The Spirit World

Allow me to introduce myself. Hi, I’m Donavan Hall. (That’s me on the left making a few notes about a beer I drank in a café in Paris.) Pleased to meet you. I’m the beer writer on this spirits blog so I’ll be writing about beer. Each Tuesday (from now on a day known as “Brewsday”), I will subject you to a new installment in the drinking and brewing life of a beer enthusiast.

Brenda has asked me to forecast what I will be writing about each Brewsday. Basically, my intention is to give you a personal tour of a place I call Beer World. Each column will be like a letter home, written on the run, telling you about the different beers I find and consume and a little about what I learned while drinking those beers. (If you are of a literary turn of mind, think of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller and replace drugs, Buddhism, and sex with beer, and you’ll have some idea what I’m shooting for.)

My travels in Beer World began sometime in 1994 when I took my first sip of Guinness Stout. (I’ll be telling you about that experience and how I developed a taste for beer.) Ever since then I’ve been seeking out new beers from all over the world to sample. So I’ll bring about eleven years of beer tasting experience to the table each week.

You’ll probably figure out in the coming weeks that I have an interest in science. One of the first books I read about beer was called Brew Chem 101 by Lee W. Janson. I wanted to know what was in my beer glass and how it worked and what it takes to get all those wonderful and diverse flavors from four basic ingredients: water, barley, hops, and yeast. I’ll be sharing with you some of what I found out about beer and brewing chemistry. Don’t worry; you won’t need an advanced degree in organic chemistry to follow along.

Christmas 1997 was an important year for me. That was the year my wife bought me a homebrew starter kit. I brewed my first beer (an English Brown Ale) in January 1998 and I’ve been brewing ever since. So you can be sure I’ll be writing about brewing beer at home.

One of the most rewarding social experiences of my life began when I joined a homebrew club. The people I met in this club were not only friendly, they were nuts about beer. At the club meetings we talked about beer and drank the beers we talked about. I learned so much about beer and brewing from my fellow homebrewers. Thus, I’ll be writing about the social aspects of beer, homebrewing, and the community of people who are passionate about beer and make this beverage an important part of their lives.

Since 1998, most of our family vacations have been beer-centric. Rarely do we go anywhere without consulting PubCrawler or a regional beer guide. With my wife Denise (also a beer and food enthusiast — that’s her holding the pumpkin) I’ve traveled the US and Canada hopscotching across the map from brewpub to brewpub in search of North America’s greatest beers. We’ve also been to Europe a few times to see what kind of beers we could find in the Old Country. (I should warn you that Denise and I have an obsession with Belgium.) I’ll be telling you a lot about my beer travels on future Brewsdays.

Being a compulsive reader — I’m the kind of person that collects and reads books on every topic that interests me — I’ve read quite a few beer books. From time to time I’ll be reviewing the beer literature and giving you my recommendations on what you should be reading. (At a minimum you should be reading my weekly beer column, but you might want to supplement your beer reading diet with roughage from other beer scribblers.)

And that’s not all! But you get the idea. I’ll be writing about just anything that has something to do with beer. I’ll try to be entertaining as well as informative. I hope you’ll grab a different beer each week, park yourself in front of your computer, and read Brewsday. It should be fun.