From Publishers Weekly
Thoreau said, "The tavern will compare favorably with the church." Following this premise rather closely, longtime Wall Street Journal writer and novelist Wells (Junior's Leg) searches for his preferred house of worship: the "perfect beer joint." Setting out to follow the Mississippi River, Wells writes, "I would begin in Minnesota among folk who, geographically speaking, are practically Canadians and by reputation descended from good beer-drinking Swedes and Germans. I would slide down soon enough into the Great Beer Belly of America, for, by lore at least, Midwesterners are presumed to be the mightiest of U.S. beer drinkers." Full of profundities ("One thing you can say about lagers: the good ones don't make you work very hard to like them"), the book also lends historical, scientific and cultural insights into the $75 billion industry—from the likes of beer behemoths like Budweiser to newfangled Extreme Beer, which has bottle values comparable to fine Bordeaux. Along the way, Wells encounters quirky characters, and the pages he devotes to describing brewers, bar proprietors, bartenders and plain ol' beer drinkers prove he's more interested in beer people (84 million Americans drink beer) than the industry itself. Wells's storytelling abilities complement his journalist's eye for stats and facts, making this a humorous, lively and informational tour. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
This account of journeys through the soft beer belly of America exudes that expansive happiness that springs from a guy who is truly enjoying his bottle of brew. Wells, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has crisscrossed the U.S., visiting breweries and bars to find out just what makes beer the nation's leading adult beverage. In the wake of the "lager wars" that drove so many midsize breweries to extinction in the late twentieth century, Wells finds newly prospering microbreweries. He visits the deceptively down-market Flora-Bama Lounge on the Gulf Coast to find out how it maintains its record consumption levels. He travels the length of the Mississippi to assess the heartland's appetite for brewskis. Wells delves into the history of the giant breweries such as Anheuser-Busch with its trademark Clydesdale draft horses and Miller with its phenomenally successful campaign to encourage that quaffing of "light" beer. As one would expect from a reporter of his background, Wells focuses his eye less flatteringly on the economic, social, and political role of beer, whose powerful lobbyists jealously guard industry prerogatives. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Dave Barry I highly recommend this (burrrrp) book.

Michael Lewis author of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing Any author who can talk his publisher into paying for him to drink his way across America deserves to be taken seriously. And sure enough, Travels with Barley is a joy. It will inspire readers everywhere to remain sober until they've finished

Michael Jackson The Beer Hunter Deep down, all guys are searching for the Perfect Beer Joint. Ken Wells was a late starter but he has grasped the principles: a pint to procrastinate; don't drink to forget -- drink to remember; drink to digress. Travels with Barley is a keen elucidation of beer and the passions that surround it, and Wells digresses with real flair.


Review
Julie Johnson Bradford editor, All About Beer magazine Ken Wells is the engaging Everyman of beer...but his quest to find the Perfect Beer Joint delivers more than beer: Travels with Barley is a perceptive and affectionate essay on everyday American culture through the lens of a beer glass.


Kirkus Reviews, September 2004
Wells is a "worthy explicator of beer's whys and wherefores," sniffing out tales from "the mahogany ridge."


Julie Johnson Bradford, Editor, All About Beer magazine
"Ken Wells is the engaging Everyman of beer..."


Michael Jackson, The Beer Hunter
"Travels with Barley is a keen elucidation of beer and the passions that surround it."


Book Description
Do beer yeast rustlers really exist? Who patented the Beer Goddess? How can you tell a Beer Geek from a Beer Nazi? Where exactly is Beervana? Does Big Beer hate Little Beer? Ken Wells, a novelist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and longtime Wall Street Journal writer, answers these questions and more by bringing a keen eye and prodigious reportage to the people and passions that have propelled beer into America's favorite alcoholic beverage and the beer industry into a $75 billion commercial juggernaut, not to mention a potent force in American culture. Travels with Barley is a lively, literate tour through the precincts of the beer makers, sellers, drinkers, and thinkers who collectively drive the mighty River of Beer onward. The heart of the book is a journey along the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to Louisiana, in a quixotic search for the Perfect Beer Joint -- a journey that turns out to be the perfect pretext for viewing America through the prism of a beer glass. Along the river, you'll visit the beer bar once owned by the brewer Al Capone, glide by The World's Largest Six Pack, and check into Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel to plumb the surprisingly controversial question of whether Elvis actually drank beer. But the trip also includes numerous detours up quirky tributaries, among them: a visit to an Extreme Beer maker in Delaware with ambitions to make 50-proof brew, a look at the murky world of beer yeast rustlers in California, and a journey to the portals of ultimate beer power at the Anheuser-Busch plant in St. Louis, where making the grade as a Clydesdale draft horse is harder than you might imagine. Entertaining, enlightening, and written with Wells's trademark verve, Travels with Barley is a perfect gift -- not just for America's 84 million beer enthusiasts, but for all discerning readers of flavorful nonfiction.


From the Inside Flap
Do beer-yeast rustlers really exist? Who patented the Beer Goddess? How can you tell a Beer Geek from a Beer Nazi? And where exactly is Beervana? Does Big Beer hate Little Beer? Ken Wells, a novelist, Pulitzer-Prize finalist and longtime Wall Street Journal writer, answers these questions and more by bringing a keen eye and prodigious reportage to the people and passions that have propelled beer into America’s favorite alcoholic beverage and the beer industry into a $75 commercial billion juggernaut, not to mention a potent force in American culture. Travels with Barley is a brisk, literate narrative through the precincts of the beer makers, sellers, drinkers and thinkers who collectively drive the mighty River of Beer onward. The heart of the book is a journey along the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to Louisiana, in a quixotic search for the mythical Perfect Beer Joint—a journey that turns out to be the perfect pretext for viewing America through the prism of a beer glass. Along the river, you’ll visit the beer bar once owned by the brewer, Al Capone; glide by The World’s Largest Six Pack; and check into Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel to plumb the surprisingly controversial question of whether Elvis actually drank beer. But the trip also includes numerous detours up quirky tributaries, among them: to an Extreme Beer maker in Delaware with ambitions to make 50-proof brew; to the murky world of beer-yeast rustlers in California; to the portals of ultimate beer power at the Anheuser-Busch plant in St. Louis, where making the grade as a Clydesdale draught horse is harder than you might imagine. Entertaining, enlightening, and written with Wells’ trademark verve, Travels with Barley is a perfect gift--not just for America’s 84 million beer enthusiasts but for all discerning readers of flavorful non-fiction.


About the Author
Ken Wells grew up in a beer-drinking family on a farm in Bayou Black, Louisiana, and is the author of three novels set in Cajun Louisiana. A career journalist, he has been a senior editor and writer for The Wall Street Journal since 1993. He lives with his family near New York City.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Why Beer, Why Me? They who drink beer will think beer. -- Washington Irving I was eleven years old, sitting on the front porch steps next to my father on a summer's day, when I took my first sip of beer, Pa holding the can for me so I wouldn't get carried away. Maybe he knew something. It was a Falstaff and it was warm. We lived in a hot, sweltering place in Louisiana's Cajun Delta way below New Orleans. A cold thing cracked open didn't stay cold long down there. I didn't care. I took a big swig anyway. Pa drank Falstaff because, cold, it wasn't all that bad, and because it was cheap, and mostly because Falstaff sponsored the Major League Baseball Game of the Week every Saturday afternoon on television. I was one of six brothers, and all old enough to talk were rabid baseball fans. We'd just gotten our first TV, a piece of heavy dark furniture with big, yellow-trimmed plastic knobs and a tiny screen in the middle. Out where we lived in the country, the reception was iffy. But if somebody went outside and twisted the antenna in just the right direction toward the station in New Orleans while somebody inside watched and yelled when the picture came into focus, we could catch a mildly snowy black-and-white broadcast of the game. Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean did the play-by-play. We liked them both but Dizzy Dean was particularly important because a) he would sing "The Wabash Cannon Ball," one of my dad's favorite songs, during the Seventh Inning Stretch, and b) my grandfather Wells had briefly played semipro ball against a young Dizzy and his brother Paul back in Arkansas, where my dad, grandfather, and the Deans all were from. Pa's way of thinking was that Falstaff wasn't just sponsoring the ball game -- it was helping out Arkansas folk that we practically knew. (This is how Arkansas people thought, and I couldn't see anything wrong with it.) Pa would now and then go for a Pabst Blue Ribbon and, when he had a little extra money, Miller High Life in a bottle. But he was loyal to Falstaff till the competition and the money men eventually drove the company into the ground. At first, I didn't know quite what to think about my swig of beer -- mostly it startled me. In retrospect, I'm sure the jolt I felt was actually the foamy, mildly bitter pop of hops in the back of my mouth. But beer vapors ran up my nose and my ears turned red and my scalp tingled and chills ran down my spine. What little I knew of sin, this seemed like it. Though I didn't become a regular beer drinker until I entered college, I've been a Beer Guy at heart ever since that moment -- that's kind of how it is with Beer People. To this day, in fact, most of my friends are Beer People, too. Now, I admit there is a question as to what exactly a Beer Person is and stands for, and it was one of the questions that got me pondering when a Wall Street Journal colleague first suggested that, far beyond writing an article or two, I should look into writing an entire book about beer. With a publisher keenly interested, this was something that obviously required deep and unconventional thinking, especially after checking the landscape and finding it already littered with beer books. Most of them are about beer tasting; some are about beer history; some about the beer industry or beer marketing or beer barons or some aspect thereof. As subjects, all are worthy, as are many of the books that have sprung from them, yet none of these subjects individually interested me as a writer. But it did occur to me that there might be a more eclectic way to look at beer that included elements of all of the above but strove to get inside the passion that I first brushed up against in that beer jolt I got as a kid. For lack of a better term, I proposed a look at beer culture in America, which I saw as inextricably tied up with Beer People. If you tell people you're writing a book, their first question is usually, "What's it about?" But as I moved around the country in the reporting of this project, running into lots and lots of Beer People of all persuasions, I often got a quick second question: "Why you?" It took a while to realize that what the Beer People were really asking was whether I was one of them. What were my beer credentials? Beer People, I learned, can be something of a fractious lot amongst themselves but they tend to be protective of the object of their passion with perceived outsiders. So I would tell the Beer Folk about drinking beer at my daddy's knee and that, though I've had my flirtations with single-malt whisky and wine, it's still hard to think of anything (printable here) better than a cold beer on a warm day at the ballpark or the beach. I also had to confess that I came to this book with no more beer knowledge or tasting experience than that of your average enthusiastic amateur but also with few biases, save perhaps a distaste for light beer, though I cast no judgment upon those who drink it. I was not when I began this book, nor am I now, a Beer Snob. I grew up with people who knew of only three categories of bad beer: warm beer, flat beer, and, worst, no beer at all. Beyond that, the salutary effects of cheap beer during the penury of graduate school left me too grateful to mock inoffensive mass market brew, or the taste predilections of the great middle-class beer masses that I so long shared. Face it: a guy who drank 99-cent six-packs of Buckhorn should never get too carried away with himself. True, I was thrilled to get introduced to a previously unknown universe of European beers when I took my obligatory summer backpacking tour across Europe right out of college in 1971. Later, in the early 1990s, when I served as a roving Wall Street Journal correspondent in London, I even came to appreciate that style of beer known as British bitter, figuring any beer that was good enough for Dickens and Samuel Johnson was good enough for me. And having now spent well more than a year totally steeped in beer, which has mandated a fair amount of incidental beer sampling in various parts of the country, I have by necessity and osmosis gained both knowledge and experience. There are roughly 3,400 brands of beer, domestic and imported, available in the U.S. market and I'd hazard that I've tried a respectable 15 percent of them. And I'm positive in a blind tasting I could tell the difference between Dogfish Head's 60 Minute IPA, Smuttynose Portsmouth Lager, and Budweiser, but the appreciation of one doesn't require me to vilify the others. I've learned that all represent a huge if disparate commitment to quality. What I did bring to this book was a reporter's sensibility and a notion, after copious research, best expressed as a metaphor -- that a huge River of Beer runs through America, smack through the heart of American commerce and through the hearts, minds, and passions of the nation's estimated 84 million beer drinkers. If you doubt this, consider that the beer industry, with retail sales of almost $75 billion a year, is bigger than the music and movie industries, bigger than cell phones, cable television, and mining. Beer's extended contribution to the economy -- essentially Beer Nation's gross national product or GNP -- is $144 billion. That's larger than the gross state products of twenty-four of the fifty states and the GNPs of scores of countries, including other B-named nations, Belarus, Bolivia, and Bulgaria among them. But beer in America is more than a business; it is a business inextricably woven into our history. George Washington brewed beer at Mount Vernon before the Revolutionary War and strongly rebuked the Continental Congress during the war for scrimping on beer rations (a quart a day) for his soldiers. Ben Franklin also brewed beer and was said to love it as much as Homer Simpson does. For generations, beer has also been America's great middlebrow social elixir, an inseparable companion to the sporting and spectator life, the portal to first intoxication, the workingman's Valium, and a leavening staple of the college experience. It is the only adult beverage, if you're perfectly honest, that goes with pizza. It is a business, as my dad's fixation with Falstaff shows, underpinned by a wide streak of loyalty. Such loyalty is often won not simply on taste but often by marketing -- not just clever advertising but alliances with sports, and the teams and stars that turn sport into celebrity. America didn't invent beer but we have grabbed it, shaken it, homogenized it, refined it, and made it our own. We are home to the world's largest brewing company, Anheuser-Busch Cos., and the world's largest single-site brewery, the Adolph Coors Co. plant at Golden, Colorado. The Czechs, Irish, Germans, and Austrians may drink more beer per capita than do we Yanks but America as of this writing was still the world's largest beer market, bigger even than China and its 1.3 billion potential beer swillers. Americans in 2002 (the latest statistics available) consumed 6.35 billion gallons of beer, or 31.3 gallons for every single person of legal drinking age. That's seven times the combined volume of beer's rivals, spirits and wine. And for the past twenty-five years, driven by a sense of innovation last seen in Silicon Valley before the tech bust, we have sprouted a robust and competitive craft brew movement, a loose alliance of so-called microbreweries, brewpubs, and moderate-sized regional brewers dedicated to repopulating America's beer landscape with thousands of new beer choices. Though it pains the European Beer Snobs to hear it, that movement has made America the seat of what Michael Jackson, the noted British beer expert, told me was "the most interesting beer scene in the world." And lately, some craft brewers, bored with simply trying to make "better beer" than mainstream beer companies, have begun to fly the flag of the Extreme Beer Movement. What else could you call beer brewed from a 2,700-year-old recipe reverse-engineered from dregs sifted from the bottom of drinking vessels in a royal tomb in Turkey? Or beer made not to be "freshness-dated" but made purposely to be put away for a few years in oak or sherry casks, decanted into ornate bottles, and sold as a rival to cognac? Or blended like good Scotch whisky and marketed with a name like Train Wreck O' Flavors? And what else but Extreme Beer could you call Jim Koch's Millennium Utopias? Koch (pronounced Cook), founder of the Boston Beer Co. and the Samuel Adams label, brought the beer in at a staggering 24 percent alcohol by volume (most beer is about 5 percent). The 2001 bottling wasn't just by far the strongest beer of record ever made -- it was the equivalent of a moon shot in the beer world. The Russians haven't launched an alcohol by volume race to get beyond the moon but Sam Calagione, an Extreme Brewer and founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware, has, his 2002 World Wide Stout achieving 23.6 percent ABV. He's not done. Koch's not, either. Many Beer People are watching this the way baseball fans watched the Dodgers-Yankees rivalry in the 1950s. That said, one of two beers sold in America is an Anheuser-Busch product -- Bud Light recently moving past its brother Budweiser as the number-one-selling beer in the U.S. In fact, about 38 percent of all beer sold in America is low-calorie light beer -- astonishing for a style that didn't break into the national consciousness until Miller Brewing Co. popularized it beginning in 1975. Anheuser-Busch, Miller (bought by South African Breweries in 2002 and renamed SAB Miller), and Adolph Coors, the Big Three, claim about 80 percent of all U.S. beer sales. Accounting for the rest: once mighty Pabst, now a contract brewer of relic beers, such as Schlitz and Falstaff, with an odd cult following; a few regional standouts like Yuengling Brewery, High Falls Brewing Co., and Latrobe Brewing Co.; a growing raft of craft brewers; and, most notably by volume, imports such as Corona and Heineken. Our British-born founders may have given us their notions of liberty and democracy but the earthy ales they brought with them ultimately couldn't hold on here. German immigrants like the Busches, Pabsts, Schlitzes, Hamms, and Millers capitalized on America, the melting pot, preferring its beer somewhat on the light, cold, and frothy side. Lager, the pale, golden, easy-to-drink beer style epitomized here by Budweiser, didn't get to America until the 1840s and didn't take off until the 1870s, aided by scientific advances, notably mechanical refrigeration and pasteurization, that made beer a highly transportable, less perishable commodity. Lager hasn't looked back since. In truth, the American mainstream taste for pale lager isn't out of kilter with the rest of the world: 95 percent of the beer consumed worldwide is also lager (though much of it fuller-bodied than American mass-produced lager). This divining of the national beer palate, coupled with the invention of beer mass marketing, itself a billion-dollar business these days, has enriched brewing dynasties like the Busches and the Coorses and vast numbers of others up- and downstream -- hops and barley growers, distributors, bottle-makers, tavern owners, and advertising agencies, to name a few. Beyond all that has sprouted a fanatical legion of homebrewers, nowadays in unprecedented numbers, who, wired together by the Internet, have turned basements all over America into finely tuned mini-microbreweries and are reinventing the very notion of what beer is or should be. Thus, we are a beer paradox: a world beer superpower aslosh in a sea of hot-selling, middle-of-the-road lagers pushed by talking frogs, catfighting bar chicks, and Clydesdale horses, while at the margins, craft brewers and ardent hobbyists turn out beers that now rival almost anything the vaunted Germans, Belgians, Czechs, and Brits have to offer. Craft brewers represent much of the creative heart of American beer -- yet they have only 3.4 percent of the beer market. In between, we make billionaires of the Mexican family that makes Corona, the unparalleled import success story of all time; we make beer that we now put away in cellars for five years, to be aged like fine wine and whiskey, and sell it for $35 a bottle; and on the ramparts, where beer passion splashes into pop culture, we marvel at the energy and vision of the Maryland entrepreneur who has dedicated much of his time to one day launching...Beer TV. Oh, and would it surprise you that beer -- good ole American-as-apple-pie beer -- so aggressively and adroitly protects its interests in Washington that it is considered by many to be one of America's top ten most powerful lobbying groups? This paradox, with its built-in tensions and contradictions, its converging and diverging passions, its entrepreneurs and characters, seemed best explored by journey. So that's what I have attempted to do, setting off on both a literal and figurative voyage on the River of Beer, traveling through the precincts of the beer makers, sellers, drinkers, and thinkers, trying to gain insight into the forces that drive the mighty River onward. The narrative heart of this book is a car trip I took, following the Mississippi River the length of our mighty beer-drinking country, in a quest to find the mythical Perfect Beer Joint -- a quest that I might admit, if pressed, was part pretext to gain a view of America through the prism of a beer glass. Since all great rivers have their tributaries and backwaters, I knew it would be impossible to stop at every port or scenic wayside. So this book in no way attempts to be an atlas of the American beer experience nor, except coincidentally, a pub or brewery guide, but rather a selective (and thus subjective) look at what makes beer in America interesting today. By way of affording the reader partial insight into my thinking: the state of Big Beer was impossible to avoid; Extreme Beer gave me a compellingly fresh way to look at the maturing craft brew industry. On the other hand the people who spend their lives collecting beer cans and what is loosely called breweriana certainly reside on the periphery of the beer world. But I decided early on they didn't fit in this book. That said, as soon as I got a whiff of the very notion of beer yeast smuggling and beer yeast rustling, I was hooked. And I concluded that the pivotal role of the Beer Goddess in modern beer retailing has been woefully underexploited in beer literature. The River of Beer beckons. Here's what I discovered. Copyright © 2004 by Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Do Beer Yeast Rustlers Really Exist? Who patented the Beer Goddess? How can you tell a Beer Geek from a Beer Nazi? Where exactly is Beervana? Does Big Beer hate Little Beer? Ken Wells, a novelist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and longtime Wall Street Journal writer, answers these questions and more by bringing a keen eye and prodigious reportage to the people and passions that have propelled beer into America's favorite alcoholic beverage and the beer industry into a $75 billion commercial juggernaut, not to mention a potent force in American culture.

Travels with Barley is a lively, literate tour through the precincts of the beer makers, sellers, drinkers, and thinkers who collectively drive the mighty River of Beer onward. The heart of the book is a journey along the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to Louisiana, in a quixotic search for the Perfect Beer Joint -- a journey that turns out to be the perfect pretext for viewing America through the prism of a beer glass. Along the river, you'll visit the beer bar once owned by the brewer Al Capone, glide by The World's Largest Six Pack, and check into Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel to plumb the surprisingly controversial question of whether Elvis actually drank beer. But the trip also includes numerous detours up quirky tributaries, among them: a visit to an Extreme Beer maker in Delaware with ambitions to make 50-proof brew, a look at the murky world of beer yeast rustlers in California, and a journey to the portals of ultimate beer power at the Anheuser-Busch plant in St. Louis, where making the grade as a Clydesdale draft horse is harder than you might imagine. Entertaining, enlightening, and written with Wells's trademark verve, Travels with Barley is a perfect gift -- not just for America's 84 million beer enthusiasts, but for all discerning readers of flavorful nonfiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Thoreau said, "The tavern will compare favorably with the church." Following this premise rather closely, longtime Wall Street Journal writer and novelist Wells (Junior's Leg) searches for his preferred house of worship: the "perfect beer joint." Setting out to follow the Mississippi River, Wells writes, "I would begin in Minnesota among folk who, geographically speaking, are practically Canadians and by reputation descended from good beer-drinking Swedes and Germans. I would slide down soon enough into the Great Beer Belly of America, for, by lore at least, Midwesterners are presumed to be the mightiest of U.S. beer drinkers." Full of profundities ("One thing you can say about lagers: the good ones don't make you work very hard to like them"), the book also lends historical, scientific and cultural insights into the $75 billion industry-from the likes of beer behemoths like Budweiser to newfangled Extreme Beer, which has bottle values comparable to fine Bordeaux. Along the way, Wells encounters quirky characters, and the pages he devotes to describing brewers, bar proprietors, bartenders and plain ol' beer drinkers prove he's more interested in beer people (84 million Americans drink beer) than the industry itself. Wells's storytelling abilities complement his journalist's eye for stats and facts, making this a humorous, lively and informational tour. (Oct.) Forecast: This work is especially well suited for home brewers and literary-minded beer enthusiasts, but it's a fun book for anyone interested in American popular culture. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

"America's great middlebrow social elixir, and inseparable companion to the sporting and spectator life, the portal to first intoxication, the workingman's Valium, and a leavening staple to the college experience" finds a worthy explicator of its whys and wherefores. Wells (Logan's Storm, 2002, etc.) likes a glass of beer, and though he's not undiscerning, he's no snob either. "I grew up with people who knew only three categories of bad beer: warm beer, flat beer, and, worst, no beer at all." Wells's mission here is not to anoint the best beer ("the appreciation of one doesn't require me to vilify the others"), but rather to gather a sense of how beer fits into the American everyday, "to gain a view of America through the prism of the beer glass." And while he's at it, he might as well suss out the finest watering holes along the length of the Mississippi River. Wells doesn't trust the homogenization of longitude, but prefers the variety of latitude. He can't explain how the Big Three (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors) got so big, except that an ice-cold lager on a hot day can't be beat . . . and their bosomy advertising garners admirers. But Wells will also be sampling Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA and Blackened Voodoo as he explores the history of beer and the cultural geography of the towns that hug the great river and its tributaries. Then, with a reporter's nose, he seeks stories: one bar features a mullet toss, another sponsors a 5-K race with a beer stop at the half point. Wells gets literary-Shakespeare figures in, as do Chaucer, Joyce, and Thoreau ("The tavern will compare favorably with the church")-but he is happiest bellying-up with his nose to the wind. In the newspaper worldthey call it "reporting from the mahogany ridge," where so many fine stories, social truths, and bits of political wisdom are revealed. Agents: Tim Seldes/Russell & Volkening; Joe Regal/Regal Literary

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Michael Lewis

Any author who can talk his publisher into paying for him to drink his way across America deserves to be taken seriously. And sure enough, Travels With Barley is a joy. It will inspire readers everywhere to remain sober until they've finished. — Author of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing

I highly recommend this (burrrrp) book. — Dave Barry

Michael Jackson

Deep down, all guys are searching for the Perfect Beer Joint. Ken Wells was a late starter but he has grasped the principles: A pint to procrastinate; don't drink to forget--drink to remember; drink to digress. Travels with Barley is a keen elucidation of beer and the passions that surround it, and Wells digresses with real flair. — The Beer Hunter

Julie Johnson Bradford