Some change really is progress and beer is the perfect example. The Campaign for Real Ale, which started in Britain in the early 1970s, was a protest against the homogenization of beer that was a function of the big brewers buying up the pubs and filling them with wishy-washy products. And then came the era of micro-breweries. Real cask ale—no filtering, no pasteurization, secondary fermentation, no nitrogen or carbon dioxide.
Which brings us to Ian Coutts, author of The Perfect Keg: Sowing, Scything, Malting and Brewing My Way to the Best-Ever Pint of Beer. On the evidence of this book he is one of the funniest, bravest, most interesting and resourceful men on this planet. And best of all, he is a beer lover. So much so, in fact, that he set out to make his own beer from scratch. I do not know about you, but my idea of making beer from scratch is to go to a little store in...
Michael Ruse, a refugee from compulsory retirement laws, now living and working in Florida, was for 35 years a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He has written many books on the history and philosophy of Darwinian evolutionary theory. With Socrates, he believes that good food and drink are highly conducive to deep philosophical thought.
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