E-Mail This Article to a Friend Social ferment In Travels with Barley, Ken Wells dives deep into the ebb and flow of American beer culture BY MIKE MILIARD

On November 9, 1620, the Mayflower bobbed in choppy brine off the Cape Cod coast. On board were 101 puke-green Puritans, seasick and starving after an Atlantic crossing that had taken more than two months. Although they’d hoped to land further south, on the more temperate beaches of Virginia, the passengers and crew soon decided to drop anchor immediately and come ashore in what would become known as Plymouth. They were thirsty, after all. As soon-to-be Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford inscribed in his journal, "We could not now take much time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beere."

Unfortunately for them, none of Plymouth’s packies — neither Mayflower Food & Spirits nor Bradford’s Package Store — would be open for another few centuries. But the Pilgrims’ keen appetites serve to illustrate the long and close relationship Americans have had, pretty much since day one, with their beer. It’s been a tangled history, from the early Colonial brewers churning out barrels of English-style ales, to the profusion of neighborhood taverns, breweries, and saloons that cropped up around the country as the frontier crept westward; from the arrival of German and Czech immigrants who brought with them the light and crisp lagers of their homelands, to the inexorable rise and market domination of the super brewers many of them became; from the long, dark night of Prohibition, to the flowering of craft brewing and home brewing in the 1980s — and the subsequent emergence of the envelope-pushing extreme-beer movement. Nowadays, there are 84 million beer drinkers in the United States, and somewhere around 3400 domestic and imported brands for them to choose from. And the beer industry here boasts around $75 billion in retail sales — that’s bigger business than either the music or the movie industries.

But beer, of course, is more than a business. It’s a craft, a hobby, a passion. It’s social glue, a central part of the American experience. And two years ago, Ken Wells set out to explore just what that means. In a quixotic journey to find "The Perfect Beer Joint," the novelist and long-time Wall Street Journal writer, armed with an expense account, embarked on a perambulating journey down the length of the Mississippi River — as good a place as any, he figured — to see what he could see and sip what he could sip. Travels with Barley: A Journey Through Beer Culture in America (Free Press), the fizzy and flavorful travelogue that resulted, is appropriately intoxicating. Wells’s wanderings take him far and wide: to the World’s Largest Six-Pack in La Crosse, Wisconsin; to a hotel in Dubuque, Iowa, where Al Capone used to lie low drinking pilfered hooch in his own bar; to a Japanese-themed dive hidden deep in the steamy N’Awlins swamps. He tosses mullets at the sprawling Flora-Bama Lounge and Package Store on the Gulf Coast, and tosses back pints at the Gasthaus Bavarian Hunter in the cornfields of rural Minnesota. He stops by "the Castle of the King" (the gargantuan Anheuser-Busch headquarters) in St. Louis, and enjoys the pursuit of hoppiness in Portland, Oregon, where craft brews account for an astonishing 50 percent of beer consumed. There are side trips along the way, ruminations on sundry freaks and geeks of the fermenting arts. Wells hangs out with home-brewing fanatics, explores the furthest reaches of the extreme-beer movement, and relays the strange saga of underground yeast-rustling syndicates. The welcoming, fun-loving people he meets along the way — be they red or blue staters, hard-core beer nerds or jes’ plain folks — give one hope for this great land of ours.

WHEN I MEET Wells at Back Bay’s Bukowski Tavern, a beer-lover’s dive boasting 130 brews from around the world, it’s November 3. George W. Bush has just won re-election, and Wells already has his mantra for the coming term: "Four more beers!"

This afternoon, at least, we’ll have just one each. Wells samples the local craft, choosing the deep, dusky maltiness and rich coffee undertones of an Ipswich Oatmeal Stout, while I spring for a Maudite, a strong and spicy Belgian-style dark ale from Unibroue, a Québec brewery just north of the Canadian border. We sip slowly and savor (as one should) as Wells explains the beginnings of this book — and how he inveigled the Wall Street Journal into picking up the bar tab for his cross-country jaunt. Wells has worked for the Journal’s San Francisco and London bureaus, and more recently in Manhattan, serving as editor of WSJ’s Page One. In a meeting one day, he and some colleagues were batting around ideas for books that might be published by the paper’s new Wall Street Journal Books, an imprint of Free Press.

"Someone said, ‘What about a book on the beer industry?’ and everyone looked at me," Wells laughs. "I’m not really sure why. There are 300 or 400 people in the Wall Street Journal’s offices, and there are seven or eight who drink beer. And I’m one of them." (It’s remarkable that in an industry in which afterwork drinks were once as ubiquitous as the pencil and pad, habitual tipplers now constitute just two percent of the staff at one of the nation’s premier broadsheets. But we’ll leave for another story.) "There’s a dearth of beer-drinking journalists these days," notes Wells. "It’s something that I think is missing."

After Wells had mulled this tantalizing proposition for a while, the idea evolved. "The original notion was to do a book on the beer industry, but who’s going to read a book on the beer industry except people in the beer industry?" he asks. "As I started to refine it, that’s when it became clear to me that it had to be a journey of some kind, because otherwise it would just be another collection of episodic [stories] going from one beer topic to another without any cohesion. That’s when I came up with the whole notion of driving the Mississippi River in search of the perfect beer joint."

Notwithstanding the fact that Anheuser-Bush is built on its banks, Old Man River might not be the first place one thinks of when considering beer’s place in America. But Wells saw it as a handy pre-mapped route, offering access to out-of-the-way locales and cutting a direct swath through a cross-section of the United States — starting among the hale and hearty beer-drinking Scandinavians of the upper Midwest, descending into what he calls "the beer belly of America," and on down to the lager-lovin’ Louisiana bayou where Wells grew up. "It occurred to me that this was the best way to take the pulse of the broader beer Zeitgeist," he says. "I knew I was going to spend a lot of time in the ‘Bud Light Belt,’ especially as I headed down South. But even in parts of the Midwest, away from big cities, even middle-sized cities, craft beer is still ... they still don’t really know what it is. They find a Sam Adams and think they’ve struck the mother lode of all craft beers."