Beer School. Jonny Garrett

      This book is about a journey – about the pursuit of something perfect. As I write this, two friends and I are speeding past New York on Interstate 95. From the cramped backseat, I watch the city lights wink at me invitingly. It’s a strange feeling to see Manhattan and not be destined there. No tourist drives past New York. But our journey goes way past it.

      We’re headed to a farm outside Springfield, Massachusetts, where a brewery called Treehouse is reinventing IPA in the most unlikely setting. The farm where they brew is a long drive from where we were in Philadelphia that morning. Even once you’re off the freeway it’s a 30-minute meander through towns and country lanes. My friends are skeptical it’s worth the drive, but I know it will be.

      I want to find out how Treehouse makes beers so fruity, so smooth and so enticing that people come from all over the world to queue for a few cans. I want them to prove to me that one IPA can be so different that it towers over all others. And then I want to know why. I’m not really expecting answers, though; beer is rarely that simple.

      The more Brad and I learn about brewing, the more we realise we know nothing. We’ve spent years reading about, talking about and drinking beer together. We’ve interviewed everyone from the heads of macro-lager breweries to some dude making gruit out of his shed in the Arctic Circle. All they’ve managed to do is confuse us even more.

      It’s disorientating how deep the rabbit hole goes, but that’s what makes beer the best drink on earth. Most people take it for granted, but it is one of the most important technological and philosophical accomplishments of the human race. Since being discovered by accident some 6,000 years ago, beer has been credited with inspiring the first biological engineering project, the practice of large-scale crop cultivation, and even a medical advance as an important antibiotic. Some historians think it was part of the formation of society itself.

      Clearly these guys don’t drink in the same dives that we do, but the point is clear – beer matters. Beer is culture, and its evolution has followed the peaks and troughs of our species, nearly dying out thanks to financial crashes and world wars, before being revived in boom times as part of a worldwide flavour crusade. Beer is as diverse and exciting as the people who drink it. Just like biology, anthropology and the Kardashians, everything you learn about it raises more questions.

      At its most basic, brewing is a science; a formula with rights and wrongs. Brewers have spent millennia trying to control natural fermentation to the point where we can break the process down into chemistry – numbers, symbols and equations on a page.

      At its most complicated, though, brewing is unfathomable. If it is a science, then it is more akin to alchemy. For all our knowledge, making consistently delicious beer is a desperately difficult task. You can see it in the fact that the truly great brewers of the world – the Cantillons, Russian Rivers, Treehouses – attain a mythical status in the mind of beer hunters like us. And the brewers buy into it too. The owner of a fantastic Italian Lambic brewery once refused to take my praise, claiming it was nature and not him that made the beer so fantastic. Even for those who seek to control it all, religion, superstition and luck have a vital part in beer’s history and its future.

      At first humans put their brewing faith in the gods, praying to Ninkasi (the ancient Sumerian goddess of beer) and then fermenting grain in the same pots, believing them blessed. Now we know that using the same pots worked by inadvertently cultivating the same yeast. But brewers still have their favourite fermenters or unwavering belief in “first-wort hopping.” Through repetition and recording results, two things

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