“There wasn’t a single moment when the chummy, jovial craft beer industry became a battlefield of ‘us versus them,’” Josh Noel writes in Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business (Chicago Review Press). “It happened slowly. And then, seemingly, all at once.”
But John Hall and his son Greg, who became head brewer in 1991 after the first one quit, did take risks. That “barrel-aged stout” in the title of the book isn’t there just to rhyme with “selling out”: Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout, created back when barrel aging was all but unheard of, defied categorization when it was introduced in 1995 but became one of the most iconic beers in the country and helped to launch the barrel-aged beer trend. Similarly, Goose Island began experimenting with using the unpredictable yeast Brettanomyces to make beer at a time when most American breweries were just trying to avoid it (the yeast can cause beer to spoil), producing a Belgian-style ale called Matilda that’s still one of the brewery’s most popular beers.
