Sometimes you pick up a book from Amazon to fill up up the basket to the point of free shipping. I think this one was like that. I mean I am not thinking of starting a nano-brewery. If Jordan is right, we are facing a nano-bubble of nano-brewers. What will that sound like when it bursts? Ping?

Happy, then, is the man who finds out this is a fairly fun read. Well, at 98 pages and about 25,000 words it is a pretty quick read. But a swell one, like one of the more entertaining minor prophets of the Old Testament. It is full of warning and foreboding. Which is good. Because when your dream is the dream of a lot of other dreamers you better act on it only after a whopping helping of "BEWARE!!" spoken in a big deep echo-y voice from a mountain tops. By a hairy guy in ill fitting sheets and blankets.

It does have the feel of something put together on the run. Apparently this is a second edition but it is subtitled Volume 2. And it is in a way an interesting means of promotion for the author's nano... except being a nano there is no point in marketing to me. There could be 37 nanos between me and his beer. Maybe 337 for all I know. You will, however, learn to hit up local radio, to buy a manual malt mill and operate it with a power drill, ask for the heating bill before renting space and find extra revenue streams. It's a great big to do list in a sense. And a sensible one, too.

In another way, it is a picture of a moment that will pass. They all do. I love my 1960s and '70s British home brewing books that remind me of the beery world before Papazian and Jackson. I still pull out mid'90s beer magazines, too. There is a bit of now in this.