Skip to main content
18th October 2024

The Meaning of Beer

How Our Pursuit of the Perfect Pint Built the World

By Jonny Garrett / November 2024 / Allen & Unwin UK

Please be in touch for review copies and interview requests.

‘Garrett shares his huge knowledge about beer and its history with joyful enthusiasm and wit. This book will make you laugh, it will make you smarter and it will make you want to drink more beer.’

Ned Palmer, bestselling author of A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles

What’s the oldest and most consumed alcoholic beverage on earth? BEER, of course. And it might just be our most important invention.

An entertaining narrative history of not just how we made beer, but how beer made us.

Since its creation 13,000 years ago, our love of beer has shaped everything from religious ceremonies to advertising, and architecture to bioengineering. 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 brewer’s yeast may yet be the answer to climate change.

In The Meaning of Beer, award-winning beer writer Jonny Garrett tells the stories of these incredible human moments and inventions, taking readers 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.

Jonny Garrett is a multi-award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker. He’s best known as the founder of Youtube’s Craft Beer Channel, which has over 160,000 subscribers and 13 million views. He has written four books and his most recent one, A Year in Beer (CAMRA Books, 2021), won the Fortnum & Mason Drinks Book of the Year, British Guild of Food Writers Drinks Book of the Year and British Guild of Beer Writers Book of the Year. He was also voted British Beer Writer of the Year in 2019 and 2022.


Media Contact: Kate Straker, KateStraker@atlantic-books.co.uk

Third-party news items that are posted on the Guild website’s news section come from press releases received by the Guild. These press releases are posted as they have been received and their publication on the Guild website is intended as an informational service provided to our members and website visitors. As such, the publication of a story from a third-party source is neither an endorsement of the content, nor its sender, by the Guild. For enquiries on any news item, please use the contact details that can be found at the bottom of each post.