Beer Blast : The Inside Story of the Brewing Industry's Bizarre Battles for Your Money
Author: Philip Van Munching
List Price: $24.00
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ISBN: 0812963911
Publisher: Times Books (02 June, 1997)
Sales Rank: 97,665
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Humorous look at the business of beer selling--very fun!
If you want to learn how to make beer in your basement, you'll need to find a different book. On the other hand, if you want to learn how "The People" are manipulated into changing their buying/drinking habits, then you need to check this book out. Written with an insider's view, Van Munching shows that beer not only is big business, it's a fun big business. From the early Revolutionary War days to the present, the growth and decline of many breweries are chronicled. It was fascinating to learn how the "Giants" came to be, and discover the true parentage of supposedly local brews. It is written in an easy to read style. Even if you do not drink beer, and are involoved in marketing in any way, this would be a good book to study. It tells "How" to market successfully, but even better (and much more humorously) how not to market.
Rating: 5 out of 5
I really liked this book.
I truly enjoyed Philip Van Munching's "Beer Blast," so much, in fact, that I consumed it in a couple of sittings. "Beer Blast" is well-researched, highly opinionated and very funny. However, the humor does not betray Mr. Van Munching's affection for his subject, which is apparently profound. To me, the fact that Mr. Van Munching looks at the beer industry through the lens of his own and his family's experience makes it all the more interesting. Because his observations often are colored by that experience, it lends them a certain validity, even when they are less than "objective." (and who ever said that objectivity was such a worthy aspiration, anyway?)
So much writing about beer is either of the trivializing wink-and-nudge variety (the kind of writing you'd never seen applied to wine, I might add), or, in the case of my segment of the business - microbrewing - uncritical cheerleading, which itself tends to be trivializing and, frankly, boring, too. "Beer Blast" is neither boring nor trivializing. I'd recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in beer.
Peter Egelston
Smuttynose Brewing Company
Portsmouth NH
Rating: 5 out of 5
Beer Blast is a blast
This is terrific reading, not only for beer lovers and marketing buffs. Philip van Munching, grandson of the man who first brought Heineken to the United States, has written a non-fiction book that contains all the ingredients of a first-class thriller: megalomanic dynasties, a fatal car accident the evidence of which was tempered with, mad-gone advertising gurus, and conglomerates trying to take over the hood ("get your girl in the mood quicker, and get your jimmy thicker with St. Ides malt liquor"). Along the way, the reader learns quite a bit about marketing. That is what the Ivy-League-trainined marketing whiz kids at Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors, apparently never did. Instead, they squandered away hundreds of millions of dollars in their futile attempts to win one of the most fiercely fought business wars of the last twenty five years: the war for the American beer market. Van Munching knows how they did it, and he tells it with wit and an incredible insider's knowledge. Great story, great writing, great book!!! Similar Products
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