Garrett Oliver, 53, is the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery and one of the world’s foremost beer experts. He is the author of the award-winning The Brewmaster’s Table and editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer. Sorachi Ace, a saison brewed with the eponymous hop, provided one of his most satisfying recipe-writing experiences, he says.
Brewing Inspiration
People often like to act like they’re inspired all the time, that they come up with these little strokes of genius. It’s the classic ‘finger comes down from the sky and touches you on the forehead’ thing. That’s not the case for me. A lot of times I have to find my way into whatever it is I want to do. Our more complicated beers have a lot of moving parts: K Is For Kriek took 18 months from the first brew to hitting the shelf, for example.
Sorachi Ace
Sorachi Ace was quite the opposite. It was released as a commercial hop to the public in 2008 and when I tasted it in 2009 I could have taken a napkin and written the entire recipe in about 15 seconds. It’s the only time I’ve ever had an ingredient speak to me so powerfully. It sounds like one of those unbearable stories when someone is talking about their novel and they’re, ‘Oh this is who the character wanted to be,’ and you’re like ‘Oh, please shut the hell up!’ but that was how it was. It just went ding!
One thing about Sorachi Ace [the hop] is that it has a flavor profile that really grabs on well to things that have a little bit of acidity and that are bone dry. That’s one of the most important attributes of a saison: Sorachi Ace [the beer] finishes at one degree plato [°P], like Saison Dupont, which is almost nothing. If that beer had any noticeable residual sugar, it wouldn’t work. I’ve had a number of IPAs made with Sorachi Ace and I’ve not liked a single one of them. IPAs are dry, but they’re not dry enough.
It has a few unique abilities when it comes to food. It’s a good response to that great culinary challenge, straight Marinara Sauce. Marinara sauce is basically unpairable, there’s lots of acid in tomatoes. If you try and pair that with most beers, it won’t work but there’s something about the character of the Sorachi Ace hop, it’s almost Basil-like. The little bit of acidity grabs onto the acidity in the sauce — it works really well. It’s great with salmon, too, and it can even work with a steak. It’s one of our most versatile beers.
Brewing Ethos
This sounds hokey, but the centre of what we’re doing is an attempt at beauty. We’re not interested in shocking you, we don’t want to make the biggest or the strongest beer. Those are clown ideas. The single obligation of the beer is to be beautiful; it should play out on your palate like a short story — there’s a beginning, middle and end, there’s an engaging storyline — and when you get to the end of it, you’re sorry.
What that requires is structure, elegance and balance. All those come together in what we think of as deliciousness. That goes for an IPA at 80 IBUs or a beer like Half Ale that is 3.4 per cent, or a barley wine that’s 13.9 per cent.
We don’t have a house flavour but we do have a house character. We’re a lot less traditional than people tend to think. Lots of people say: ‘Your things are all based on style’. That’s laughable. Look at Brooklyn Lager, what style is that?
We do have things based on styles, and when we brew to style we like to stick to those parameters — because why use the style name if you don’t really mean it? With saison, the modern form is based on Dupont. It’s foundational, it’s a style definition. My background is in filmmaking and I’d compare a style to a James Bond movie. There’s only really one plot, but some of them suck and some of them are great. What makes the difference? It’s this: can you do this thing with style and verve even though everybody knows what’s going to happen?
Future of Brewing
What I would like to see next in brewing is the Nordic idea of food: what does this place smell like, taste like? What’s our history? Not just taking things from other places, but inventing your own idiom based on where you are.
My favourite expression of that idea came when I brewed with the Wäls Brewery in Brazil. We made a beer called Saison de Caipira which was based on sugar cane. We cut 700 kilos of sugar cane, crushed it into the kettle; that was 15 per cent of the fermentable sugars. Sugar cane has a really powerful flavour but the thing is, when we get sugar at the table, the sugar cane character has all been processed out.
It’s the flavour of Brazil: you go down any road and someone is going to be making Caldo de Cana where they crush the sugar cane straight into a glass and people drink it over ice.
That’s the next question: what is the flavour of Japan, Brazil, Britain? Brewing American styles is great; we sure brew British styles. But the next evolution is to see people doing things that are indigenous. I think we are going to see a lot more acidity, a lot more funk.
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Illustration by Paul Ryding & David Sexton
