(Disclosure: I know Nick Pashley pretty well and would count him as a friend. I am also referenced a couple of times in this volume and more than that in his enjoyable earlier work, “Notes on a Beermat.” That said, I do not believe that either of these factors impact on the opinion expressed below, although you are of course free to disagree.)

While this book, Pashley’s second beer-themed tome, was published in the fall, I was unable to get my mitts on a copy until just before the holiday season, and thus read the bulk of it while toasting my pasty white flesh over Christmas on a Riviera Maya beach. If you think it odd to read a book about drinking Canadian beer in Canada while broiling under the sun in a place where the most characterful beer available is Negra Modelo, well, you’re quite right, but such were my circumstances.

Still, with all the gift cards that seem to change hands each Christmas these days, perhaps it’s better my review appear now, when you’re in a position to buy the book for yourself, than before, when you would have perhaps felt more obliged to buy it for someone else. And buy it your should, even if that means using actual cash, because this is one highly entertaining read.

Pashley has a way of writing which, like the best of beer-related scribes, makes it seem more like you are conversing with him in a pub than absorbing dry words from a page. So when he waxes poetic about the triumphs and failures of beer marketing in this country, or invites you along on his cross-Canada beer travels, it really is more dialogue than monologue, even if your part only takes place in your own head. (And for your own good, make sure that it does, especially if you’re inclined towards reading in public places, as Pashley is himself.)

What this book is, then, is a fun romp through the Canadian beer biz coast to coast, from the Centre of the Universe (a.k.a. Toronto, both Pashley’s and my home town) to both the Atlantic and Pacific and even up so far as Whitehorse. What it is not, however, is the advertised “History of Beer in Canada,” unless you count the twenty or so pages covering the start of European occupation to the commencement of prohibition, or even the thirty-some-odd pages that follow and bring us right up to the 1970’s.

But really, who cares? This is Pashley we’re talking about, not some starched collar historian, and if you go into a book with a blurred picture of a Mountie on the cover and chapter titles like “Barkeep! Gimme Another Light Dry Low-Carb Ice Beer with No Aftertaste” expecting a serious history lesson, well, you get what you deserve, my friend.

My advice is to buy the book now – for all I know, Nick might need the money, given his penchant for public house beer drinking – and store it until the start of the summer. Then, crack the spine with a glass of nicely chilled ale or lager at your side and mete it out to yourself in careful doses. You might be tempted to finish it in one go, but you’ll also want to keep drinking, which would no doubt result in that damn Mountie picture blurring even further. No, much better to take your time and savour every word and drop.