers, and why. The author, a seasoned food journalist, deftly weaves in stories of the brewers and cheesemakers to illustrate her pairing points.

Although she is based in San Francisco, Fletcher doesn’t tend to favor the West Coast when it comes to beer suggestions or specific creameries. Seeing how both beer and cheese are universal, this is a global tour of gastronomical and sensory delights that will have you scouring both the local and import aisles.

All the major beer styles are covered, and even humble workhorses like brown ales and cheddar get their due. But it’s the way that Fletcher tackles complex beers like lambics and Flanders red and brown ales that really helps both educate and explain why they work with triple-cream cheeses, aged Gouda or even chèvre. Here she also acknowledges when pairings just don’t work.

“As for fizzy, highly sweetened fruit lambics, think of them as refreshment, perhaps, but not as good partners for cheese,” she writes.

A solid hardcover, this book deserves to be displayed on a coffee table rather than hidden on a shelf. Also best to keep it close at hand, since the beer and cheese pairing chart at the rear of the book will be getting quite the workout as you explore the world of pairings.

In his newest book, Shakespeare’s Pub, English author Pete Brown takes the seat beside you in the George Inn, buys you a pint, then spins a twisting, heady story that shuttles in time between Roman Britain and today, and in scale between the local shop and the Empire. The cover calls it “a barstool history of London as seen through the windows of its oldest pub.”

Inns large and small once packed the Borough High Street that leads to London Bridge, but the George is the only one left, much reduced from its glory days as a coaching inn. As Brown notes, the George wasn’t the biggest of the inns, nor the most famous—that honor would belong to the Tabard next door, where Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury, or the White Hart, a setting for both Shakespeare and Dickens. But the George is the only survivor, and because today it is the last of its kind, the George is Brown’s vehicle.

In researching Shakespeare’s Pub, the author spent a year exploring libraries, on-line sources, academic theses, museums and public document archives, and compiled an exhaustive 25,000-word document that he calls “the most boring thing that’s ever been written about the George Inn.” Brown is a storyteller, not a reciter of dates and facts, and he proposes to use the dates and facts as the scaffolding for a marvelous narrative.

This is terrific storytelling, but also a smart move: By rejecting the list-maker’s approach to history, Brown gives himself permission to take a more speculative approach to his tale. He has the facts, but there aren’t all that many of them, so the story of the George Inn has to be told at times with facts on loan from other sources.

For example, since the George burned down and was rebuilt in 1676, Brown has no way of knowing what it looked like in its earlier, perhaps original, incarnation. But he visits medieval coaching inns still standing in towns far from London and asks the reader to accept that his findings could apply to the George.

More extrapolation is needed to connect the George to the book’s title character. Fair warning: The name Shakespeare’s Pub is a bit of a bait and switch because there’s no solid evidence that Shakespeare ever drank there. But he lived in Southwark, and the Globe and other theaters were constructed there. It is reasonable to surmise that Shakespeare knew the George and “drank there at least occasionally.”

That kind of guesswork might horrify purists, but it’s a plausible interpretation of the facts Brown is able to marshal, and it launches him on a wonderful chapter on the players, actors and entertainments that thrived south of the Thames.

The George and its neighboring inns entered their heyday during the 18^th and 19th centuries, when the stagecoach dominated travel. “[D]uring that brief period, the stagecoach transformed inns like the George, for a time, into arguably the most important businesses in the country.”

Then, just as quickly, another transformation in the movement of people and goods made the inns obsolete: The railroad arrived, bypassing the George and delivering its cargo to the heart of the city. Though the great inns reinvented themselves again, many failed.

The George survived through a combination of remarkable personalities and national nostalgia, and Pete Brown makes us happy it did. And, despite the good laughs to be found between the covers of Shakespeare’s Pub, there is deep, unaffected love for the places like the George, where Brown finds “a sense of place, a collection of memories that have accumulated in the space over the time it has been used for its unchanging purpose, over the centuries that people have laughed, drunk, argued, eaten, flirted, slept and done business there.”

This is a marvelous tale. Pour yourself a traditional London porter and settle in for a good read.

Style: IPA

ABV: 8.4%

Review: Golden orange in color, this beer is very hazy. It has great head retention, a beautiful cream color.  This beer tastes slightly more like an ESB than an IPA with its very bitter taste.  A very earthy and herbal taste, with an extremely dry finish.

Aroma Coma is an India pale ale from Drake's Brewing Co.

Drake’s Brewing Co.

San Leandro, California

Style: IPA

ABV: 6.7%

Review: A beautiful yellow, golden straw color that is slightly hazy. There is a lot of pine in the nose, and a hint of honey. The first taste is bitter, with a peppery flavor and a hint of orange. There is also a very distinct taste of citrus and pine. The finish is very dry.  This IPA really showcases the hops used to make it.

Pottstown, PA

A German-style golden lager brewed with imported German pils malt and Saaz and Hallertauer hops. Packaged in a can with a removable lid.

ABV: 4.9

ABW: 3.9

COLOR: 4.5

BITTERNESS: 18

ORIGINAL GRAVITY: 1046

AVAILABLE: PA, NJ, NY, DE

Dolores, CO

Named for the Totonac people of Mexico, credited as the first to cultivate vanilla by hand-pollinating the vanilla orchid. A stout brewed with flaked oats and conditioned with whole bourbon vanilla beans.

ABV 6.8

ABW 5.4

COLOR: 42

BITTERNESS: 48

Original Gravity: 1064

AVAILABLE: CO

Saint Paul, MN

Named after the Norse goddess Sága, drinking companion of the God Odin. Norse epic poems depict the two drinking from golden cups to the sound of waves resounding nearby.

ABV: 6.4

ABW: 5.0

COLOR: 9

BITTERNESS: 80

ORIGINAL GRAVITY: 1056

AVAILABLE: FL, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MI, MN, MO, NE, NJ, ND, OH, PA, SD, TX, WI

Melbourne, FL

This porter is brewed with a combination of eight malts, including four distinct specialty malts (Victory, chocolate, rye and midnight wheat), and Nugget and Cascade hops.

ABV: 6.1

ABW: 4.8

COLOR: 37

BITTERNESS: 40

ORIGINAL GRAVITY:

AVAILABLE: FL, MD, VA, DC

Kansas City, MO

At Boulevard, fermenter No. 7 is considered a temperamental piece of equipment. However, when brewers were experimenting with variations on Belgian-style farmhouse ale, the final version came together in Tank 7, an accomplishment this beer’s name commemorates.

ABV: 8.5

ABW: 6.8

COLOR: 4.96

BITTERNESS: 38

ORIGINAL GRAVITY: 1069

AVAILABLE: AL, AK, AR, CA, CO, DC, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, MA, MD, MN, MO, NC, ND, NE, OK, OR, SD, TX, VA, WA

La Crosse, WI

Pearl Street Brewery, which started in a basement with a seven-barrel subterranean brewhouse, is now a 30-barrel brewery. Rubber Mills Pils is hopped with whole-leaf Saaz hops.

ABV: 5

ABW: 3.92

COLOR: 30

BITTERNESS: 50

ORIGINAL GRAVITY: 1044

AVAILABLE: WI