Lost under a mushroom cloud

“Philanthropists at crowded assemblies denounce the iniquities of the opium trade, and then go home to their pipe or cigar, thinking them perfectly legitimate,” he wrote.

One reviewer described his work as “joyous and thoroughly irresponsible”.

A Wall Street banker and mycophile named Gordon Wasson can be held largely responsible for turning the world on to mushrooms, nearly a century later. A trip to Mexico was giddily written up in a 1957 article, for Life magazine, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom”, leading directly to Timothy Leary’s soundbites, Allen Ginsberg’s nudity, the whole Sixties psychedelic trip.

The trouble is that neither Cooke nor Wasson, nor many of the scientific facts in Shroom, are more interesting than the myths that Letcher is so keen to debunk.

He writes like Norris McWhirter confronted by a small child who thinks he has found a record-breakingly large earthworm in the garden. Could Aztec wall drawings be mushroom inspired? “Like doodlers everywhere, prehistoric artists might simply have found the patterns pleasing,” Letcher sniffs. But he is a child of the Nineties “crusty” scene — the book closes with a goggle-eyed appreciation of Terence McKenna’s “elf clowns of hyperspace”.

Why has western culture embraced the mushroom so late? “Why us,” Letcher asks, “and why now?” More pertinent to ask why, with its supposedly huge mushroom consumption, post-rave culture has come up with nothing to match The Doors of Perception or A Day in the Life.

Pete Brown has no such cosmic pretensions. In Three Sheets to the Wind, his sequel to Man Walks into a Pub, he is on a quest for the meaning of beer, and why drinking culture varies so wildly in different countries. Brown admits that he is no travel writer. He is right. But skip the first few pages of each chapter, avoid the barely humorous Australian customs stories, and this is a fine book.

The more anonymous the beer, the more extraordinary the tales attached to it seem to be. Carlsberg was named after the company founder J. C. Jacobsen’s baby son, Carl, who grew up in his dad’s considerable shadow. When J.C. refused to allow Carl to marry his childhood sweetheart — sending him instead on endless brewery study tours — the son retaliated by returning to Denmark, starting his own brewery, and outselling the father. The two breweries were eventually merged in 1903, some years after J. C.’s death.

More beer is drunk in the United States than anywhere else (although China is fast catching up); it has some 3,400 different beers, and the market is worth more than $75 billion (£40.5 billion). Yet 95 per cent of it is tasteless imitation pilsner. The blandness of Bud and Miller turn out to be an indirect result of Prohibition. Tales of Anheuser-Busch — ferocious marketing, mysterious deaths — and Budweiser’s rise to the top are fascinating, and an inch away from libellous.

In Australia, Brown is engaged in a headlock and called a “pommy ****” (this isn’t in the Outback, it’s Sydney); in Japan, he is treated to a three-day seminar and — because things get lost in translation — quantities of sweet potato vodka. He discovers that Asahi Super Dry has the slogan “best doshy beer”.

Brown rambles, bumbles, firing out information as if he can barely finish the sentence that he just started because there is so much beer info to impart. His style is matey, sometimes deliberately dumb (“Jan chuckles, pleased with himself, which is surprising given that he has a girl’s name”) but he can quote Dumas while boozing in Spain.

More often, he has the gentle humour of a drinking buddy, the practised, middle-aged aleman, the exact tone that a work on this social drug requires: “Patatas bravas? The very name sounds like the kind of food the Clash would have eaten.”