A sommelier and a brewer team up to give you an in-depth food paring insights for wine and beer.  Contains "wine versus beer" dinner party recipes, complete with wine and beer recommendations, so you can ger your friends involved in the debate at home.

Sam Calagione is the founder of Dogfish Head brewery and Marnie Old is a very well-known sommelier.  The delve into the depths of their respective potent potables in a Sam Malone/Diane Chambers style. 

The book is breezy and both authors know what they are talking about.  It’s broken up into five sections:

• The Great Divide:  an introduction and a debate
• Wine Primer:  basics about wine
• Beer Basics:  a primer about beer
• The Food Debate: about beer, wine and food pairings
• The Great Debate at Home:  how to host a beer versus wine party

I happen to like beer and I happen to like wine, so I’m not one of those either/or kinda guys.  Generally beer is not served at dinner parties, so  providing the information of what beer goes with what food is the best feature of the book.  There are a brazilian books about wine and what goes with what.  What makes this book unique is the approach of serving both and letting your guests pick what they’d want to drink.  It also provides a fun and interesting way to get beer slobs aficionados to try a glass of wine and wine snobs connoisseurs to try a pint of ale.

If you like to host dinner parties — and I know you do — then this is a book you should add to your kitchen library.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Book/Magazine Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.