As craft breweries dive into the food world, it’s not uncommon to see executive chefs at brewpubs. They’re not just serving burgers and pizza, either. These professionals are exploring uncharted territory, elevating the culinary merits of brewpub menus. They’re using local, seasonal ingredients; they’re collaborating with other chefs and brewers; and they’re transforming what it means to enjoy beer at the dinner table.
Dave McLean, the founder of San Francisco’s legendary Magnolia Pub on Haight Street, planned his brewpub with a focus on food. Since the pub’s opening in 1997, he has always hired chefs with expert culinary backgrounds to “further enhance the beer experience.” The current executive chef, Kevin Clancy, offers an English-inspired menu—with items such as Scotch quail eggs, bread pudding, and pickle plates—to complement the English-style ales brewed at the pub.
“Observing (and sometimes tasting) that world through osmosis,” McLean explains of working with professional chefs, “gave me context for what I wanted to do as a brewer—beer is food, too, of course, and I understood that my brewing values and ideas were part of a larger community of people who feel that way about all food and drink.”
One member of that larger community is Jorge Guzman, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of New York who was hired last year as the head chef of Surly Brewing’s new restaurant, event center, and beer garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When he was creating the concept for the new restaurant’s menu, he refused to serve traditional pub grub. “We’re not just going to serve cheese and sausage because that’s what people expect at a beer hall,” he says. Instead, Surly’s new beer hall menu includes charcuterie boards, bone marrow, pepita-crusted catfish, and flank steak. Brewer’s Table, Surly’s onsite fine-dining restaurant, offers even more unexpected brewpub food such as rabbit rillettes, guinea hen, and pork jowl.
“This is food we want to eat as chefs. We’re trying to walk that line between comfort level and challenge on the menu,” Guzman says, explaining that he wanted to create a menu that was just as surprising and intoxicating as Surly’s aggressive beer lineup. “Our opportunity is to help people understand that food and beer are one and the same.”
The synergy between craft beer and food goes far beyond brewpubs. Even breweries that don’t serve food are getting involved in their local food scenes by hosting beer dinners, collaborating with chefs, and participating in beer-and-food pairing events. Perhaps the most notable of these breweries is Brooklyn Brewery in New York. The company has long been on the forefront of the beer and food movement, in large part because of its brewmaster, Garrett Oliver.
Garrett Oliver is a household name for craft-beer lovers and a staple on their bookshelves. He’s the editor in chief of The Oxford Companion to Beer, author of The Brewmaster’s Table, and a world-renowned expert in food and beer pairing who has hosted more than 900 tastings, dinners, and cooking demonstrations in sixteen countries. He also sits on the Board of Governors of Slow Food International, an organization formed to counteract the culture of fast food.
“Garrett and I have similar food-value systems,” says Andrew Gerson, Brooklyn Brewery’s house chef, another active member of Slow Food who founded the Philadelphia Mobile Food Truck Association. Gerson, a graduate of both the French Culinary Institute and the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, joined Brooklyn Brewery in 2013 after ten years of professional cooking. “I’ve always been a fan of Brooklyn Brewery,” he says about considering the job opportunity, “and to see a brewery without a restaurant willing to hire a chef was exciting.”
That’s right—Brooklyn Brewery does not serve food. The company is so active in food culture, though, that it needed a professional chef to support that participation. “Culinary arts have always been a huge part of what Garrett and Founder Steve Hindy believe in,” Gerson says. “When I started, I remember receiving a huge stack of notes on beer dinners that the brewery has hosted since 1992. My role is an evolution of what Brooklyn Brewery was already doing for years.”
Gerson manages Brooklyn’s copious beer dinners, food-related festivals, and events. For Brooklyn Brewery, beer and food are more than just the pairing of flavors. Craft beer and artisan food are about community, Gerson explains, and with that community come other artisans and charitable causes with music in the background. “[My role] is to create an awareness about diversity of food and beer and get people to think not just about where that beer and food come from, but how they experience them—that’s the new frontier of beer.”
Gerson is at the helm of the Brooklyn Brewery The Mash, a global food and beer tour that collaborates with chefs for food events and other cultural happenings in eight major cities. It’s a montage of parties, comedy, pop-up dinners, charity events, concerts, film festivals, and more that takes place in each city (Washington, D.C.; Boston; New Orleans; Philadelphia; Austin; Chicago; London; and Stockholm) for one week. “The idea behind The Mash tour was to celebrate this cultural renaissance of brewers, chefs, and other artisans happening all over the world, and bringing a Brooklyn flair into the mix,” Gerson says. The focal point of all of these events is, of course, craft beer.
“We believe that beer is part of the community because it fits into so many cultural modalities,” Gerson proclaims. “We’re inundated with beer dinners, and now trying to think outside that box. The Mash tour is about creation of all different types.”
Gerson and Brooklyn Brewery are reinventing the wheel of food and beer experiences, which are “so much more than just sitting down and having an appetizer, then an entrée, and a dessert,” Gerson waxes poetic. “It’s about playing, singing, interacting, and breaking bread together. It’s about all of these great intersections—about the people, the music, the feel. We support the craft industry, and that’s so much bigger than just beer.”
As Gerson, Guzman, McLean, and other brewery professionals across the globe are demonstrating, food is becoming integral to the craft-beer industry. Not only does it expand the perspectives of consumers when they experience the transcendence of culinary pairings, but it also helps to establish beer’s status not just as a beverage, but as an artisan movement. Just like beer, Gerson concludes, “Food is beautiful. It’s community. It brings people together.”