Pizza Port, Carlsbad
By Julie Johnson
Published January 2011, Volume 31, Number 6
You’ve won Large Brewpub of the Year twice, and you have won Alpha King twice. So what I want to know is, what’s the story with the plaid pants?
That’s a good one. I like that question, right off. In my high school years, some friends of mine used to wear kind of loud pants and jackets and cruise around town, being a general menace. In college, some friends did the same type of thing, but just the loud pants, and we used to call them “party pants.” Now, each year for the GABF I try to find a new pair that’s louder or at least just as loud, so now I’ve got quite a collection. We make a beer here at Carlsbad that won an award a few years back, called Party Pants Pilsner. Read More…
Shipyard Brewing Co.
By Julie Johnson
Published November 2010, Volume 31, Number 5
What was the status of craft brewing when you arrived in the U.S.?
Back in 1986, there were about 50 breweries, period, including all the big guys. I came here in June of ’86 to help David Geary build Geary Brewing Co. About a month after I got here, Richard Wrigley opened the Commonwealth brewpub in Boston, and that was the first brewery in New England.
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Goose Island Brewing Co.
By Julie Johnson
Published September 2010, Volume 31, Number 4
I think Goose Island was the first brewpub I ever visited, not too long after you opened. Tell me how the brewery began and how you moved into the company.
My father [John Hall] was in the paper packaging business, which was a good business, but about the least sexy business there is. And he was on the financial side, the least sexy part of the least sexy business. In the mid-eighties, the company he worked for was bought by a competitor and he had the opportunity to move to another city or take the early retirement package. He was about the age I am right now: I was going to college and my sister was starting high school. He went out on a limb, for a pretty conservative guy, and decided to open a brewery and a restaurant at the same time, without any experience in either one of them. Read More…
Pabst Brewing, Asia
By Julie Johnson
Published July 2010, Volume 31, Number 3
How did you become involved with the Lhasa Beer project in Tibet?
When I was at Portland Brewing, one of the things we offered was consulting for other breweries. The Lhasa people came to me and said they were interested in brewing a beer in Tibet. I liked what they had to say. That was within a month or two of Pyramid buying Portland, so, when it was time to go to Tibet, I was no longer employed at Portland Brewing Co. and I went as Kornhauser Freelance Consultancy—KFC. Read More…
Duvel Moortgat
By Julie Johnson
Published May 2010, Volume 31, Number 2
How long have you been the head brewer for Duvel? I’ve been with the company for 17 years, and I’ve been the head brewmaster for 10 years now.
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Carlow Brewing Co., Ireland
By Julie Johnson
Published March 2010, Volume 31, Number 1
Over here, we tend to think of brewing in Ireland as being dominated by one very big brewing company and two smaller ones. Tell me about the rise of craft brewing culture there.
These days, it’s really one big company and one smaller one, Diageo and Heineken. Craft brewing really took off in Ireland in the early or mid-nineties. Most of the inspiration came from the U.S. People like Seamus O’Hara [founder of Carlow’s] had traveled in America, and tried beers over there and thought, well, why can’t we do that in Ireland? There used to be a time in Ireland when every town and village had a brewery. When you go to towns like Carlow, you see names like Brewery Lane and Malt House Street, so what they were trying to do was revive the tradition of brewing that had existed in Ireland up to maybe the 1950s. Read More…
