• Michael Gebert
  • Troublesome, a sour beer from Off Color Brewing.

Yesterday I published the first half of an interview with John Laffler, former R&D brewer for Goose Island, who started Off Color Brewing with his partner Dave Bleitner on the west side. Besides talking about some of the obscure historical styles that he brews—or at least brews versions of—he also offers his assessment of our beer scene, where it’s going, who’s going to get hurt if there’s a shakeout, and why it matters that the world of beer remain small and collegial.

I really don’t like styles being confined to the style. Having to brew styles. It’s not something we do, and the people whose beer I enjoy, they don’t do it either. Our Berlinerweiss has a yeast that has no business being in there. The gose [Troublesome] is our interpretation of a gose. There’s only a couple of examples coming out of Germany and the oldest ones there are from the 90s. It’s basically a blank slate—here’s an idea, here’s some ingredients, you can put your own spin on it.

I guess maybe craft brew is mainstream now. We have a place at the table now. For those of us who have been in this for a while, forever you had some weird bearded guy working in the brewery. It attracted people who don’t like talking to other people. And now that model doesn’t work anymore. You can’t just be the surly brewer in the back who doesn’t talk to customers. That doesn’t fly now. My favorite is Nick Floyd [of Three Floyds]. He’s so surly, he just does not give a fuck. But he’s so genuine about it that it becomes a lovable quality. Where if you don’t know him, it’s like, oh my God, that guy’s going to punch me. But he is who he is and he’s genuine about it.

We probably sell 40 percent of our beer to the national market. So we’re a small brewery in Chicago, and we have beer in 23 states, I think.

But I was in Denmark for a festival, and then I had to fly the next day to London to brew beers in London. And I didn’t know where I was going to stay; I knew like two people in London, and at four in the morning I’m drinking outside the hotel with the staff of like half the craft breweries in London, and I stayed in one of their pubs that had a hotel attached to it, went out drinking with them, and I just wandered around the city drinking with people who I had met like two days ago.