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There were side trips, too, to Anheuser-Busch’s hops farm in Idaho, and to the annual meeting of the National Beer Wholesalers Association, in Boston. Wells wanted to see it all. What’s more, he was diving into this river of beer as a pure novice, having done no research before he left. "I learned as I went. I assiduously did not read up beforehand," he says. "I wanted to go through it as a pilgrim, as an explorer."

Which is hardly to say Wells was a stranger to beer. "I grew up in this little place where everyone was drinking lagers ... it was all Falstaff or Schlitz or Regal. If we had someone buy us beer out behind a liquor store, it was usually those," he remembers with an impish smile. "As soon as I graduated from college I did the obligatory backpacking trip through Europe. And I might have had a stout for the first time in London; I remember going to Holland and going through the Heineken brewery and saying, ‘Oh, this is so much better than Jax!’ Then, going to Germany, it was stunning — all these full-bodied lagers."

Further travels stateside afforded Wells the chance to sample regional specialties. "Florida is not a great beer state. Mexico, I drank Tecate. Then, I moved to San Francisco and started drinking Fritz Maytag’s beers." Maytag — yes, he’s a washing-machine heir — is the president of Anchor Brewing Company, whose trademarked Steam Beer is the spiritual forefather of the rich, flavorful ales so preponderant in today’s craft-brew movement. But Wells says that at first, he was happy, by and large, to stick with his macro-brewed beers. "I just remember that in the early days of brewpubs there were a lot of weird ales and green lagers and people who just didn’t know what the hell they were doing."

Of course, that’s all changed. Thanks to the microbrew revolution of the late ’70s and early ’80s, the United States now has more breweries than any country in the world, and some of the very best beers around come from operations that brew fewer than 10,000 barrels a year.

Wells says one happy by-product of his long and arduous research is a newfound devotion to the plangent, puckering bitterness of a frothy, super-hoppy India Pale Ale: "This book turned me into a hophead." But if IPA represented a broadening of his horizons, he was completely bowled over by some of the things he saw when he ventured toward the outer edges of the extreme-beer movement. Wells takes us, for instance, to the frontlines of the alcohol-by-volume wars. When, after three years of planning and using a proprietary strain of yeast, Boston Beer Company’s Jim Koch released Samuel Adams Triple Bock a decade ago, its 17.5 percent ABV broke a 15 percent ceiling that was previously thought unbreakable. (It was presumed that existing yeast strains, which convert sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, would ferment only to a certain point — and that the sole ways to boost alcohol content further would be to distill it, or to freeze it in the finishing tanks. But not only are those methods considered cheating, they’re technically illegal, Wells says. And that’s to say nothing of the deleterious effect they’d have on the beer’s flavor.) Several years later, Delaware upstart Dogfish Head Brewery, whose founder, Sam Calagione, is something of a rock star in the industry, responded with its super-hoppy 120 Minute IPA, which weighs in at a knee-quaking 20 percent ABV and retails for $9 per 12-ounce bottle. (Wells calls it, admiringly, "nuclear fission in a glass.") Not to be outdone, Koch soon released consecutive limited-edition beers — 2002’s Utopias MMII (24 percent ABV) and 2003’s Utopias MMIII (25 percent ABV) — truly innovative beverages that in many ways resemble cognac more than beer.

Adventurous souls like Calagione, monkeying around with strange ingredients and extraordinary recipes, are keeping the industry interesting, says Wells. Consider Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch Golden Elixir. On a dig in Turkey, in 1957, archaeologists discovered a tomb that they surmised belonged to the ancient potentate who inspired the King Midas myth. The place was 2700 years old. Biochemical analysis of the residue inside the iron drinking vessels scattered about revealed a residue of barley, white muscat grapes, honey, and saffron — a potion not unlike beer. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania used mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs to sort out the proper proportions of each ingredient, but still couldn’t nail it. So they approached Calagione, and before long, he’d fiddled enough to figure out a brew that approximates one quaffed by a Phrygian king three millennia ago. (With luck, you can find it in your local liquor store.)

It’s brewers like Koch and Calagione, and New Jersey’s Heavyweight Brewing — whose Two Druids Gruit Ale hearkens back to the Middle Ages by using yarrow, sweet gale, and wild rosemary instead of hops — whom Wells credits with being the rebels and risk-takers of the industry. "It really is true that not since the tech bust in Silicon Valley have we seen so much innovation. These guys are making really wild and interesting things. It’s good for all beer, I think. You have to really appreciate what they’re doing."