I blame an old school friend for this book.

Two years ago, I published my first book, The Slab. I posted it on Facebook to try and sell a few books – which was pretty much the sum total of my marketing efforts. If you think writing a book is hard, wait til you have to try and sell it. So much pain in the arse – BTW buy my book.

I post a photo of the book and this guy named Michael, who I went to primary school with for a few years, posts a comment. He says, “now you need to write a sequel and call it The Six-Pack.”.

I thought, “damn, that’s a good idea”, But I tried so hard to forget about it because I had other things to do. But the idea of a book called The Six-Pack just wouldn’t go away. So I figured the only way to get it out of my head was to write a book with that title.

The Slab was a collection of 24 stories about beer in Australia – because a slab has 24 cans. With that in mind, The Six-Pack has just six stories in it. But this time the stories are from around the world. There’s the idea that the Australian accent was created by our drunken ancestors, the New Zealand legend that is the Steinlager headache, why brewing in the 20th century could be a dangerous job and a bit about Trappist beer. Just because the idea of monks brewing beer and selling it still amuses me to this day.

Because it’s a short book, it’s not available in hard copy. If you want read it you’ve got go electronic. You can pick it up for a few bucks at Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, whatever the hell Scribd is and a few other places. As a bonus I’ve thrown in sample chapters from The Slab and James Squire: The Biography. Just because I’m a top bloke.