25 Years of Brooklyn Brewery: An Interview With Garrett Oliver
I wanted to talk about the 25th-Anniversary edition of the Lager. What was it like working on that beer?
I’ve had a lot of beers that have been anniversary beers for various breweries, and the temptation is always, “We’re going to make the biggest, craziest, most barrel-aged thing you’ve ever seen, and it’s going to completely blow your mind.” And I started thinking about it, I’m like, ok, we make beers like that, and we think they’re a lot of fun. But if this is really about our 25th anniversary, shouldn’t it tell the story of where we came from and where we’re going and where we are? So that’s how I came up with the idea that it would be an amped-up version of Brooklyn Lager, made with the same proportion of just about the same ingredients. But then, in its bottle form, we’re refermenting it in the bottle, which is something we didn’t even know how to do until 2006 or 2007. I think it shows the arc of the brewery in a certain way, and it shows that we’re still very proud of our roots. We’re very proud of that beer.
But at the same time, it’s kind of like if you were a musical artist, and you’ve been around for 25 years, are you really just gonna play all new stuff? There’s always that album that came out 20 years ago that everybody still loves and that you’re still most famous for. Your inclination is to play all the new stuff because you’re an artist and you’re moving forward. But every time you play a concert, you have to play those songs from that first album. And I feel that way about Brooklyn Lager. It’s our everyday beer, and I’m gonna sing that song every time I show up, but I’ve got a lot of songs.
So you’ll be releasing it throughout the year with four different labels from four different artists. How’d that idea come about?
That really came from Steve Hindy, who’s always been tied into the artist community here. He wanted to do something that really reached back to our roots. Here are artists from Brooklyn that were just starting out when we were starting out, and are now well known internationally. I came up with the beer separately from his idea for the label, but I think we were both thinking in the same direction. We’re not here divorcing ourselves from where we came from. We’re proud of where we came from.
Can you talk about the growth of the craft beer industry over the past few years?
It’s interesting watching the thing you’ve been doing all this time become normal and become a regular part of the culture. I think that in the mid 90s there were about a dozen breweries in the city. Most of them were brewpubs—you had Heartland, which was a brewpub at the time. You had Typhoon, you had Commonwealth Brewery, you had places on the Upper East Side, you had Times Square Brewery. And what’s interesting is that what happened to all these brewpubs is that craft beer actually won, and as a kind of ironic result, the brewpub became disadvantaged versus the regular bar, which now had 15, 16, 20 draft lines. And here’s the brewpub with their eight, which before would have been great, and it was the only place you could get real beer back in those days. But it’s interesting that if you opened a bar now that had the same lineup of beers you’d have had in 1992, you’d close. Nobody would go to your bar. You can’t live in that world anymore.Things are a lot different.
Could you speak about the differences between the beer cultures here versus overseas?
Well, what you really see is that even different parts of the US are developing definitively different beer cultures. The West is really different than the East. They don’t even really like the same hops that we like. For example, a lot of the West Coast breweries prefer hop varieties that have dank, weed-like, oniony aromatics, whereas we prefer brighter citrus, floral characteristics. It’s not an absolute split, but you talk to the hop growers, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, the stuff you hate, they love it.”
Also, you have some cities that are all about themselves. When you go to Philly, the first question someone asks is, “So, are you from Philly?” And if you’re not, they don’t really think they need to know you. In Brooklyn, people go out of their way to open bars that don’t have anything from anywhere near by. Their thing might be that they’re known for sours from at least 500 miles away, and it’s all very specialized. We’re very popular, which is great, but the geeky beer scene here reaches to the outside rather than the inside.