The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [118]
But Oliver had very clear ideas about bringing craft beer to internationally experienced New York audiences, starting with their most notoriously decisive organ, the stomach. “Food came before beer,” he reminisced. “My father was a serious cook.” Oliver’s love of food is evident in his book on the synergy of the two, The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food (Ecco, 2003). Today, Oliver is a regular commentator on the delights of pairing food and beer, and has built a space inside the Williamsburg facility for special beer dinners.
Beyond the culinary aspects of beer that have helped Oliver brew for a New York mind-set, he is most outspoken about craft beer’s place amid the larger culture of New York, and America beyond. “My original background comes out of filmmaking,”he said, “and people often ask me, ‘How do you go from being a filmmaker to being a brewer?’ In my mind, they are actually almost exactly the same. They are disciplines where you need 50 percent technical ability and 50 percent inspiration and art. Now, you can have a career with only one half or with an imbalance of those two things, but we have all been to movies where all the explosions and car chases are perfect, and you walk out of there and that’s just two hours of your life you’ll never get back. Basically Anheuser-Busch is Jerry Bruckheimer.”
As we moved from the lemon verbena-like Sorachi Ace Saison to the racy, aromatic Blast IPA to the maltier, Belgian Abbey–style Brooklyn Local 2 and Cuvée Noire, a complex, roasty stout, Oliver explained that unlike the nation’s truly mass producers, he sees brewing in more writerly terms.
“A beer is like a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it should be interesting throughout, and it’s supposed to have a structure that beckons to you to say, ‘I would love to have a bunch of that’.”
To achieve this sort of drinkability, Oliver went on to explain, is to manage a factor that many winemakers also must confront: attenuation. How much residual sugar should remain? “I think dryness is vastly underrated,” he says. He’s right. What goes for wit in conversation works as well with wheat beer, wild ale, or whatever beer you like: more often than not, less is more.
The genius of restraint is that then you want more of it, achieving perhaps what Oliver calls, “The Four Pint Threshold.” “That’s what I’m always trying to do . . . [the beer] falls into a place on your palate that causes you to say, ‘You know what? I could sit down and get really comfortable with this’.”
DETOUR
THE BROOKLYN INN
148 Hoyt St. (at Bergen St.) • Brooklyn, NY 11217
(718) 522-2525 • Established: 1880s
It has no sign; it has never needed one and never will. Regulars and neighbors fretted in 2009 when The Brooklyn Inn, a perfect little jewelbox of a bar on a quiet Cobble Hill street was rumored to be near closing, then remodeling to expand its seating, then appeared as a set for post-adolescent angst in the Gossip Girl TV show. It was surely headed for the rocky shoals of history, smashed to bits amid the glare of such misguided attention.
But not so. History has been good to the Brooklyn Inn, open for the last 120 years or so in various incarnations, and with its creamy craftsman light fixtures, high windows, tin ceilings, dark wood walls, massive polished mirror bar (imported from Germany in the 1870s), eclectic jukebox, good local beers, and back room pool table, it’s got all the ingredients for perfection for centuries to come.
Perfection, it’s true, has its drawbacks. Like