There's no more fascinating brewery in America _ or possibly the world _ than Goose Island Beer Co.
Across its 30 years, Chicago's oldest brewery has been on the leading edge of beer (it pioneered aging imperial stout in bourbon barrels) and business (its 2011 sale to Anheuser-Busch InBev launched a wild new era of the beer industry).
When I started writing about beer for the Chicago Tribune in 2009, Goose Island was the city's most interesting brewery. Nine years and one sale of the brewery later, that's probably still the case. Goose Island is not only a vibrant local entity, it has become the lead national and global craft brand for the world's largest beer company, with pubs popping up across the globe. It has grown into a story that couldn't just be contained to the pages, whether web or paper, of the Chicago Tribune.
The story deserved a book.
That book, "Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch and How Craft Beer Became Big Business" reaches bookstores June 1. The Goose Island story starts small: one man's idea for a second career in the nascent American brewing industry during the mid-1980s. It winds up telling a story far larger than its own _ the story of craft beer: innovation, struggle, wild success and a complicated crossroad.
Life has been anything but simple for Goose Island as part of the world's largest beer company. Here is where the brewery's story began.
Excerpted from "Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business" by Josh Noel, to be released June 1. Copyright 2018 Chicago Review Press, $19.99.
On a Thursday evening in 1986, as a spring storm pounded the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, John Hall sat in an airplane on the rain-glazed tarmac and did something he would recount for the rest of his life. He reached for a magazine.
John was forty-four and had grown from a low-level sales grunt to one of the senior-most executives at Container Corporation of America, a corrugated box manufacturer housed in a sloping high rise in downtown Chicago. John had a fine view of the skyline from his fifty-fourth-floor corner office, but he spent much of his time on the road. He was headed home from a few days in Ft. Worth and Houston, visiting two of the plants he managed. But the plane wasn't moving, and the rain wasn't letting up. There was talk of tornadoes. He needed distraction. Tired and ready to be out of his suit, John pulled a magazine from the seatback pocket ahead.
He thumbed through the pages until landing on a story about a tiny brewery 100 miles north of San Francisco, opened three years earlier by a pair of friends who thought their home brew might be good enough to appeal to a broader audience. It was. Hopland Brewery was California's first brewpub and just the second in the nation since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. It had become a destination for thirsty travelers headed north on California's fabled Highway 101, with a simple set of directions: "Take the Golden Gate Bridge out of town for two hours; the brewery is on the right." Hopland Brewery made four hundred barrels of beer during its first year _ less than what the largest brewers might pour out in a day.
That tiny brewery 2,000 miles from home stirred something in John on that Dallas tarmac. He'd loved beer since the age of fifteen, when he and his childhood buddies frequented the Waterloo, Iowa, bars that knew better than to ask the ages of their patrons. Because John's growth spurt didn't come until his later teens, he had to strain to see over the bar as he dropped a quarter and asked for whatever lowbrow Midwestern lager was on tap. Old Style. Grain Belt. Gluek's Stite. It didn't much matter. Young John Hall liked beer.
Older John Hall liked beer, too. He'd grown into a stocky man, not quite six feet tall but thickly built from near-daily workouts. He wore an extra layer around the middle from a life of white-collar comfort, and his hair began fleeing in his twenties, which left him bald on top with a fringe of brown circling the back and sides of his head. He believed in respect and clarity and decorum, and though he wasn't the type to close down a bar, he was able to have three or four pints with virtually anyone before heading home to read that day's Wall Street Journal. His kids called him "Encyclopedia" because he seemed to know everything.
As a vice president at Container Corporation, he'd traded the cheap lagers of his youth for the beers discovered on the other side of the Atlantic: endlessly drinkable English bitters, deftly layered Belgian ales, and crisp German lagers. European beer looked, smelled, and tasted different from anything John knew at home. A hefeweizen in Bavaria filled his nose with the tang of lemon, the richness of banana and clove, and arrived in gorgeous, sloping half-liter glasses that felt weighty and dignified in his hand. He could never understand why the genius that flowed from the average European tap barely existed in the United States.
Beyond a love of beer, a scrappy, young California brewery resonated with John because of a simple truth after twenty years in the corrugated box industry: he was bored. Corporate finance had been good to him. He'd climbed from a fresh-from-business-school assignment that initially disappointed him _ salesman at Container's plant in Sioux City, Iowa _ to a lofty perch overseeing a thousand employees at eight plants from the Chicago headquarters. He'd become the $2 billion company's youngest vice president, met Vice President George Bush at the White House, and done well enough to buy his family a condo in Vail. But he couldn't fathom being a cog in someone else's operation for another twenty years.
John had already survived one takeover of Container Corporation, when Mobil oil bought the company in the early 1970s; he watched a bunch of executives cash unfathomably large checks on their way out the door. He didn't want to work for an oil company but gritted his teeth and earned his way to the top. A second takeover was ahead, by another box company, and John had no interest in navigating it. Buyouts led to jobs cuts, efficiencies, and changes in culture. He was assured he would survive but was uninterested. He craved a smaller operation where he was the boss and could make the decisions that would lead to success or failure. "If I'm going to work for an asshole, it's going to be me," became his go-to line. The sale would be his chance to cash in his Mobil stock and leave with a seven-figure nest egg.
John had considered a run at acquiring Container Corporation, but he couldn't raise the cash. He weighed buying a label company in Kansas City _ it was heavy into digital imaging, which struck him as the future _ and a printing company in Mississippi. He hired a firm that brokered sales of small and medium-sized businesses to find a fit. Nothing fit. And then he reached for that magazine. It struck him immediately. A brewery. A brewery was the answer.
