Beer Expert Talks InBev, 'Extreme' Brews

When longtime beer aficionado Ken Wells got the opportunity to spend a year hanging out in bars drinking on his publisher's tab, he knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

He also knew he couldn't have it turn into the type of crazed jaunt best exemplified by one of his heroes, Hunter S. Thompson, who was best known for his drug-fueled adventures while writing for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s.

"I had to keep it clean," says Wells. "As a Wall Street Journal reporter, I would have to bring Journal-style reporting to it, or it would be disgraceful."

In other words, what Wells didn't want (or couldn't give his publisher) was a beer version of Thompson's classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which the late author recounted a series of paranoid narcotic-induced hallucinations while expounding on the state of the U.S.

What Wells did do, in his book Travels With Barley: The Quest for the Perfect Beer Joint, which was this year republished in paperback, was to chronicle his yearlong investigation of beer culture up and down the Mississippi.

Rather than just float from dive bar to dive bar up and down the country, Wells steeped himself in brew lore, detailing the history of old-world brewing from England and Germany, and how America gave the world its own particular tilt to the beer story with the eventual rise of the industrial-size brewers, the makers of Budweiser, Coors and Miller.

Of course, the biggest news in the global brewing business so far this year is InBev's bid for Anheuser-Busch(BUD Quote). It was a move that sparked outrage in BUD's home town of St. Louis, Mo., when the news came to light earlier this year.