I must come clean by admitting to have worked in or around the brewing industry for nearly thirty years. It will come as no surprise to you, then, that I drink beer. I like beer. I admire brewers. I think they are some of the most skilled, devoted, and ingenious people on the planet. Charming, too.

However, I do not dislike wine, nor the viticulturalists and enologists who bring that amazing product to the market. I drink wine, though I prefer beer. I believe that the brewer has much to learn from the winemaker with regard to re-establishing their product as an integral component of a wholesome and elongated lifestyle. Equally, the winemaker must doff his or her cap to the brewer insofar as technical matters go. There is no question that brewing leads the way in matters technological and scientific. Indeed, throughout the industrial ages, brewing has been a pioneering process that has informed all other fermentation industries, even to the production of pharmaceuticals and the latter-day biotechnologicals, with their diversity of high-value products.

In this book, I compare beer and wine. I do not seek to decry wine. Rather, I aim to demonstrate why brewers can hold their heads high in the knowledge that their liquid is every ounce the equal of wine, by any yardstick you choose to nominate.

On November 5, 1991, a journalist by the name of Morley Safer presented a piece on the highly rated CBS news program, Sixty Minutes, that told of how a French doctor, Serge Renaud, had shown that red wine was a powerful counter to coronary heart disease. The phenomenon became known as the French paradox, for the French were pursuing a diet that was anything but healthful and seemingly certain to cause serious blocking of the arteries, but in fact that wasn't occurring. Almost overnight, sales of red wine started to surge in America and the wine industry in the country took massive advantage.

It was far from being the first report of alcohol consumption being beneficial to health, as we found earlier in this book when discussing the history of wine and beer. Indeed, the Irish doctor Samuel Black in 1819 remarked on the far lesser incidence of angina in France as opposed to his own country on account of “the French habits and modes of living.” The first properly scientific study in this area was conducted by the Baltimore biologist Raymond Pearl in 1926, all the more remarkable for its timing in that it was smack in the middle of Prohibition. I suppose it was based on data accumulated before the Volstead Act, which enabled federal enforcement of Prohibition.

There is no reason why brewers couldn't play on the strengths of grain or hop variety in the styling of their products. At present, it is fairly tangential – for instance, a brewer may boast about his or her use of hops with a certain provenance, perhaps Tettnang or Hersbrucker in Germanic lagers or Fuggles in English ales. Surely, this could be done much more: The characters unique to an aroma hop are no less special or unique than those associated with a given grape varietal. So where a winemaker may compare Pinot Noirs, Chardonnays, and Zinfandels produced by different vintners, so could the brewers, with no less sophistication or passion, debate the merits of different beers using Saaz or Challenger or Cascade.

The fact is they don't. Rather, brewers rejoice in styles that are founded on the type of grain, the extent to which the wort is fermentable, the strength, the color, and the brewing technique.

As a first fundamental, we speak of ales and lagers. The former have the more ancient pedigree. Once upon a time, the word “ale” was used to describe unhopped products. These days, virtually all ales are hopped. A classic feature of an ale is that it is fermented using a “top fermenting yeast,” that is, a yeast that rises to the top of the vessel during fermentation. Fermentation is effected at a relatively warm temperature, say, 16°C (61°F), which leads to relatively high levels of esters (fruity flavors).

In considering the quality of any alcoholic beverage, it is insufficient to discuss just the obvious characteristics of a product, which in the case of wine would be color, clarity, aroma, and taste. Perhaps more so for wine than any other beverage, including beer, quality is shrouded in a mystique, a culture, a state of mind, and an almost intangible meeting of geology, climate, locale, tradition, art, mystery, and hyperbole.

Let me illustrate. A year or two back, an entrepreneur by the name of Fred Franzia decided that he was going to shake up the snobby world of California wine with the release of products marketed under the name Charles Shaw, but colloquially known to all as “Two Buck Chuck.” This was on account of the fact that they retailed in the charming chain stores of Trader Joe's at the princely sum of $1.99. Understandably, these wines were very popular with all – everyone, that is, except those who considered themselves wine aficionados, experts, and commentators, who decried the exercise as a loss-leading gimmick. That was until the day that the toffee-nosed judges selected Charles Shaw 2002 California Shiraz as one of 53 finalists for the International Eastern Wine Competition at Corning, New York, in a blind tasting of 2,300 submissions. The judges were seen next morning at breakfast to stagger around, heads held low, utterly ashamed of their ignorant mistake and completely baffled as to how they could have been “misled.”

It is probable that wine was not the first alcoholic beverage enjoyed on this planet. Grain was a cultivated crop before grapes, and the work of the bee led to honey in the ancient forests at a very early stage. And so, the earliest beers and meads almost certainly pre-date wine.

Others suggest, however, that wine must have preceded beer because it is rather easier to make than is beer – a case of just crushing the grapes and allowing adventitious organisms on the surface of the berries to do their own thing. As a colleague of mine says, if you tread grapes you get wine; if you tread grain you get sore feet.

I facetiously tell my students that Jesus performed the miracle of converting water into wine because doing the trick of water to beer was far too technically demanding. The winemakers remind me that it was his first miracle.

Grain needs some degree of processing before it is ready for brewing, and yeast is not a native inhabitant of cereals and so would either need to be added to make beer or be present as a contaminant in a vessel.

Wines can be classified in several ways. this may be according to their alcohol content, their color, or the amount of carbon dioxide that they contain. However, most frequently, they are grouped according to their geographic origin (Chablis, Bordeaux, Mosel, Chianti, and the like) or on the basis of the variety of grape from which they are produced. As we saw in Chapter 4, terroir and varietal and an interaction between the two have various degrees of impact on the result in the winery. A single variety grown in different specific locations within a single region may lead to differing end results.

In the United States, it is the norm to label wines on the basis of the grape varietal that enters into their production – Chardonnay and Merlot and Pinot Noir and Zinfandel, and so on. To be named in this way, the wine must feature more than 51 percent of that variety.

As we saw in Chapter 4, the prime species of grape employed worldwide is V. vinifera. Within this species are Muscat-flavored varieties, other varieties with their own distinctive flavors, and some with no distinctive flavors. In turn, within each of these classes are grape types that suit white or red wines. The Muscat varieties, with their characteristic aroma likened to daphne flower, are best suited to dessert wines.

The quality of beer, if we were to distill it into a nutshell, may be described as “all as for wine, plus bubbles.” Certainly there are wines that effervesce, but in no instance do the bubbles survive as stable foam. Despite the fact that too many people in the United States chug their beer directly from can or bottle and a visitor to London will encounter ale (albeit delicious) that resembles cold tea, every image of beer that you will encounter on screen or in print features a rich, dense, creamy foam.

There is no question that foam impacts drinkers' perception of a product. Show customers images of beer with good or poor foams and those with superior foam are declared to be better brewed, fresher, and better tasting. All this is based solely on appearance; not a drop has been drunk in making this evaluation.

So why do most beers display stable foams whereas other drinks, such as champagne and sodas, do not, despite the fact that often times they contain more carbon dioxide than does beer? The answer lies in the presence in beer of molecules that stabilize the bubbles: They are carried into the head when the latter is created and, once in the bubble walls, they fashion a framework (liken it to scaffolding) that prevents the foam from collapsing.

Joe was one of my best ever students. he thirsted for knowledge of beer. He devoured the literature, attended class compulsively, asked perceptive and passionate questions, and was superlative in the experimental brewery, producing beers of sublime excellence. He also has the word “beer” tattooed across an ample belly in huge gothic script. This says everything really. I cannot imagine the winemakers on campus – seemingly as many women as men – adorning their guts with “Pinot Noir,” even in henna. Perhaps a subtle little tattoo located somewhere tasteful and sophisticated.

Plenty of these winemakers take my beer classes. They accept the well-intentioned teasing, for the most part (as do the chemical engineers, who proudly identify themselves when I go round the class at the start of term, before I remind them that they have no soul and have no grasp of the beauty inherent in biological systems). After about four weeks, as we finally reach yeast and fermentation, I delight in telling the viticulture and enology students that had this been a wine class, we'd have reached the fermenter on day one: “Heck, you just crush a few grapes and you're ready to toss in the yeast – if you bother even to do that. You might always just leave the contaminating microflora to get on with it.”

I flew to Heathrow from India, via Frankfurt. the four-hour holdover in the German airport had not remotely bothered me. I hate tight connections, and, besides, I was able to indulge in some sausages and weissbier while peaceably reading my newspaper, a faint buzz of conversation surrounding me.

Later the same day, I found myself for the first time in several years in central London. Strolling toward Hyde Park Corner in the dusk of early evening, it occurred to me that the traffic heading toward the West End was much heavier than I recalled from when I was a more regular visitor and living just a short train ride away. As I walked, there was suddenly the most stupendous whooping, and I turned to see two girls, probably late teens, hanging (in every sense of the word) out of the windows of a stretch limo and gyrating maniacally.

I thought little of it – surely an aberration – and continued my stroll, eventually pitching up at The Crown on Brewer Street, close to Piccadilly Circus. It was a hostelry I knew of old, and, in truth, little within had changed, with the exception of the display on the bar. There was row upon row of taps for dispensing kegged beer, but just a solitary handle for pumping traditional English ale from the cask. I had a pint of the latter, a worthy drop of Charles Wells Bombardier.

The brewing of beer is substantially more complicated than is the making of wine. The brewing scientist in me says that it is not too challenging a task to tread a few grapes, and then leave them alone while the native yeast does its thing and converts the grape sugars into wine. A bit of cleaning up here and there and then, voila, wine. I am, of course, being utterly cynical, and retain my admiration for the skill of the winemaker in taking the right grape from the right locale and turning it into a delightful product.

Yet, I still insist that the complexity and skill of the succession of folks who grow barley and hops and then turn them into beer is perforce greater: The whole journey toward a bottle of beer is far more exacting than is the making of wine. There are many more steps. And most brewers insist that the product meet stringent specifications, both in terms of flavor profile and in the levels of a diversity of analytical measurements. Some of the molecules that contribute to flavor are specified to parts per billion levels. The barley and hops are no less prone to seasonal variation than is the grape. But brewers overcome these fluctuations so as to achieve a consistent beverage, whereas the winemaker will tolerate them and the attendant variation (and sometimes, unpredictability) in the finished drink.

It's exactly analogous to the operation of a Boeing 777.