There’s an unexpected collaboration brewing in the city of Flagstaff. Public libraries and microbreweries are pairing literature and local beer to promote library use in an age of digital reading. The social event, “Books and Brews,” rotates locations every month, most recently at Flagstaff Brewing Company. In this latest installment of KNAU’s series Eats and Beats, stories about food and music, we put the “pub” in public library.
The next “Books and Brews event takes place tonight, 4 to 8pm, at Dark Sky Brewing in Flagstaff. All library card holders will receive discounts on beers.
Claudine Taillac, Reference Librarian at Downtown Flagstaff Public Library: So, we’re hoping that this will encourage people to visit their library and see what’s going on. And, what we’ve found at these events is that people actually do love looking through our pairing menus. They like to see what they’ve read or give recommendations to other people just like you might recommend a great new beer. So, we think it goes together really well. So for example, they have Blackbird Porter. So, they gave us their description of the beer. And then we wrote something about black birds and how it relates to literature. We’ve got “Mind of the Raven,” which is a non-fiction book, but then we have fiction books. And, we even have a cookbook, “The Four And Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book,” from that really amazing pie shop in Brooklyn. So, we had some fun with that.
Jeremiah Green: That is kind of the nice thing about this. Just being able to openly pick up books.
John Harper: There’s a lot of really good books in here. I’m very interested in reading “Crime and Punishment.”
Jeremiah Green: “The Alchemist” is brilliant.
John Harper: I look forward to reading “The Alchemist.” It sounds great.
Jeremiah Green: I prefer Jameson actually with “The Alchemist.”
John Harper: I was going to say, you might want to go for some straight whiskey with that one, to be honest.
Julie Woodward: “The Epic History of Yellowstone,” that would be cool. It’s just kind of cool to have a mobile library, where you can go have a beer and figure out what you’re supposed to read while you drink it. I like history. I like adventure. The Bitterroot ESB could also be considered a bit adventurous. You really got to like a hoppy, hoppy beer for that. And, of course because it has chinook hops, you end up with books on cooking salmon.
Gunter Ziwey: I’m from Germany originally, but I have been here for 22 years and I’m a very passionate beer drinker. You know, I read mostly about the Colorado Plateau. I love the canyon so everything that has to do with it. Lots of historical fiction. Everett Reuss, for example, his story. John Wesley Powell, his travel down the Colorado River. Everything that has to do with the Colorado. A beer that resembles the plateau? That’s a very good question. Let me think about this here for a second. Well you know what? After you hike the plateau, and you’re out there for hours and hours, pretty much every beer tastes good.
