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Travels with Barley is steeped in historical context, with Wells digging deep into the history and sociology of beer consumption. He notes that the first known reference to beer is a 4000-year-old Sumerian recipe carved into a clay tablet dug up from ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and Wells is sharp enough to extrapolate that "the ... Miller Genuine Draft found near the end of the Gulf War II in the fridge in Odai Hussein’s abandoned sybaritic pleasure pad bore no resemblance to [it]." He tosses in funny tidbits, like Carrie Nation, of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, scolding in the early 1900s that "men are nicotine-soaked, beer-besmirched, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils!" But while it’s surprising to be reminded, say, that "Schlitz, in the late 1940s, was the best-selling beer in the world," Wells’s most enlightening and engrossing tales come from the here and now, from his interactions with his fellow beer drinkers.

As is obvious from the moment we meet, Wells is a people person: affable, open, gregarious, funny. Those qualities are helpful when your job is to talk to folks in a bar, and Wells puts them to good use. Better, his conversational voice and eye for detail make for lucid thumbnail portraits. He introduces us to the big players, of course — Koch and Calagione, and Fred Eckhardt, who penned A Treatise on Lager Beer, the home-brewer’s bible, way back in 1969, and Michael Jackson, the portly and bearded British beer scribe who’s every bit the opposite of the freakish American of the same name.

But it’s the regular Joes who make for the clearest portraits of the Modern American Beer Drinker. Like the twentysomething dude in hard-drinking erstwhile timber town La Crosse, Wisconsin, who muses that "actually, when I think about it, the per capita number of bars here is deeply troubling." Or Jeff, who Wells says is the first literal "two-fisted drinker I ever met," and who enlightened Wells with an old chestnut of folk wisdom. "He was sitting with two long-neck bottles of Bud, and he says, ‘You know what Budweiser stands for, don’t you?’ " — Wells enumerates the letters on his extended fingers — "Budweiser. Because. U. Deserve. What. Every. Individual. Should. Enjoy. Regularly.’ "

But who’d have guessed that perhaps the most interesting characters in the book would be single-cell organisms? The most surprising and engrossing chapter is a masterfully written meditation on the strange phenomenon of yeast smugglers. These folks have more than a passing interest in the ravenous fungi, different strains of which are responsible for the limitless flavors possible in beer. Of course, your run-of-the-mill corner home-brewing-supply store sells the stuff for as little as $1.50. But for many enthusiasts, run-of-the-mill is far from enough.

"[O]f a few hundred recognized beer yeast strains in the world, only about 100 are available commercially in the U.S., principally through two for-profit yeast labs," Well writes. "But if you’re one of those madly passionate homebrewers ... [that’s] simply not good enough. Propelled by the maddening theory that, if you just had the yeast, you could make Sam Adams as well as Boston Beer does, or you could make some highly exotic beer that could change brewing life, you wanted them all." Wells brings a virtuosic brio to the chapter, weaving history, biology, and sociology into this subculture-within-a-subculture, these beer freaks rustling up cultures from other people’s beers and distributing the stealthily acquired yeasts from as far away as Europe, so amateur brewers can try their hands at making beers that emulate the dry tang of a Bass or a crisp Pilsner Urquell. (It’s not illegal, since the yeast strains aren’t genetically engineered and can’t be patented. But there’s a certain amount of intrigue since the labs and name brewers consider them proprietary.) "The yeast rustlers were the most surprising thing," Wells says, shaking his head. "To me it was the biggest education."

Indeed, Wells got quite an education in the course of researching his book. And seeing this beer novice — his critical vocabulary at first limited to bromides like "potent and good" or, simply, "tasty" — happily learning the ropes offers some of the book’s most entertaining moments. This scene, in which a hard-core home brewer offers Wells a pull from a flask filled with strange liquid, is priceless:

I take a small sip. The taste is mellower than the aroma, though it still tracks down my throat like a slug of hot, boozy honey.

Which is what it more or less turns out to be.

"Honey mead," the man says.

Then, grinning and looking around, he lowers his voice, draws closer and says, "Actually, distilled honey mead."

When I don’t immediately react to this because, at the moment, I am still ignorant of the intricacies of mead, not to mention the cascading intricacies of distilled honey mead, the man looks at me with the realization that he has just wasted his prize on an ignoramus.

"I went to Nuremberg," he explains. "There, they make mead, then distill it, then dilute it with water. I dilute mine with beer."

I nod.

He looks at me in mild exasperation.

"This is 70 percent distilled mead, 30 percent beer. I added cabernet," he says. "I aged it for a year in a bourbon oak cask. That’s why you get all those vanilla tones."

I nod again. He waits for me to say something.

"It’s good," I say. "I like it a lot."

I realize how lame this sounds the second it comes out of my mouth.

The man nods as if to say, "Oh, jeez." He goes off with his bottle, seeking more knowledgeable judgments and more articulate appreciation.

Such adventures notwithstanding, Wells found that however daunting the beer world may be for the uninitiated — for all the seemingly arcane zymurgical terminology like diacetyl and ester and specific gravity, or more obscure styles like Altbiers, Geuzes, and Saisons — it is infinitely more accessible than the rarefied realm of oenology. "The issue with wine is that once people cross over and become serious about wine, they automatically become snobs. It becomes this very self-important quest to find this or that. And I’ve certainly met beer snobs, but the beer geeks are kind of missionary — they show people how complex beer can be and how fun beer can be, but they realize that it’s still beer. I think there’s a qualitative difference between the two. Beer people are so much more fun to hang out with."

Pints, after all, are meant to be clinked. "The river of beer is an incredibly hospitable place," Wells says. "And brewers, home brewers, and beer geeks are more missionary than the Mormon Church. They always want to convert you to their favorite beer, to their favorite pub, to their favorite style. The problem on the river of beer was not getting access, it was getting away: ‘No, I can’t have another one!’ " As if on cue, our waitress arrives and inquires about seconds. Wells has an appointment to make, but checks his watch hopefully just the same. "Ah, shoot," he decides. "I better not."

So, after months on the road, sniffing hops and quaffing suds from Minnesota to Louisiana, Oregon to Massachusetts, does Wells now consider himself a bona fide beer geek? "I’m still a beer-geek-in-waiting," he says. "I’m really interested in the subject, but I’m too lazy to take the next step, which would be to join a beer-judge-certification program or something. Then you really cross over into pure geekism. But I don’t want to do that. One of the things that I really like about this is that I could enter this as an outsider and be welcomed and sort of learn the language. It’s like going to a foreign country and learning to speak well enough that you can join the conversation but you still won’t understand everything around you. And that’s okay. I certainly have now become a much more assiduous beer hunter. Especially now that I like IPAs. I’m always on the hunt for the next great IPA."

But, Wells insists, he is emphatically not a beer snob. On a hot summer day, he’ll still reach into that vaporous fridge and grab a crisp, cold, old-fashioned mass-produced lager. After all, beer is beer. Drawing distinctions between styles serves only to needlessly subdivide this magic liquid that for centuries has been bringing folks together. As Wells writes at the beginning of the book, "I grew up with people who knew of only three categories of bad beer: warm beer, flat beer, and, worst, no beer at all."

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com