April 24, 2006 -- In my office, just to the left of my desk, I have a large pine bookcase filled with volumes related to things I write about. There are books on beer, of course, but also a large atlas to help me figure out where I’ll be visiting next, beefy books on food like the Larousse Gastronomique and The Oxford Companion to Food, wine and spirits guides, bar and restaurant books covering cities from Toronto to Helsinki, and more than a few volumes of food lit, such as my treasured and frequently thumbed M.F.K. Fishers.

Every year or so, I make a point of pulling all these books off the shelves and rearranging them according to the amount they are used, the more frequently plucked garnering space on the upper and mid shelves, within easy arm’s reach, and the seldom browsed battling it out with the dust bunnies at the bottom. I mention this because I have just made space for a new book at a prime place on the desk side of the eye-level shelf, because I expect that it will quickly become dog-eared and dirty through repeated use. That book is The Essential Reference of Domestic Brewers and Their Bottled Brands, 2nd Edition, or as it is less cumbersomely known, the DBBB.

Hard covered and close to 350 pages in length, the DBBB covers the brewing industry in the United States in four different, easy to reference fashions: alphabetically, by beer style, by distribution and by geographic location. So, for instance, if you’ve ever wanted to know who is making a bottled Imperial stout, you need only flip to page 128 for a listing of 38 brands from 36 breweries. And if you want to see if any of them are sold in your state, then it’s as simple as cross-referencing the breweries in the 10-page “Availability by State” listing.

For a bar owner or retailer seeking brands to stock, this is obviously a vital, though not by a long shot encompassing, resource. (While I haven’t tallied up the number of breweries listed in the book itself, there are 323 operations catalogued in the DBBB’s online companion site, accessible via a pass code that comes with the book, well short of the 1,368 breweries and brewpubs listed by the Brewers Association as operational at the end of 2005.) And for someone like myself, or any enthusiast whose memory banks can only hold so much data on many breweries and beers, it’s a very handy tool for kick-starting the “Oh yes, I remember that beer” process. For the graphically inclined, there’s even a visual prompt available at the back of the book in the form of a select brewery portfolio index, complete with label illustrations and beer descriptions.

At a price of less than US$50 per copy (from the publisher’s website: www.essential-reference.com), even if you opened the DBBB but five or six times this year, I believe it would still be a worthwhile addition to any beer professional’s library, and a worthy consideration for ardent beer aficionados, as well. As noted, while it’s not comprehensive and should not be taken as the first and last word on the industry, it is a most handy reference and one which will almost certainly be of benefit.

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