GARRETT OLIVER: I
almost said, welcome-- as if I was bringing
you guys to the brewery. But I should say, thank
you for welcoming me. So I'm Garrett Oliver. I'm the brewmaster
of Brooklyn Brewery. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. I know that I'm speaking here
as an American male, which is, in and of itself,
a rarefied species. But I think brewmaster
has to be-- well, it's probably the
third coolest title that can have in American
male life if you like. I mean there's quarterback,
and then theres' astronaut. But right behind
astronaut is brewmaster. They always say that
you know that you have some kind of success
if you enjoy saying what you do when you go to parties. So I get to go to parties,
and I'm like, "Brewmaster." You know, it's Ike
version of the force. It's kind of good. I do remember one time I
went to a party, though, and the guy said,
"Hey, what you do?" I'm like, "Brewmaster." And I'm like, "What do you do?" He's like, "Fighter pilot." And I was like, "Oh." [LAUGHTER] You know, like, your
Kung Fu is very powerful. That was the only time I
ever got a brush back pitch. So I do love it, and we get to
do an awful lot of cool stuff. And I'm grateful that I've
been doing this for 27 years, and I still get to
do it every day. Yesterday I was
actually out on a boat. The Seaport Museum--
and you guys should know this--
the Seaport Museum run a 130-year-old schooner
called "The Pionner." And "The Pioneer" is a
full-rig sailing vessel. And we took it
out on the harbor. And the day started hot, but
it got really, really nice. Beautiful sunset. We went out around the Statue
of Liberty and whatever else. And you kind of come to
remember that this is really a water city. And we often forget that. And it kind of leads me to
think about all the things that came and went
out of that port and how that port connected New
York City to the whole world. And we live a very, very
different kind of life than people did back in other
countries-- than most people even live today. I mean, we'll look
up and we'll say, "What do you want
to have tonight? How about some Thai food." Like, "Oh, I had
Chinese food yesterday." Or something, as if
it was somehow related and that what you
had yesterday has anything to do with what
you're going to have today. If you are in a
good-sized Italian city, and you wake up in the morning,
and you're really tired. Say you're in Torino. And you wake up in the
morning, and you don't really feel like Torinese food. Guess what you're probably
going to have today. Torinese food. Most people in the world
don't get to think about, well, I ate that three days
ago, and I'm bored with it. In the United States, especially
in a place like New York, we had everything. Everything. Every kind of beer from
everywhere was here. There were so many IPA
breweries in New York City there was a New York Burtinizing
company that existed just to selling brewing salt
to IPA and pale ale brewers in New York. You could get
whatever you wanted. And I'm talking about the 1880s. Your people were from
Campagna, and you're tired of Campagnian food? Walk five blocks that way,
and you'd be in China. Walk 12 blocks that way,
and you'd be in Sweden. There would be a
different language, and people would have
completely different food. We were never locked
into anything. In Brooklyn we had 48 breweries. And those 48
breweries were brewing 10% of all the beer
in the United States. We had the most
diverse food culture on the face of the earth-- and
the most diverse beer culture on the face of the earth. And we had everything
because we had everybody. And that was our strength. I think it continues
to be our strength. But we went through
a weird period. Now I look around this room,
and I can see that most of you did not live through
the weird period. You know, which is cool. And it's the weird period
and our recovery from it that we're going to
talk about today. Because it's really what I
do on a day-to-day basis. I feel like I am
helping us recover from the strangeness of the
middle of the 20th century. So we had-- and this kind
of pertains, in a way, to your business-- we had a huge
difference between what 1920 looked like-- which is
when prohibition came in-- and what 1933
looked like-- which is when prohibition ended. Prohibition is a
fascinating subject. If you've never
really studied it, it's a lot more
interesting than it sounds. It was not really an
anti-alcohol movement, but more of an anti-German,
anti-Catholic movement, which was kind of tied together with
the women's suffrage movement. It had relatively little
to do with alcohol itself. But I digress. The important thing is that 13
years later, from 1920 to 1933, you emerged into a
completely different world. Oh, sure, beer came back,
but the world was different. And, in a way, it's
almost as different as it was between, say,
1993 and 10 years later for most of us, when they
were smart phones starting to pop up everywhere, et cetera,
et cetera, shortly after that. And you had search engines,
yourselves foremost among them. We couldn't imagine that world. And we don't remember the
old one almost anymore. But by 1933 you had a
true mass market possible. You had actual modern
media-- a radio network that could reach out to
everybody all at once. And this was new. Beer used to be a local. It was a thing,
like all other food. It was local. It got trucked a little
ways, but there wasn't really a network of highways. So you could only
get food so far. I think, even by
the 1970s, Pabst was still the number one
beer in the United States. And it probably had
20%, 30% of the market. It wasn't possible to
grab everything at once. But finally they
figured out-- wait a minute-- we have the ability. We now have roads,
and we have trucks. And we have a railroad
system, and we've got this, and we have that. And we have mass
communications which makes possible that mass market. And what is going to
be most profitable is to sell only one
thing in each category. Control the category,
and get all the money. And that is the end of the more
radical straightforward idea of capitalism. Your job is to
get all the money. And the people in
the food industry started to think
about it that way. And the really
horrible thing about it is that we like to act like
we fought it all the way. But we didn't. We asked for it. Because it was
science, and science was going to solve everything. And science is kind of like
the force in "Star Wars." It has this bright side,
and it has this dark side. And at certain times people
only look at one side, and they're not really
seeing the other creeping up behind them. So the same forces that
wanted American sugar to be blindingly white and
that wanted all of our bread and our food to be
blindingly white, and then to have these
ideas of purity running very hard-- everything from
eugenics on down to food. We can make things pure. We can solve all problems. And the problem, when it
came to food, was life. Things that are
alive are a problem. Everything is
trying to eat sugar. It's trying to get protein. Which means that it's trying
get into your food and spoil it. A loaf of bread was a problem. They had two ends on it. You had to slice the thing. Then try to make a bunch
of sandwiches for the kids. Get the kids out the door. Most people were poor. But you could solve that
problem by making stuff that would never ever spoil. In 1990-- and I'm
sure there are people, myself possibly
included, who can do entire parts of
this movie verbatim-- but one of my favorite
movies, the original, "The Matrix" which obviously
posits a world where computers have essentially pulled down
a scrim over the real world and replaced the real world with
a computer-generated vision. But here's the thing. You know, I grew
up in The Matrix. I grew up in The Matrix. And The Matrix was the
American supermarket. When you walked in there
were all these things in the supermarket that
were labeled as food, but they weren't food. Almost none of them
were actually food. Bread-- there were
two kinds of bread. There was white
bread, and then there was white bread with
food coloring, which they called wheat bread. And this bread stayed fresh
in a bag for two weeks. That was the expiration date. Now who here has ever made
a loaf of bread at home? OK. How long does your average
loaf of bread stay fresh? One day, two days. OK. A loaf of bread does not stay
fresh in a bag for two weeks. The thing in the
bag was not bread. It didn't look like bread. It didn't smell like bread. It didn't taste like bread. It was not made from
what bread is made from. And it was not made
how bread is made. It had no actual
bread attributes. And how can we actually-- and
every person, if you ask them, what is bread made of? They could tell you. There are four or five
ingredients, each of which could be pronounced by
a five-year-old child. But this bread
had 40 ingredients printed in a big blue
panel, and all of them were the unpronounceable
names of chemicals. The question is, why
are you not scared? You give this to your children. You have no idea what it is. Right? It doesn't even taste good. It doesn't even taste good. Even worse than that, it was
never supposed to taste good. It wasn't its job to taste good. Its job was to keep your meat
from falling onto the floor and to hold on to mayonnaise
and for you to pay for it. That's its job. I always wonder why
did they call it a crust when it wasn't crusty? It had never even
been in an oven. It was sprayed on food coloring. Every single thing
about it was fake. This is The Matrix,
and this is the world of American food in the 1970s--
1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I saw my first broccoli
plant-- like, stalk of broccoli that you could go out
anywhere in New York City now and buy at 4:00
o'clock in the morning to your heart's content-- I
saw my first broccoli plant when I was in my 20s. Broccoli came chopped
up frozen in a box. It was a brick. And that was the only
way you could get it. Not that you wanted it. Because your mom
was going to cook it the way everybody else
was going to cook it. Follow the instructions--
put in a little bit of water, cook approximately 30
minutes until gray. And that was the way
that we ate broccoli. I hated broccoli. I hated every vegetable
except for iceberg lettuce. That was the one
you could get fresh. There were only two
kinds of broccoli. There were two separate names. But that was it. And that was food. Even the Thanksgiving
turkey that we all got familiar with-- let's face it. Nobody even likes the turkey. Nobody even likes the turkey. They're like, "I
don't like turkey. It's dry." It's like, real
turkeys aren't dry. I mean, an actual turkey
is a delicious bird. But most Americans have
never even had one. So The Matrix is still here. OK. I want you to think about this. The stuff that you--
probably a good many of you, maybe some
of you are still thinking about doing
it this weekend. You're going to put
it on your hamburger. It melts so beautifully. So I want to think
about what is this? And if your answer is cheese,
I want you to think again. First of all, the package
doesn't even say cheese on it. It mentions the word cheese--
"American pasteurized processed cheese food product." Sounds delicious, huh? It's got a whole
bunch of ingredients. What this is an edible plastic,
and that is not a joke. I know people who are working
on this for the military. So you can carry this
stuff around in your pocket forever, take it out in
the desert, and eat it. Now if your definition
of food is something which does have calories and
does not kill you immediately, well, all kinds of
things are food. This is awesome. I can come down there and eat
your papers and whatever else, and I'll get some sustenance. And I'm going to die,
like, not right now. It's all food, right? What is this? Well, I mean, you probably
have a nostalgia, some of you, about it. You're thinking-- there
are a few of you actually thinking about grilled cheese
sandwiches when you see it. You are really well conditioned. This isn't cheese. This was never cheese. I went to my first cheese
shop-- my first actual cheese shop-- in 1993 in Paris. And I literally walked in, and
I said, "What's that smell?" "It is the fromage, Monsignor." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. I've had all four cheeses, and
none of them smell like that. And these are covered in mold." No, they've solved
the entire problem. Life has gone away. It's undead. It was never alive, and it's
never going to be alive. I could walk around with this
for a month in my pocket, take it out, and
eat it right now. And each one of you
knows that's true. You know it's true. You know nothing will
ever happen to this. And yet, somehow, to you
this still looks like food. That's The Matrix. Do you know why it's yellow? The reason why it's yellow
is that, hundreds of years ago, everybody knew that,
as cheeses got older, they gain more flavor. They also became yellow over
time, as many things do. They oxidized. There were melanoidin
reaction products, and your cheese became yellow. So yellowness became a symbol. And it was a symbol of age
and, therefore, quality. Now people started later to
add annatto food coloring into cheeses to
give them that color so that you would associate
their cheese with quality, even if that quality
wasn't there. Then you denature the product
further into something which isn't even cheese anymore
and put the coloring in there. And then you look at this now,
today, identify this as cheese, identify yellow as the
color that cheese should be, based on something
hundreds of years ago, which you no longer even
remember and never even knew. That's The Matrix. And that's the way
that it worked, and it worked on everything. Nobody here probably
is old enough to remember Sealtest ice cream. I probably shouldn't mention it. You should beep that
out, the actual name. But that's the one that--
they were all the same. It was a box of air. This thing weighed
absolutely nothing-- a cardboard box of air. So I remember going
down South one time-- I think it was in Virginia. I was on a road trip. And we pulled up to a diner,
and a stack of pancakes sounded great. There were literally cows
out there in the field. We're like, we're
from New York City. This is awesome. There are cows outside. And the lady says to us,
"Want to have the syrup?" And I was like, OK. And I knew it wasn't really
going to be maple syrup. This was 1985 or something. But then she put these
pats of goo on the table. And it was like the
old school thing. It had a little
square of wax paper, and there was, like, splat. And we said, "Well, can
we have some butter?" And they're like,
"Well, this is butter." I'm like, "Uh, no,
actually this is margarine. We'd like to have some butter." And her previously sweet
nature went away suddenly. And she said, rather
bitterly, "Well, this is the only butter we have." And it turned out
that, no matter where you went the United States, the
closer you were to actual cows, the further you
would be from butter. And vice versa. And that's still true today. I love the idea of kind
of facsimile and reality in butter. Because margarine actually
started off as fake butter for poor people. And then during the
'80s it actually turned from being fake butter
to real margarine. Because they said that it
was actually better for you than butter. And they actually started to
promote the fact that it didn't have the properties of butter. It supposedly didn't
have the same fats, et cetera, et cetera. Butter was terrible for
you, and margarine was good. Then they found out that
this wasn't actually true. And the whole thing reversed. And margarine, which
had been fake butter, then became real margarine,
became fake butter again. All these things depend on
what it is you're trying to get and what it is that
you're thinking about it. When I first lived in London--
well, before I lived in London, I lived in Boston. And I went to Boston University. We drank beer
basically every day. The thing was we didn't like it. We didn't like it. There wasn't anything to like. It was yellow. It was fizzy. And I will tell you the truth. We drank the mass market
brands like Budweiser when we had money. We never had any money. But if we had a
little bit of money, we got that stuff, because at
least it tasted like water. The other stuff, which I
will not mention by name, tasted much, much
worse than water. They were horrible. Absolutely horrible. The thing is that those
mass market brands won out for a reason. The mass market bread
won for a reason. You know, you've heard
the term, "the best thing since sliced bread." But it never occurred
to you, probably, to think about, well, what's
so great about sliced bread? How could something be the
best thing since sliced bread? Sliced bread was
considered awesome. It stayed fresh in
a bag for two weeks. Never throw out a slice. No food waste. That's great-- if it's food. So beer, we thought
we knew what it was. It was yellow. It was fizzy. And it tasted OK, or it didn't. But we drank everything. We were college students. You know, 18 was the
drinking age back then. And we drank like fish. And Tuesdays, kamikaze
night at Mollie's. OK, whatever. Try to find the bartender who
is really going to hook you up. And that was about it. And then I got to London. And my first day, I'm
like, "Oh, there's the British beer I've
heard so much about." And it's brown. It's like, I wonder
why it looks like that. And then I taste it. It's not even cold. And then it's barely fizzy. And I'm drinking it,
and it's like, this tastes like hay and flowers
and fruit and sea air. And I'm drinking it, I get
to the bottom, I'm like, "I'm not sure I liked that. I better have another
one to find out." And I became completely
fascinated with this stuff. And I had traveled all over
Europe from then Czechoslovakia to Belgium, et cetera. And everywhere you went,
people had different beer. And it started to occur to me,
as I went to the cheese shops, and I went to the beer places,
et cetera-- we've been lied to. That wasn't cheese. That wasn't bread. That wasn't a croissant. This is a croissant. That beer wasn't beer. And I was pissed. I was pissed. I got back, and I
went to the bar, and they had the same four beers
they'd had when I left in 1983. Came back in 1984,
pretty appropriately. And they were all like, "Bud,
Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite, Heineken." I was like, "Oh, no. I can't-- I can't
do this anymore." I had took the red pill. I had already left The Matrix. I was not going back
into The Matrix. So I determined for myself that
the only way to have any beer was to make myself. And my best friend
Larry, one year he gave me a home brewing
kit for Christmas. He was like, "Man, I'm
so tired of hearing you talk about how much
you can't get a good beer. Here. Make it yourself." So I did. And it was kind of magic. And it's still kind of magic. Take this really inert
looking material. I mean, let's face it. I love malt, but it
doesn't look like grapes. I mean, now, I love wine. I think wine is a
quite limited beverage. I mean, that one
ingredient they've got. It's a nice ingredient,
that one ingredient. They can do a lot with it. They can't do nearly what I can
do with malt or whatever else. Like, every time I do a
competition versus a sommelier wine versus beer with cheese. There are two
types of opponents. The ones who know
they're going to lose and the ones who don't
know they're going to lose. I like the second type better. Because they're more
combative about it, and they just go down
spinning in flames. You can't beat me. You can't beat me. I can make something that tastes
like anything, like anything. I have a whole drawer full
of-- I can spice things. I can smoke them. I can caramelize them. I have a whole range of yeast
and things to work with. And you have this one grape. Nice grape, but
there's no way you're going to win this competition. So I have a good time
smoking these guys. But people don't think
of beer that way. They think of beer
as a commodity. That's only now
starting to change. People look at it
because they're thinking of The Matrix
version of beer as beer. What's funny about the
way the market works, though, perception wise,
is that the actual truth of the American wine
market is a bag and box or a jug with a finger loop. That is 90% of the
American market-- 90%. The stuff that you're
thinking about when I say wine-- the
nice label and a cork and whatever else--
less than 10%. Less than 10%. When we think about
scotch we tend to think about a single malt.
That's not the scotch market. The scotch market is
blended scotch-- the stuff that you, by and
large, don't drink, that's the actual market. The difference is that when
people think about beer they think of the
90% at the bottom. And when they think of wine they
think of the 10% at the top. That's marketing. Boy, the French are so good. I mean, I have to
love that about them. Ronald Reagan was
not my favorite guy. I will tell you right now. I did-- speaking of
our political season-- I did wear a black
armband for two weeks when he got elected in 1980. I was not into him then,
and I'm not into him now. But I'll tell you
one thing that he did that turned out interestingly. He deregulated the airlines. And one thing that this resulted
in was cheaper airfares. And Americans started to travel. And they went overseas, and
they said, now wait a minute. Look at all this food. Look at these markets. This is unbelievable. Where's ours? And this is really what
jump started craft brewing in the United States. Was Americans going overseas,
finding out that beer was not what they
thought it had been. Leaving The Matrix,
food and beer-wise, coming back and starting,
not only the craft brewing movement, but all of
the interest that we see flowering in food,
in cheese, in chocolate, and all sorts of things. These are not actually
separate phenomena. We look at them as being
separate, because we as ourselves think of ourselves
as brewers, or we're beer fans. We may or may not be chocolate
people or coffee people or whatever else. It's all one thing. And what's fascinating
is that you would have thought in 2008
when the economy collapsed that what you would
have had was a decline of this "fancy stuff." Because, after all, millions
and millions of people are losing their jobs. People are insecure
in their incomes. This stuff is more
expensive, and you would expect it to decline. What happened, interestingly,
is exactly the opposite. People said, I'm not going
on vacation this year. I'm not getting that new car. I can't afford that new suit. But I'm sure as hell
not giving that up. I am going to keep that. I'm going to stay
in the actual world. And I'll leave you
with a thought here. Americans are odd people. We are suspicious of pleasure. Now when I said the word
pleasure, some of you had a little jolt of
"that sounds dirty." The word pleasure actually
sounds dirty to Americans. You know who it
doesn't sound dirty to? Italians. And that's why we go there. Because when an
Italian says pleasure, that automatically just sets
off nothing but happy thoughts in their head. And you know what word you
can't explain to an Italian? Try explaining to an
Italian what a foodie is. I hate that word so much. I can't even tell you how
much I hate that word. "Oh, he's a foodie."
""[INAUDIBLE] foodie." It's like, what is a foodie? Oh, a foodie is
a person for whom food is one of the principal
pleasures in their entire life. And the Italian would
just look at you and say, as opposed to who? Like, what other
person would there be? It's like, yo, sex--
really like it. As far as they're
concerned, food is-- yes, it is sustenance--
but you're supposed to be having a good time. Can you imagine listening
to music all the time that you didn't like? You just, like, go home,
and you're just like, ugh. It's music. Now there are people like that. They can't hang out at my house. You cannot be anywhere
around me and not care, at least little bit, about
what you're eating not you're drinking. Because liking some things
and not liking other things-- we call it taste. And you have to have some. What we're in right now
is simply a recovery. And some people remember The
Matrix, and some people don't. Those of us who lived
through it and who grew up in it, many
of us are determined to make sure that we never
go back that way again. And fortunately what we're
seeing is that we are winning. People are unwilling to go back
there and drink that stuff. Oh, yeah. Maybe if they want to be ironic. It's the trucker hat of beer
when you want to be funny. But when it comes
right down to it, people really just aren't
interested in bad things anymore. And I think that the
big breweries thought that there was going to be--
this is a pendulum, it's a fad. It's going to swing back
the other direction. It's like, no. Actually there is no fad,
and there is no pendulum. This is a return to normality. This is the way things
were supposed to be. We had 4,000 breweries with
every kind of beer already. And if you look at the history
of American food what you see is everything in the whole
world all the way out here. And then post-war you have
a very thin period where everything is squeezed. And this is the choke point. This is The Matrix. This is big business trying
to get all the money. And now that you can't
find everybody anymore. You don't know where they are. You don't know how
to market to them. They are not going to be sitting
in front of the same three channels on Friday
night at 8:00 o'clock. Now you can't reach everybody. Everything fractures again. Taste also fractures again. And people go back to
having actual taste, not taste controlled
from a central point. And that's what craft
beer actually is. That's what I do every day. And people ask on a
day-to-day basis, oh, what is a craft brewery? It is a small brewery? Is it a brewery run by
somebody who's under 26? Or is it a brewery that--
well, I'm going to say, no. I'll give you my version
of what a craft brewery is. A craft brewery is a
brewery really controlled by one individual vision. There is a person-- a
person, not a committee, not a department-- a
person whose taste is expressed through what's
going on in front of you in that glass. That's a craft brewery. I don't care how big it is. If that person is saying
this is the way forward, and this is what we do, and
this is who we are, then, yeah, that can be a craft brewery. And it can be 20 times our
size, as far as I'm concerned, as long as they're
doing the right thing, and they're bringing reality to
people in the form of a glass. And what I tell younger
brewers if they want advice, and what I tell them
is, brew the truth. Brew the truth. Whatever is your
personal truth, whatever makes you get up in
the morning and say, I'm want to go do that job. That's your god. You go serve that god every day. And we're no longer serving
him, pack your bags, go home. We don't want to
see you anymore. We're not interested in fear. We're only interested in making
things that taste good for, hopefully, nice people. And I'll tell you what. It's a lot of fun. It's pretty good. I hope you guys will
sometime come and visit us. There are many ways to
visit Brooklyn Brewery. Some of them will impart
information to your mind. Other ways of visiting us
will remove information from your mind. If you come on Friday night,
you will leave knowing less than you did when you came. We will teach you
absolutely nothing. However there are ways of
coming during the week where you can come see us. Go check it out,
BrooklynBrewery.com. You can just come
see us, and you can come in for small tours. There are the big tours on the
weekend, lots of fun things to drink. And I hope that you'll
come check us out. Of course, in a certain way,
I see you guys every day-- probably more times a day
than I want to imagine. But I hope you will come see us. I thought it would be
churlish to come and bring not one drop of beer with me. So I did bring one
drop of beer with me. So we're going to have a little
bit of beer here afterwards. It is a beer--- and I
did go to film school, so you'll have to forgive. The name of the beer
is "The Discreet Charm of the Framboisie." [LAUGHTER] He's the one who
actually got the joke. Everybody else who wants to
know what this is a reference to is going to have to Google it. And I think that you probably
think that's pretty OK. Thanks very much. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER: And we have time for
a few questions if any of you have questions for him. GARRETT OLIVER: Sure. AUDIENCE: Hi, Garrett. Thanks for coming in. I really liked your talk. I love your beers. GARRETT OLIVER: Oh, thanks. AUDIENCE: So a lot of the foods
you were talking about-- like, The Matrix foods, like
processed cheese-- a lot of that comes from the military. Because they're one of the
biggest investors in R and D into food. So you mentioned Reagan
deregulating the airlines, and Americans going abroad, and
that was a huge cultural shift to get people to
kind of wake up. So do you think we're
still on the down slope from that discovery? Or do you see any
cultural shifts more recently that might take
people away from The Matrix? Because the military is still
really invested into R and D into food preservation
and things like that-- like the energy
bar, and they're really into discovering shelf
stable pizzas now. And when people in America
really value convenience still a lot over taste, do you see
any other indicators in culture that might swing us out of
that convenience-heavy mindset and more into actual food? GARRETT OLIVER: Yeah, I think
that's a very good question. I think that-- and it
is sometimes ironic that I was one of the founders
of the Slow Food movement here in the United States, Slow
Food USA, about 16 years ago. It's a worldwide
eco-gastronomical organization. So it looks to
preserve worldwide food culture and the
biological diversity necessary to make real food. And we always
joked that the time that we were most likely
to end up eating fast food was when we were
traveling for Slow Food. Like, you'd be running through
an airport, whatever else. My last book took
4 and a half years, and I'm not going to
sit there and tell you there were not times that I
wished to God that in Brooklyn we had drive-ins. Because I'm like,
I have 12 minutes. I have three minutes
to get the food, and I have six minutes
to eat the food, I have two minutes to clean up
what's left over from the food. I have no time. Somebody give me some
food, give me some food, give me some food. I would have eaten
anything at the time. Fortunately I
discovered peanuts. And at the end of that whole
process, I had lost 20 pounds. Everybody looked at me and said,
you look great, and I said, I'm dying. But I still love peanuts. But I think that,
yeah, you're always going to have a need for
things that are convenient. However actual cheese
and peanuts and things like that are not
actually inconvenient. If you have them, they are
among the most convenient things you can have. I can literally put some
peanuts in a bag, or trail mix, or whatever else. It can be made of 100% real
stuff, and it even tastes good. And it's a great protein
and everything else. It's going to keep you
going for many hours. It is a matter of what
you're willing to pay. And I think that a lot of it
really comes down to the fact that in our culture
the people who are most likely to know how
to take $10 worth of material and turn them into a really
great meal for four people-- I can do that. I can do that and leave
several dollars over. And there'll be sauces
and all kinds of stuff. The people who know how to
do that are rich people. It used to be everybody. Everybody knew how to cook. And it might have been sexist,
but they taught home ec to girls. But at least somebody in the
household knew how to cook. And this is
critically important. And I think what it's
going to require, really, from us is things like
the Edible Schoolyard where we are bringing
home to children every day what it
means to grow food, what it means to
consume food, and what it means to cook food and
share food with people. If you can cook, the
world's your oyster. It's when you can't-- the people
who most need that knowledge are the people least
likely to have it. I mean, all the great foods of
the world are based on poverty. You know, boil the
bones until you get every bit of-- stocks
and everything else are all based on poverty. So I think that's
one thing I really admire about Michelle Obama. That's one of the main
things that she put out there was getting kids
to pay attention to that. And hopefully we can turn our
education system that way. Looking at beer culturally
what's fascinating is that we are now
exporting beer culture. It used to be we
only took it in. Now, no matter where
you go in the world, everybody brews
American-style stuff. And they're not talking
about the mass market beers. They're talking
particularly about IPA, but even things like
sour beers which originally came to us in certain
forms from Belgium, et cetera. And now we're giving them back
in completely different forms. AUDIENCE: Hi, there. Thanks for coming. And cheers for the
Bunuel reference. My question is, you talked
a lot about deregulation. GARRETT OLIVER: Yep. AUDIENCE: Or at least
you mentioned it. And the narrative that
I'm used to is really, Fritz Maytag gives
way to Ken Grossman, gives way to this explosion. So I'm curious. Do you think that
the deregulation piece and Americans
traveling was more important? Or that it was kind of a
perfect storm, where you have, again, Fritz Maytag,
Ken Grossman, and then this appetite growing
in the American public for that type of stuff. GARRETT OLIVER: Well, I think
that one, if you like, is push, and the other is pull. So the push is, I make the beer,
and I try to sell you the beer. The pull is you want
to buy the beer. And they wanting to buy the
beer was really created-- partly by people tasting what we had--
but it was almost like we were a fish and there was no ocean. There was nothing to swim in. We had to actually
start distributing our own beer in New York City. Sierra Nevada came
to us and said, we can't sell our beer either. Nobody wants it. Would you put our
beer on your trucks? It's like, well,
you're our competitors. Like, yeah, I know, but none
of us can get to market. And then Chimay came,
and Paulaner came, and everybody came. By the time we were done and
we sold that business off, we had 200-plus brands. Because nobody
wanted these bears. There were, like, eight
guys who wanted them. What deregulation did
is that flying to places became something
for "the Jet Set." And we all have heard
the term, but we forget that it was a real thing. People who could get on
a plane were rich people. By a point in the mid-'80s I
was flying to Boston because I didn't have money for the bus. It got weird there for a while. You won't remember
Freddie Laker's airline, but I'm glad still to be here. Because Lord knows that was a
budget airline, I'll tell you. But it got off the ground,
and it went back down again, and it landed. So I guess everything was OK. But, yeah, things got-- I mean,
your average American college student now if you hear they've
been to Europe once or twice, it doesn't sound as
weird as it would have. If you had said
that in, like, 1980, people would have imagined
you were insanely wealthy. It's true that Americans
are famous for not having passports. We are not a traveling people. We have a very big country,
so there is some excuse. But the fact that we
started to actually travel-- all that that happened
in California-- the new food movement, people
like Alice Waters-- it's all down to them traveling. And that comes down to Ken
Grossman and Fritz Maytag, too. They went to England, and
they came back on fire to get some for themselves. AUDIENCE: Cool. So it seems like
the United States-- thanks for coming, by the way. GARRETT OLIVER: No, not at all. It's great to be here. AUDIENCE: It seems like
this is-- currently this is a sort of
Renaissance for beer, and maybe even the
organic movement, whatever you want to call it. And we're exporting
that, as you said. In fact, you can find Brooklyn
Brewery all the way in China. I've been able to find it there. Although you can't find
it in California, and I want to know why. That's actually my question. GARRETT OLIVER: The reason
is-- and you may not like this reason. I don't want to get myself
in too much trouble. We have really
followed a strategy of going to where
we found really cool things and like-minded
nice people, and we go there. Now that does not
mean that we're not cool things and nice--
like-minded nice people, but if you're in New York,
you can get on a plane. And in six hours you
can be in California, or you can be in Paris. And if you had to choose one,
I decided to get on the plane to Paris. Now California is beautiful. I have so many
friends out there. They grew up. They make a lot of great beer. We will get ourselves
out there eventually. But, really, it came down
to-- we're like, well, we feel like going that way. It's an overnight flight. You sleep on the plane,
you get up in the morning, there's cool stuff
when you get there. It's not America. And we liked it. So we started
traveling immediately after establishing the brewery. In 1989 we were in Tokyo. We were selling beer in Tokyo. It was always-- I mean, you
see other American beers internationally now. But actually the
number two market for Brooklyn Brewery outside of
the New York City area itself is Sweden. AUDIENCE: Interesting. GARRETT OLIVER: So we
have a second sister brewery, Nya Carneiebryggeriet,
in Stockholm. And then we're just
finishing the redevelopment, opening in a couple
of weeks of E.C. Dahls in Trondheim, Norway. And there will certainly
be other things coming. But our international
associations have always been
really, really strong. The owners of the
brewery are half Italian. They speak fluent Italian. We've brewed beer in Italy
with partners to do projects. We were actually the
first brewery in the world to do collaborations. So when we started
doing them, that was the start of the
collaboration culture. And for a long time we
were the only ones really going out there doing them--
us and whoever we chose to do a collaboration with. And when I went back to Germany
and did the first collaboration in Germany, people were
kind of like, wow, this is really weird. Americans are going to
come here and brew a beer, and then the Germans are
going to come over there. But now this has
become-- 10 years later, 15 years later-- it's,
like, totally normal. AUDIENCE: Yeah. When I talk to friends
that are from Europe it's almost like they
appreciate the American beers more than the beers in
their home countries. GARRETT OLIVER:
Well, that's true. And actually I think
that's a shame. I think that's a shame. I think that we get
we get a little bit too big for our
britches sometimes because everybody's
swelled with pride that, like, the American
thing is what everybody wants. Frankly, when I go overseas,
the first thing people say to me is like, "You
want to taste our IPA?" Now I'm going to be polite. And I'm going to taste it. But the answer is, no. No, I don't want
to taste your IPA. We have 10,000 IPAs-- actually
a lot more than that-- in the United States. At least the modern version
of this, we invented it. It's like taking a
Japanese person out for sushi in New York. It's like, come on, dude. Really? I mean, can't you find him
some barbecue or something? And so I'm most interested--
like, I go to Brazil, I want to see you what are
you doing that I can't do? You've got some stuff. You know some things. Your grandmother
knew some things. Do you know how many kinds
of sugar these guys have? And I went down
there, and I actually carried out one of those ideas. They said, let's
do a beer together. I'm like, fine. I've got an idea. He's like, what is it? Like, I love
[INAUDIBLE], I said, and I can't get sugarcane,
not fresh sugarcane. You've got to use
it within 24 hours. We went down, cut down
700 kilos of sugarcane, and crushed it straight into
the kettle to make a beer called Saison de Caipira
that has actual sugarcane character and 20% of
the sugars in the beer were straight off
the plant that day. And the reason for me
that it was so cool is not just the
flavor of the beer, I can't do that here--
like, not possible. That has a flavor of place. I love that. I hope people will continue
to explore that wherever they are and have a little pride
in what's going on locally. AUDIENCE: I'll just
say, anecdotally, I just got back from Texas. It was a family reunion where I
was able to find Brooklyn Beer. I bought some. They loved it. GARRETT OLIVER: Ah, well,
I'm glad to hear it. Because Texas pride is fierce. AUDIENCE: They all
want to drink Shiner. GARRETT OLIVER: Yeah, well, as
I said, Texas pride is fierce. It overcomes almost anything. Anybody else? See, they're thinking, we would
like to drink the beer now. All right. Have at it. The beer is called The Discreet
Charm of the Framboisie. It is a sour beer. It is not tremendously sour. If you've had sour beers, and
you think that they are awful, I still urge you to try it. Think more, sparkling rose. I'm not a person-- there are
great complexities there. The beer spent several
months on fresh raspberries, 15 pounds per barrel. They were previously
used bourbon barrels, and then re-fermented
in the bottle. So the beer was
bottled completely flat and gains all of its carbonation
from the secondary fermentation in the bottle with champagne
yeast and Brettanomyces, which is a wild yeast strain
which is just starting to show itself a little
bit of earthy complexity in the background. But if you want to turn
all that off and just say, hey, this is happy juice,
that's totally fine by me. Because that's
kind of what it is. So I hope you like it. It's about 7%. Won't completely
put a spin on you, but hopefully brings a little
bit of brightness to your day. [APPLAUSE]
