• Michael Gebert
  • John Laffler with Off Color’s tanks, which are named for dead pets.

At Goose Island, John Laffler worked with one of Chicago beermaking’s cult successes: Bourbon County Stout, an imperial stout with a fearsome 14 percent alcohol content, aged in used bourbon barrels from places like Iowa’s Templeton Rye, and hunted for by fans on their release dates like a Wonka golden ticket. A bald technical description scarcely does justice to the rapture the Bourbon County Stout line provoked; here’s Michael Kiser at Good Beer Hunting trying to sum it up:

Goose was great. I was doing R&D for them, so I didn’t have to worry about making wort, I didn’t have to worry about production scheduling. I could just go off and make new stuff. That was wonderful; I had a lot of resources there, and a tremendous amount of creative and intellectual freedom.

I got typecast a little bit. Like the first beer we made here was a 3.5 percent Russian serf stout. That was a little bit of a commentary—no, we’re not going to be doing the exact same thing as we used to do.

It’s a shame because people put their life savings and a lot of themselves into a brewery. One of the things we ask when we make a beer is, why do we need to make this beer? Why should we make this beer? Not, does it taste good, but is it important? Is this viable or is it just that we’re going to make this because we can sell it and then we’ll make money?

Talking about the beers you do make, Troublesome is a sour beer, which is a category that’s gained favor in the last few years.

We can do anything we damn well please! One of the great things about American brewing is that we have that sense of bravado that’s just, fuck it, we can do it. It’s great now to go back to Europe because we were so influenced by the Europeans, and now they’re all really influenced by us. But they’re not as afraid to take risks now. I mean in England, you used to have your mild, your bitter, and ESB—ooh—that’s a hoppy beer, people aren’t going to buy it. Now they’re all making double IPAs.