Garrett Oliver is the Brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery in New York. He was introduced to good beer while stage-managing rock bands in England in the 1980s. The unexpected flavors and aromas of British real-ale led this wanna-be filmmaker first to homebrewing and eventually to a flourishing career as a professional brewer. His professional career began in 1989 at the now-defunct Manhattan Brewing Company. He left there in 1994 for his current position at Brooklyn Brewery.

Garrett has been an outspoken advocate for the American craft-brewing industry through his many public talks and media appearances. He has garnered myriad awards for brewing including the 1998 Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation and Excellence in Brewing, granted by the Institute for Brewing Studies and the 2003 Semper Ardens Award for Beer Culture (Denmark). In 2007, Forbes named him one of the top ten tastemakers in the country for wine, beer and spirits. His 2003 book The Brewmaster’s Table has become a classic in the canon of beer literature and a must-read for anyone interested in beer and food pairing.

Most recently Garrett Oliver was the Executive Editor for the recently released Oxford Companion to Beer. The result of a five-year effort by Garrett and a crew of 166 contributors, the Oxford Companion is a comprehensive encyclopedia of all things beer. You can read my comments about the work in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Garrett for an interview during a recent visit to the Twin Cities to promote the book. I’m publishing the interview in two parts. The first part deals with the Oxford Companion to Beer. The second part, to be published tomorrow, deals with the subject of beer and food pairing.

Part 1: The Oxford Companion to Beer

I have to admit that I don’t yet have my copy of the book.

There are 166 contributors and a lot of them don’t have the book either. The book sold out so fast that they had to pull back all of the contributors’ copies and send them out to paying customers. A couple of days ago was its official publication date and it’s already looking at a fourth printing. I think it kind of goes to show that craft beer in particular has arrived. Even though the book isn’t about craft beer, it’s about all beer, but certainly it is the craft beer enthusiast that is the first to grab onto it.

What was the inspiration for the book?

The originating editor was a craft-beer fan and saw what was going on. He saw the hole, the vacuum for something of this sort. The Oxford Companion to Wine has been out there for many years. And in the United States the craft beer market is bigger than the better wine market. When I say better I mean not a bag-in-box and a finger loop. Something with a cork or at least a screw cap. And even though people seem to be more interested in beer than they are in wine, every newspaper has a wine column. But this book was missing. So that was a strange disparity. We have the works obviously of Michael Jackson. We have a number of other books out there, some of which are quite good, but nothing vaguely like this.

So he came to me and said, “I’d like you to be the editor in chief.” Of course I had the Oxford Companion to Wine. I knew how big it was. My first reaction was, “I am not insane, and I’m not going to take this on.” Turns out of course that I apparently am insane, and I did take it on.

What changed your mind?

I think it’s one of those things where friends and family said, “You have a choice between accepting a certain amount of pain now, or accepting pain later when you realize you should have done it and that it was an honor to be asked. Later on, it will be much later, but later on you’ll regret that you didn’t do this.” I think that they were right, but in the meantime, I had a lot of pretty tough days, as did others, putting this together. It does represent not only an effort by me, but an effort of 166 people in 24 countries to really put together something definitive.

How did you gather the contributors?

There were several ways. The first thing you do is assemble a subject list. There are now 1120 some-odd subjects. There were originally, on my first list, about 600 subjects. I put out a call on the Brewers Association forum asking anybody who would like to see the list and add in some others that they think we should consider, to please do it. And we had dozens of people in the craft brewing community, not just here but in other countries, who would take the list and then fill in some other terms that they thought we should cover. Here and there something would come up that I didn’t even know what it is. I mean a stuykmanden; I didn’t know what a stuykmanden was.  So I was like, “Okay. Sounds fascinating. This guy knows what a stuykmanden is and it’s a real thing. So sure, let’s carry it.” Eventually over time we refined a list that appeared to make sense.

Inevitably when you have something of this scope, something is going to be missing. There will definitely be things that are controversial. I got a thing this morning from the UK about some blogger. Apparently he’d just gotten the book and he went directly to the entry for sparkler, which is a term for the widget that you put on the end of a cask faucet, and he was taking issue with my having said that there was still a regional difference about whether people used it or not. He called that a myth. I’m like, I don’t know. I’ve never seen them in the south and I’ve seen a lot of them in the north. But what’s fun is that people are so geeked-out that they’re going to go and dig into every corner of this book and be looking at, thinking about, and talking about what we’ve brought about here. And although some things will certainly be controversial, I think what you have here is a lot of what I call earned authority, things that have been dug up through actual research, not just Google it and copy what come up on Wikipedia or something.

There’s a lot in this book. Some of it is really fun to read like the history of ale houses and some of it is, let’s call it super-über-geeky.

I think we had to be not afraid to go there. And you know this as well as I do, a lot of craft beer enthusiasts, in particular and homebrewers, they know their organic chemistry as well as we do. I’ve met three or four people since I got here saying, “I’m loving how much organic chemistry there is in this book.” I’d never even heard the term “O-Chem” before. People are like, “I’m an O-Chem guy.” I’m like, “I’m so sorry.” I drew the line at actual pictures of molecules, but if you want to know how a particular compound ends up in beer, we’re going to tell you.

The nice thing about this kind of format is that if you decide you don’t want to read about pentanedione, you just skip that one and go on to the next entry. But if you do want that, it’s here. So it really is kind of one-stop shopping for all information. Inevitably you are going to cover in a few thousand words something that you could write an entire book about, so like an encyclopedia you have to distill things down. But I think it’s important not to talk down to people. Give them a lot of information, but also not have it be dead on the page. And Oxford itself has a kind of voice. I wanted to make sure that even though I didn’t squish people’s individual voices, that it had the tone of an Oxford book.

Who is the intended audience for this book?

That’s a good question. I think that’s what makes this type of writing interesting and challenging is that you really are writing for everybody; the professional brewer, the beer geek, the amateur brewer, the person working in a restaurant who needs to know the beers well enough to talk to customers, and casual enthusiasts. You know, aunt Jane buys her nephew Bob the book for Christmas because she knows that he has brewed beer a few times and he seems to like beer a lot. In that way it needs to be accessible in its overall style, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a lot of information there.

I think there’s a certain level we were looking to fly at. When it came time to dive into the chemistry or whatever else, we would go there. Basically, what I wanted was, if a professional brewer’s eyes would glaze over it probably wasn’t something that we needed to really get into. But that allows for a lot.

So we’re looking to cover the entire world of beer, and that goes from sours at one end, with Vinnie Cilurzo writing about the cutting edge of what’s going on in sour-beer making, all the way to American mass-market light beer, a piece written by somebody who works for one of the big breweries and knows exactly how these beers are made, basically giving it to you straight. It’s not a polemic. I’m not saying that the book is without points of view, but when you ask, “What is light beer?” the answer is not, “Well you shouldn’t like light beer, why are you asking?” You ask the question, we’re going to answer the question in great detail. And so it’s really different that way.

You obviously know a lot about beer and beer-making. As you were putting this together were there things that you learned?

Oh yeah. I learned tons of stuff. And that was actually one of the motivations for doing it. I kind of said to myself, “Not only is it an honor to do it, but by the time I finish with this process I’ll either be really smart or I’ll be dead.” I came close to the latter. We hope for the former, although we’ll see.