The 10 Beers That Made My Career: Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery

From pints of bitter in London to top-secret "ghost bottles" (shhh!), the Brooklyn brewmaster reflects on nearly three decades in the beer game.

Chris Schonberger

If you were to create a Mount Rushmore of American craft brewing, whose faces would you have etched into stone? Few would argue with the selection of Ken Grossman for his work at Sierra Nevada, the trailblazing West Coast brewery that set the blueprint for so many that followed. Serious beer nerds would surely lobby for Charlie Papazian, whose The Complete Joy of Home Brewing inspired so many of the garage tinkerers who today define the beer scene in the U.S. But you’d be hard-pressed to make it past the planning committee without serious consideration for Garrett Oliver, best known today as the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery.

With a career in beer spanning back to the ’80s, Oliver has been a vital and consistent link between the founders of the craft-beer movement and its current moment of unprecedented growth. He tasted some of the earliest microbrews—from San Francisco’s Anchor Steam, as well as the now-defunct Manhattan Brewing Company—and filtered them through what he learned about beer while traveling through Europe to form his own brewing philosophy: Respectful of old-world traditions and techniques, yet never afraid to embrace the artistry and individuality of beer-making.

In addition to helping turn Brooklyn Brewery into the 11th largest craft brewery in the country, Oliver has established himself as one of the industry’s most revered figures. Scholarly and hyper-articulate, he’s helped to codify many of the wild-west antics of American brewing, from bottle-conditioning (which he studied to create Brooklyn’s beloved Local 1), to food pairings (he literally wrote the book—The Brewmaster’s Table—on it in 2003), and everything in between (two years ago, he edited the first Oxford Companion to Beer, 960 pages of pure beer geekery). He’s also been a key ambassador for American craft-beer movement, solidifying ties to old European stalwarts like Brakspear and Schneider-Weisse through collaborations (a concept Oliver seems to have invented), and most recently breaking ground on a new Brooklyn Brewery project in Stockholm.

Suffice to say, Garrett Oliver has had a few beers in his day, and hearing him talk about them is like listening to Dr. Dre talk about his favorite beats, or hearing Scorsese break down the films that changed the game. You just shut up and listen—preferably with a pint in hand.

From his desert-island beer (Saison Dupont) to his most recent experiments in barrel-aging, these are the 10 beers that have shaped Oliver’s understanding and love of craft beer.

Pint of Bitter near Victoria Station (London, England)

I graduated from Boston University in 1983 with a degree in broadcast and film, and [that summer] I decided to move to England. I thought I was going to work for HBO, which was going to open a new division there—turned out, I ended up stage managing rock bands. As soon as I got off the plane, I went from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Station and walked into the first pub that I saw. I ordered a pint of bitter and they poured me what looked like a fishbowl of this amber liquid and I’m like, This stuff is weird! It's got a strange color, it's kind of flat, and it's warm, but it has a little prickle of carbonation to it, it has waves of flavors of fruit and hay and flowers and all this stuff—what the hell is going on here? When I got to the bottom of the glass, I thought, I’m not sure I like this beer; let me have another one and find out. I had a few pints that day and that still remains a very pivotal moment. It never could have occurred to me that I was going to end up [working for a brewery], but it was the first pint where I was like, Wow, beer can really be something different. [In college] my friends and I drank beer, but we didn’t like it—we drank because we were college students and this was the stuff we could afford. There was no craft beer around then. When I moved to England, the pub as an institution became a very important part of my life. That style of [English ale] is what I later ended up brewing and emulating. I think you would hear that from a lot of craft brewers—that it was the experience of going to England and seeing what beer could be that drove them to become brewers. That’s certainly where my beer story starts.
Manhattan Royal Amber (Manhattan Brewing Co.)

Manhattan Brewing Company opened on November 9th of 1984. The head brewer there was guy named Mark Witty, who had a been a senior brewer for Samuel Smith in England. The new brewery’s main beer was called Manhattan Royal Amber, and I remember waiting on line on opening night to [see if they were making] beer that tasted like the beer that I had in England. I’d been traveling all over Europe; I spent almost a year living in London, and I was spoiled. So the fact that there was this one place [in New York] where you could get a decent pint of beer was extremely important to me. The beer was really good, and that place was so early—1984 was basically the beginning of the craft-brewing movement in the United States. It had started largely on the West Coast, so I believe [Manhattan Brewing Company] was the first brewpub to open east of the Mississippi after Prohibition. They had a line down the street and around the corner every day for a long time because they were the only place where you could get real beer.
Anchor Liberty Ale

I can’t remember exactly what year Liberty Ale first started being served in New York City, but it would have been around '86-'87. When we first tasted that beer—and when I say “we,” I mean other beer enthusiasts and home brewers—we had never tasted anything even vaguely like it. We knew what hops smelled like, but we'd never really had a beer that smelled so strongly of hops. Even though it's not very strong, Liberty Ale can certainly make a claim to being the forerunner of the modern American IPA. It had that big Cascade hop aroma, and what's interesting is that Anchor basically saved the Cascade hop, which nobody was interested in. [Anchor helped make it] almost synonymous with the flavor of American craft beer. For a long time, that beer remained shocking every time I had it. It was so explosive in its flavor. We largely drank out of this place on East 7th Street called Brewsky's. We held most of the meetings of the New York City Homebrewers Guild there. When Liberty Ale was on, it was almost the only beer that any of us drank.
Rough Draft IPA (Manhattan Brewing Co.)

Rough Draft IPA was a beer that I brewed once I became head brewer at Manhattan Brewing Company in 1993. It was an attempt to brew IPA the way IPA had been brewed in England in the old days. It was strong, bitter and highly aromatic. People would drink it and they’d be like, “Good Lord, that’s crazy!” It was one of the beers where I really started to make my mark as a brewer—I was trying to step out and bring something new to the scene. In 1994, What's Brewing [the newspaper of the Campaign for Real Ale] held a conference on the IPA style at the White Horse Pub in London, and I brought my IPA over to England. All the great brewers of Britain were there and they tasted that beer and were like, Well, this is all very amusing but nobody is ever actually going to drink beer like that—it's way too bitter, your hop aroma is completely out of balance, et cetera. But of course, that type of beer became the flagship style for American craft brewing, and it is widely brewed in the U.K. now as well.
Saison Dupont

People often ask me what my favorite beer is, and I am telling them the truth when I say I don’t have a single favorite beer. But if they asked, “Well, you’re going to be on desert island for a month and you can’t have any of your own beer—what would you like to take with you?”, I think Saison Dupont would be the answer. I’ve never had a bad bottle. Beers like Saison Dupont and a couple of others are kind of the classics of the modern saison style that's now being brewed across the United States—there's a little bit of Saison Dupont DNA in a lot of the beers we make. One that's popular now that I’m very proud of is called Sorachi Ace. Even though it has a quite different flavor than Saison Dupont, I think that it's undeniably structured around the same sort of character. In my book from 2003, The Brewmaster's Table, I’m pretty sure Saison Dupont had the largest write-up of any single beer. I still run into many people who say, “Yeah, I drink it because I read your book; I went to check it out and you weren’t lying, it's really great.” That beer has kind of a beautiful severity. It's uncompromising, it's ludicrously dry, it's super aromatic in a funky way, it's got chunks [of yeast] floating through it—there have been no great attempts to over-refine it. It is what it is and has remained so very steadfastly for a lot of years. I really respect that.
Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout

Black Chocolate Stout was the first beer that I ever made for Brooklyn Brewery, but I actually did the first brew of it while I was at Manhattan Brewing Company. The owner of Manhattan Brewing Company had canceled everyone’s health insurance without telling them, which I’m told is a felony. So there were a lot of different possible plans afoot—I talked to the guys at Brooklyn about working together, and there was a possibility that I was going to try to buy Manhattan Brewing with British brewery entrepreneur David Bruce and his people. On July 4th of '94, when [Manhattan Brewing Company] was closed for the day, I went in and brewed a version of Black Chocolate Stout. A few weeks later, I brought it to the guys at Brooklyn Brewery and I said, "Okay, if I was to work with you guys and I was to make a holiday beer, this is what I would do." They tasted it and said, "That’s it, you have to come work for us." So, Black Chocolate Stout was kind of underway even before I technically had signed on the dotted line and decided to come work for Brooklyn Brewery, but it was almost like a test to see how well we would work together. We brewed the beer up at Utica [at F.X. Matt Brewing Company]. They were making two other Brooklyn beers back then: Brooklyn Lager and Brown Ale. But now we went up there and we had this ridiculous beer: 10.5% [ABV], black, et cetera—no one had ever seen anything like this. I’ll never forget that F.X. Matt called me up at my hotel in Utica late at night before we brewed and he said, “Garrett, I don’t think this thing is going to work; this recipe is crazy, we can’t possibly get it through our system.” It required three separate mashes just to make one batch of beer, so it was pretty radical. I remember it was my first taste of being my own person in that situation. I told him, “I have every confidence in your crew and I know that we’re going be able to do this. I’ll see you at 6am.” And I put the phone down. [Laughs.] I showed up the next day and we did it. It just exploded. People loved that beer, and they still love that beer. For me, it’s a touchstone because it was my first beer at Brooklyn Brewery, my first professional recipe that I had done on that kind of scale, and the first one that was put in bottles.
Brooklyn Bridge Bitter (Brakspear collaboration, 1997)

One thing many people don't know is that we invented [beer] collaborations. In fact, collaborations were the hallmark of Brooklyn Brewery for quite a few years. We probably did about six or seven of them before any other brewery in the United States did a single one. I didn’t even know this myself until a group of beer journalists got in touch with me several years ago and said they were writing a thing about the history of collaborations, and it seemed like from what they could see I was the first one to do it. It never really occurred to me to think about it. I’ve made that claim many times since and no one has seemed to find another before this one, which was in 1997. I was working with Peter Scholey at Brakspear Brewery, which was still at Henley-on-Thames then. I loved the Brakspear beers—they had been one of my favorite breweries when I lived in England. The original idea was basically, I make a beer with you and you make a beer with me—our beer reflects our character, and you can come brew something British here. I went over there and brewed that beer, which became quite popular; it had a big American hop character, a lot of Cascade in it, heavily-dry-hopped. They had never done anything like that. After [this beer], we did so many collaborations. The most famous was the Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weisse that we did together with the Schneider Weisse brewery in Germany, which was kind of a pivotal beer in the German brewing scene. It made people realize that German beer didn’t have to be 100% traditional to be great.
Brooklyn Brewery Local 1

Whatever art you intend to pursue, there’s always a gap, for a long time, between the artist you are and the artist you want to be. I think that Local 1 was a turning point for Brooklyn Brewery because it the beginning of us getting somewhere close to where we wanted to be as a brewery. In 2006, we decided that we were going to start bottling special beers in big 750ml bottles. [We also decided] that the beer was going to be completely bottle-re-fermented, because when I tasted a wide range of Belgian beers, one thing that all my favorites had in common was that they were all fully bottled-conditioned, rather than partially bottled-conditioned. One thing most people don’t know is that 97% of the bottled-conditioned Belgian beers are partially bottled-conditioned, which means that they go into the bottle with a lot of carbonation, and they get a little boost from a secondary fermentation. But beers like Saison Dupont started from flat beer in the bottle, and it seemed to me that they built lot of character through that full bottle re-fermentation—that’s one reason why Champagne has to be done that way, or you can't call it Champagne. [When we started figuring out how to implement] this technique, it turned out that no one taught it, which to me was a shock. It was passed down in families and wasn’t written down. Bottle-conditioning in a brewery doesn’t look anything like bottle-conditioning for a homebrewer, so it was very different thing. We had a Belgian brewer who spent four days with us to talk to us about how to do bottle-conditioning. I essentially stepped out my role as brewmaster and said, “For the next four days, we listen to him.” I now teach bottle re-fermentation, and it’s the only PowerPoint presentation I’ve ever done. I’ve done the class for Craft Brewers Conference and for the Master Brewers Association of Americas, because there still really isn’t any place to learn how to do it. I am certainly not claiming that were the first people in the United States to do bottle conditioning. But we dedicated ourselves to doing it on a pretty large scale, and we still do. I think we do more beer bottle from flat here that any other place in the country. I can’t be a 100% sure of that, but I haven’t heard of or seen anybody else doing more.
Brooklyn Brewery Black Ops

When social media starting to pop up in 2006-2007, we realized we had a problem: There were all these new beers we wanted to make, but everybody knew what we were doing all the time. It used to be if you made a special beer, you could make a few kegs and hand them off to your friends who had beer bars. But suddenly, everybody wanted everything. If you made 100 cases of something, you would make a 100 people happy and 1,000 customers inconsolably angry. You would actually lose tons of business because you had sold this one case of beer to one guy, and then the other guy who didn't get it would take Brooklyn Lager off draft because he was pissed off. I wanted to make [a new] beer and the sales people were like, “No. Whatever you do, don’t make this beer or we’re going to be in trouble.” I’m like, Okay, I can’t take this, so I brewed a batch of beer in secret, which is why it’s called Black Ops. It was not on the brewing schedule. We made the beer, [put it in] the bourbon barrels, and hid it under tarps in the warehouse. Only five of us actually knew the beer existed. We didn't release it, but everybody who worked at the brewery got a case at Christmastime. That beer was the jumping off point of barrel-aged beers for us. Many of them that are not [sold commercially], and we call them the Ghost Bottle series. We only recently started putting some labels on the ghost bottles even though we don’t sell them—there are so many of them that we were starting to get the blank bottles confused. Eventually, some of these beers become things that we will actually sell, like Black Ops. We actually have some stuff in barrels that we’ll sell next year, but I don’t have name yet. And we’re building a barrel-aging facility at the Navy Yard right now, where we’ll be able to hold 2,000 barrels at one time. Black Ops is kind of the generator of all that stuff.
Brooklyn Brewery Crochet Rouge

Crotchet Rouge is my look into what I would like part of our future to look like. Crotchet Rouge means “Red Hook,” and this a project that we started doing a few years ago with our friends at the Red Hook Winery. They’re making a range of wines piloted by the natural winemaker Abe Schoener, who’s kind of a cult figure in the natural-wine movement in the United States. In this case, what “natural wine” means is that they get the grapes from the plots on Long Island, bring it back to Brooklyn, crush it, and it ferments by itself, without adding yeast. This is pretty rare in American winemaking, and most people who say they are doing it are lying. One day several years ago, the winemakers over there said, “Hey, we’re moving some wine today, would you like to have the lees?” The lees are the sediment that drops out of the wine after fermentation. I thought to myself, “The lees from your fermentation? Why would I want that?” All they said was that the lees were “magical.” I thought, I’ve got lots of yeast here, why would I need that? But it was a situation where somebody is offering you something and they clearly think is a gift, so as a friend, you’re obligated to take it whether you think it’s worth anything or not. I got back to the brewery and I said to the guys, “We’re going to take this lees yeast and we’re going to add to some Local 1 in a bourbon barrel and see what happens.” And they said, “Why?” I said, “I don’t know.” [Laughs.] Six or seven months later, we taste this beer, and we’re like, “Oh my god—this is spectacular!” Since then, we’ve done maybe five different editions of that beer, and we’re going to do more in the future. The lees [that Red Hook Winery] are giving us are filled with all of these wild yeast strains that, over the course a year or so in a barrel, make this beer fantastically complex—very, very dry; a little bit sour; and quite possibly the best stuff we’ve ever made. We’ve been making 50 cases here, 80 cases there—again, not enough to sell. But it really has us thinking about how can we do more and more of these things in the future to make beautiful and complex beers—beers that are not completely predictable, that require long-term planning and a completely different way of thinking. And even if there’s never a time when we can make a lot of beer like this, for us, it’s really something special. Those guys at Red Hook are great friends of ours too, and we value that relationship. We drink a lot of wine and beer together, which is what it’s all about.

The 10 Beers That Made My Career: Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery

Pint of Bitter near Victoria Station (London, England)

Manhattan Royal Amber (Manhattan Brewing Co.)

Anchor Liberty Ale

Rough Draft IPA (Manhattan Brewing Co.)

Saison Dupont

Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout

Brooklyn Bridge Bitter (Brakspear collaboration, 1997)

Brooklyn Brewery Local 1

Brooklyn Brewery Black Ops

Brooklyn Brewery Crochet Rouge

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