Volume 36
Spring-Summer
2010 |
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Beer is probably the oldest alcoholic beverage
known to man. Evidence of beer brewing
goes back to the dawn of recorded history: the
Sumerians wrote about beer on stone tablets
in their early alphabet, and there are references
to the technical aspects of brewing beer dating
from Egyptian times.
Garrett Oliver, 47, is the brewmaster for the
Brooklyn Brewery, a regional brewery in the
Williamsburg section of Brooklyn that turns
out 310,000 gallons of beer annually. A native
of Queens, Garrett became interested in the
finer points of beer consumption when he
lived in London in the early 1980s. There he
discovered pub-brewed beers that were very
different from the “industrial-style” brews
that he’d known in the United States. Back in
the States, he started brewing his own beer at
home, then went on to apprentice at the nowdefunct
Manhattan Brewery. Garrett worked
his way up to head brewer, then began working
at the Brooklyn Brewery. The Brooklyn
Brewery began its on-site brewing operations
in 1996, producing draft beer made “the way
beer used to be brewed: in the old style, using
traditional ingredients,” said Garrett.
Garrett explained that Brooklyn was once
a city of breweries: in 1900, the borough
boasted 48 breweries, and 10 percent of all the
beer brewed in the U.S. came from Brooklyn.
At one point in the early twentieth century,
Garrett said, Brooklyn produced more beer
than Milwaukee. By the 1970s, however, there
was only one brewery remaining in Brooklyn:
Schaeffer, which shut down in 1976.
As brewmaster, Garrett is the “chef” of the
brewery. He supervises the entire beer-brewing
process, makes sure that the proper ingredients
are used and that the flavor and quality are up
to standards, and supervises the staff that run
the brewery. He is responsible for overseeing
all the recipes, procedures, and techniques that
go into the brewing of Brooklyn Brewery’s
products.
While the facility in Brooklyn brews the
craft beers and ales—the specialty and seasonal
brews—the large-scale beer production is done
at Matt Brewing Company in Utica, New York.
Brooklyn Brewery supplies its own malt, hops, and yeast, and the upstate brewery turns out
beer to Garrett’s specifications. According to
Garrett, it wouldn’t be cost-effective for the
Brooklyn facility to produce all of the beers and
ales that make up the Brooklyn Brewery’s line.
Garrett took me on a tour of rooms with
stainless steel vats, then across the street to
one room where beer is aged in whiskey casks
and to another where bottles of a small-run
specialty ale are kept for several weeks in a
temperature-controlled environment until they
have matured enough to be ready for sale. In the barrel room, the beer gets flavor from the
wood, as well as oxygen that comes through
the wood.
Just before they go to market, labels are put
on these bottles, which have a European-style
cork-and-bail closure. The Brooklyn Brewery
label features a stylized capital “B” that evokes
another era. It was designed by Milton Glaser,
who is known for the famous “I Love New
York” logo. The logo, which suggests the style
of the long-vanished Brooklyn Dodgers baseball
team, “evokes a lost past,” said Garrett.
The Brooklyn Brewery facilities, a sprawling
complex of nineteenth-century industrial
buildings, originally housed the Hecla Ironworks.
Later, it became a matzoh bakery. When
the Brooklyn Brewery took over the buildings,
the floor of the brew house was covered with
layers of hard, compacted matzoh dough that
had to be painstakingly removed.
Garrett is something of a beer scholar, and
he is doing his bit to make sure that the old
techniques are available to new and future
generations of brewers. He is the editor-inchief
of the Oxford Companion to Beer, and all
of the recipes and techniques that are used in
the Brooklyn Brewery are carefully recorded,
so that nothing will be lost to posterity.
At the turn of the last century, there were
4,000 breweries in the United States. Currently,
there are 1,500, many of which are
small-production facilities. At the low point, in 1974, there were only forty breweries in operation,
and the production of beer had largely
become a high-volume industrialized process.
“The brewery is actually going backwards,”
said Garrett. “It’s now more artisanal than it
was even five years ago. We are recreating old
flavors and reviving old techniques that had
largely disappeared from industrial brewing.”
The Brooklyn Brewery, and its brewmaster
Garrett Oliver, are the modern-day custodians
of a craft that goes back to time immemorial.
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Paul Margolis is a photographer,
writer, and
educator who lives in
New York City. Examples
of his work can be seen
on his web site,
www.paulmargolis.com.
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Garrett is something of a beer scholar, and
he is doing his bit to make sure that the old
techniques are available to new and future
generations of brewers.
This column appeared in Voices Vol. 36, Spring-Summer 2010. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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