In an entertaining year-long devotion to the near-religious art of brewing beer, Ian Coutts sets out to make the perfect keg. This beer didn’t start with a beer-making kit, which is what most homebrewers use. And it didn’t rely on pre-roasted industrial malt, which is how commercial brewers do it. Coutts made his own malt, and he grew his own barley. Hops, too. Yeast, he went out and captured. And that’s it. With this beer, the only additives were knowledge and history.

There were plenty of adventures and misadventures along the way, but Coutts writes about them with humour and aplomb, proving it is possible to make the perfect keg of wholly natural beer in one year.

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Ian Coutts is the author of several books, including Titanic: The Last Great Images (with Robert Ballard), Backyard Birds (with Robert Bateman), and The Ultimate Guys' Q and A (released in the United States as Do Nymphomaniacs Really Exist?). His writing has also appeared in Toronto Life, Canadian Geographic, the Globe and Mail, and Quill and Quire, to which he contributed a regular column called ""Watch Your Language."" He lives in Toronto; Kingston, Ontario; and Merida, Mexico.

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