Goose Island brewmaster Greg Hall
Photo: courtesy of the brewery
Before he became Goose Island Beer Company’s award-winning brewmaster, Greg Hall toured breweries around the world to hone his beer knowledge. We chatted with Hall about the ascendance of U.S. brewers, as well as his role in New York’s Craft Beer Week, for which he's organizing a beer dinner at Tabla (September 14, $90 for six courses paired with Goose Island beer; reserve at 212-889-0667).
Zagat Buzz: In which areas of beer brewing do you feel that the U.S. is excelling?
Greg Hall: In just about every one. Our ales are as good as the British. Our Belgian ales are becoming as complex as the Belgians'. The lagers are great too. If you look at the results at the World Beer Cup, where we have to compete against European brewers and brewers from all over the world, American brewers generally do really well.
ZB: What do you think has caused this renaissance of brewing?
GH: I think it’s part of the American spirit to try new things and not really be boxed in. Just as you can get any style of cuisine in America as good as it is anywhere else, you can get beer just as good as anywhere else. Most of the ingredients of beer are very portable. The one that’s not, water, is pretty easy to modify. So we’re operating with the same set of tools.
ZB: Is there still a big divide between American craft brewing and old-world European methods? Or are they coming closer together?
GH: I don’t think there's any divide at all. What’s really pushing everything is brewpubs. Because in a brewpub situation, if you’re making a new beer, all you have to do is brew the beer and write it on the chalkboard, which gives an enormous amount of creative flexibility to the brewer. In a packaging brewery, you really have to put a marketing plan together, get your distributors to buy in and get your sales reps trained for a new style of beer – so it’s a lot more complex to launch a new beer. I see both sides of it since we do both, but it’s much less of an investment to experiment at our brewpubs.
ZB: What are the hard and fast rules of pairing beer with food?
GH: When I try to match up beer and food, the first, and really only, rule is to match flavor intensity. There’s no 'ales with meat,' 'lagers with fish' or silly rules like that. A well-seasoned dish deserves a flavorful beer and a more delicate dish really works better with a more mild-flavored beer. The difference between beer and wine – and I’d like to clarify that I’m not an anti-wine guy – is that wine is for little flavors that sometimes you have to hunt for. Beer is full of big, aggressive flavors, and because of that I think that beer works especially well with cuisines that have really assertive flavors. You always think of spicy cuisines, like Mexican, Southeast Asian and Indian, as being beer food, and they absolutely are. Beer has a little bit more residual sugar that really absorbs the heat and allows the flavor of the spice to come through instead of just the heat of the spice.
ZB: Tell me more about what diners can look forward to at your Tabla dinner pairing.
GH: I am thrilled about that dinner. Chef Floyd Cardoz has got such a wide range of subcontinent flavors, and they really call for big, rich beers that would absorb all those spices. Diners can look forward to having our Matilda, which is a Belgian-style pale ale, and a new brew called Sofie, a Belgian-style farmhouse ale named after my daughter. We age 20% of it in French oak with orange peel, so it has a real nice citrusy nose. It’s clean on the palate, and then you pick up that oak and a little bit of vanilla and creaminess in the finish. We have a new Bourbon County Stout – it’s a barrel-aged imperial stout that we will probably serve with a dessert like Floyd’s signature panna cotta.
ZB: If I am a home chef planning a beer pairing dinner, how would you suggest I go about it?
GH: Maybe try cooking three courses with a cheese and a dessert at the end. And then keep moving the flavor intensity dish by dish. So start with a wheat beer with a salad; you get the nice greenness and citrus aspect with that. Then maybe do a shellfish course with a pale Belgian-style ale with a little bit more malt that will bring out the richness of the shellfish. Then maybe pork with a bigger beer, like a hoppy beer. Then finish it off with another Belgian with a nice washed-rind cheese and maybe an imperial stout with chocolate.
– Kathleen Squires