The Hungry Brewer: A Craft Beer Pioneer’s Journey Through Family, Business, and Reinvention

Like opening the tap to pour a foam-topped glass of freshly fermented stout, THE HUNGRY BREWER is an insider’s guide to the world of beer & cider from the legendary brewmaster at Chicago’s Goose Island Beer Company.

If wine nerds are known as snobs, beer geeks are known as great buddies and storytellers. Greg Hall is both.

Greg Hall was brewmaster at Goose Island Beer, the craft beer company his father founded in 1988, for twenty years. He was responsible for many of Goose’s prize-winning top sellers, including 312, Honkers Ale, IPA, Pere Jacques, Matilda, Sofie and, most notably, Bourbon County Stout, a landmark brew that introduced barrel-aged beers to the industry. And while the brewery was a family business–later sold to Anheuser Busch–Greg is a true master of brew because he loves to drink it, loves the history of the beverage, loves the people who make it, sell it and enjoy it.

In THE HUNGRY BREWER, Hall gives us the story of the first generation of American craft beer makers and drinkers. He shows what an eye-opener it was to move from mostly pale lagers made by big U.S., German, Canadian or Mexican breweries to traditional ales at the Goose brewpub in the late ‘80s. As he says, “it was as if we were offering a portal into another world of beers. People in Chicago weren’t used to drinking what we were serving, and it was exciting.”

Hall lets us in on how beer is tasted, brewed and sampled, about how much the grains and hops that go into the fermentation vats matter (sometimes too much). THE HUNGRY BREWER is about the joy of eating and drinking, about traveling to places like the Maltings in York to blow through samples of 40 different ciders or the hunt in Belgium, beginning at Bier Circus in Brussels, for a way into the legendary no-outsiders-allowed Trappist monastery Rochefort where the beer is the color of the monks’ robes. (Greg got in–and he even got access for a couple of women he was traveling with; no woman had ever set foot in the monastery before.)

THE HUNGRY BREWER is about the pure joy of eating and drinking, and getting to make what you really want to have in your glass. It’s chock-full of great stories and cool insider lingo–such as firkin, losing taps, and baluster stems. And it’s also a food & beverage world business story as Greg and his father navigate–not always smoothly–the sale of their charming, idiosyncratic outfit to an enormous multi-national corporation whose values may not be their own.

This is a great eating and drinking book, but it’s also an excellent *reading* book–the secret weapon in collaboration with Hall’s distinctive, front-porch-of-the-general-store way of telling a story is his collaborator Laurie Woolever’s writing. She’s extraordinary in her breadth: hugely knowledgeable about food & drink, and an elegant, unpretentious stylist.