The Oxford Companion to Beer

Oxford University Press has perfected the “reference companion”. Other publishers active in the reference sector such as Routledge and Wiley‐Blackwell have produced numerous titles labelled “companion”, but most of these comprise a series of chapters usually giving a “state‐of‐the‐art” summary of a subject area. Oxford companions on the other hand, are effectively mini‐encyclopedias. The general format is an A‐Z sequence of entries, most fairly short but some longer, usually penned by various hands, and scholarly in outlook and tone yet accessible to a general readership. Subject coverage is wide and is not confined to traditional “academic” subjects. Recent companions reviewed...