Happy New Year, folks. You like books? You like beverages? We got books about beverages! Two of them! No strings attached! The first person to write in and request one of the books linked below gets it for free. Limit one per person and you must request a specific book and send me your mailing address — although we won’t use your email or postal address for anything other than sending you the book. Email me for a free book while they last!
GONE! Sent to Amanda of Grandville, Michigan
Hot Chocolate | ” Chocoholics rejoice! If you thought there was only one way to make hot chocolate, then a sublime world awaits. In HOT CHOCOLATE, the first book to come out of the growing trend of haute chocolate consumption, preeminent chocolatiers from around the world contribute more than 60 recipes, including concoctions like Lavender-Pistachio Hot Chocolate; Maple-Whiskey Hot Chocolate Toddy; Nutella Hot Chocolate; Malted Milkball Hot Chocolate; and the famous Frrrozen Hot Chocolate from Manhattan’s Serendipity 3. Food writer Michael Turback suggests adding rosebuds or cayenne, frothing with a Mexican molinillo, or adding dollops of schlagobers (Viennese whipped cream), and includes ingredient and tool resources as well as a fascinating account of the history of liquid chocolates.” By Michael Turback —Amazon.com (List price: $9.95)
GONE! Sent to Ray of Richfield, Minnesota
Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer | “In the first-ever history of American beer, Maureen Ogle tells its epic story, from the immigrants who invented it to the upstart microbrewers who revived it. Beer might seem as American as baseball, but that has not always been true: Rum and whiskey were the drinks of choice in the 1840s, with only a few breweries making heavy, yeasty English ale. When a wave of German immigrants arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, they promptly set about re-creating the pleasures of the biergartens they had left behind. Just fifty years later, the American-style lager beer they invented was the nation’s most popular beverage–and brewing was the nation’s fifth-largest industry, ruled over by fabulously wealthy titans Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch. But when anti-German sentiments aroused by World War I fed the flames of the temperance movement (one activist even declared that ‘the worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller’), Prohibition was the result. In the wake of its repeal, brewers replaced flavor with innovations like marketing and lite beer, setting the stage for a generation of microbrewers whose ambitions reshaped the drink.” By Maureen Ogle —Amazon.com (List price: $25.00)