The Oxford Companion to Beer

The Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Garrett Oliver and published in late 2011, was one of the more eagerly anticipated tomes on our favorite beverage since Garrett's 2003 The Brewmaster's Table.

Look, the book is awesome and every beer lover should have it. But sometimes, the real story is the story behind the story. And this post is about controversy, emotion, and drama--but not that found within the book itself. The book is meant to be more of an encyclopedia, full of facts and free of opinions. Rather, this post is about the controversy, emotion, and drama that ensues when writers write about writers...

I obviously lifted the cover photo from Amazon

There is a difference between writers writing about what writers write, and writers writing about writers. The first is called criticism. The second is libel.

In October, while copies of Garrett's latest were making their way to bookstores, our friend Martyn Cornell of Zythophile fame blogged about the Oxford Companion to Beer, henceforth called OCB, in a post calling it a "dreadful disaster." Martyn used the "Look Inside" feature at Amazon to scan a few pages of OCB. He found and itemized many issues and concerns. And in his own inimitable fashion, he described these issues and concerns as drivel, rubbish, invented facts, poor scholarship and the like, and concluded with the question, not the statement, of whether the OCB wasn't a dreadful disaster?

Word of this insult traveled at the speed of electrons to Garrett, who responded in an open letter to Martyn Cornell which is available in the OCB Commentary wiki. Garrett parry's Martyn's every thrust. Then, Garrett not only challenges Martyn to a duel, but he also questions the legitimacy of his new enemy's parentage. Then he accuses Martyn of McCarthyism, and declares that Martyn has essentially referred to the editor of the OCB "as a dupe, a cretin and a liar, piloting a project populated by lazy idiots."

Friends, I am not making this up. Mostly. OK, some of it I am making up but most of it is true, and you can read it for yourselves. The passion is drippingly real. And for the record, passion is a good thing to have in a brewer, a chef, or an author. Garrett is all three and the passion meter is pegged in his reply intended to emphatically end all replies(!)

However, and as it happens, the story continues after all. Still within the month of October, an undaunted Martyn delivers his measured response to Garrett's open letter with a pithy blog post. The gist of Martyn's post is this: if you sell your product as the end-all and be-all, you've got to expect a little feedback when maybe it ain't all that. 

I believe another lesson from Martyn is to save the passion for the kitchen, the brewhouse, and the opinion page. And perhaps a few other places that spring to mind, too, but pointedly not for academic writing. Academic writing, such as that expected in OCB, is writing about facts. There are plenty of other places where writing about feelings is OK, or even encouraged. But no one wants to read about opinions and rumors in a book like OCB.

I suspect that Garrett and his team of esteemed writers will in fact correct many errors in the 2d edition of OCB. For example, I suspect that references to rumors will either be replaced by documented evidence or expunged. I further suspect that Garrett will be less defensive about criticism in the future--not less likely to take it personally, because that's normal, but less likely to respond to it personally. Martyn wrote about OCB. Garrett wrote about Martyn, and in so doing, he essentially made Martyn's point.