MiBrew Magazine: Greg Hall

Greg Hall Is Brewing Again. (Sort of.)

BY Karl Klockars FOR mibrew trail

question is Greg Hall, former brewmaster at Chicago’s Goose Island (aka the man who made Bourbon County Stout famous) and it’s his first foray into professional beer making in a decade? That’s big news. These days Hall is known in Michigan as the founder of Virtue Cider, and they’ve been making farmhouse-style ciders in Fennville for a decade. After finding inspiration in the flavors of Norway while also seeing many similar ingredients growing in Western Michigan, he and his team decided now was the time to release Vestland: a lager with juniper, rye and caraway. We wanted to know more about how Vestland came about, what’s next for Virtue Farm (the brand his beers will be under), what it’s like returning to brewing after so long away and why the world doesn’t need another brewhouse right now:

hen a cider maker decides to pivot to brewing beer...well, that’s interesting. When the cider maker in

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MIBREW TRAIL MAGAZINE

ISSUE 8, SUMMER 2021

We started doing Friday night tastings to get people in the door. That quickly brought breweries in. It was great for them. They got to showcase their special beers to people in an intimate setting. Friday night tastings became an event. It was one of the things that put us on the map early on.

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Fellowship Drives Philosophy at 8 Degrees Plato

The dynamic husband and wife team pride themselves on their hospitality and sincere desire to get to know their customers.

MBT: Have you been brewing this whole time? Or is Vestland really your first true foray back into beermaking since leaving Goose Island? GH: I've done a couple of small-batch things with Goose Island, just kind of like little guest brews. But beyond that, it's been all cider. Now, I still enjoy a beer on a pretty regular basis, and I like to keep up with what's going on because it was part of my life, my identity for so long. But this is the first time in a while. MBT: When you came back to it, was there anything that you realized that you'd forgotten over the last 10 years? Was there anything that surprised you about making something with grain instead of with fruit? GH: That's a good question. I think [it’s] the body thing. Typically, even the sweeter ciders have a pretty limited body. And beer is a little more mouth filling, which I welcome, but it's a little bit of a different experience drinking a few ciders versus a few beers. Not just flavor-wise, but body wise. Again, it’s different - not better, not worse.

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It can sometimes be overwhelming to walk into your favorite bottle shop and peruse the shelves loaded with Michigan beer.

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Greg Hall Is Brewing Again. (Sort of.)

MIBREW TRAIL MAGAZINE

ISSUE 8, SUMMER 2021

Michigan beer. The choices are astounding, the varieties plentiful, and we all know the quality is outstanding. Sometimes, all you want is just a super solid, great drinking, lower alcohol, nice, light and refreshing brew. Nothing fancy, nothing crazy. That is when you reach for what I call a ‘no-nonsense’ beer. While these beers have always had a lock on the industry with offerings from our big beer companies, Michigan craft brewers have gravitated back to the style. And while these brews, which could be either ales or lagers, might seem simple from the outside, they are some of the hardest to make. With no outside additives, no huge hop additions, no barrel aging to hide behind, the true talent of the brewer is on display. It’s almost a way for the brewer to get back to their roots, and fine tune classic brewing techniques.

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MBT: You brought your skills as a beermaker to cider a decade ago. Now that you’re brewing again, what skills from creating cider do you think you’ve brought over to making beer? GH: It's pretty clear to me what the answer is: [it] is more about complexity than intensity. And I think if you look at beer right now, intensity is a pretty, pretty big deal for beer. A lot of beers have a lot of flavor. And there's nothing wrong with that. But when you, when you drink cider for 10 years…in traditional old world style ciders, there's really never, that kind of intensity. The flavors are more subtle. It's much more like drinking white wine - the flavors don’t knock you over, but there's a lot of stuff going on. For beer, we wanted malt flavors and we wanted spice flavors, but not stuff that you can smell from across the table like we do with so many IPAs these days. Which is great! But we wanted something you’d be able to get some flavors that maybe you weren't used to, to make a little more interesting.

MBT: Since Virtue doesn’t have a brewery yet, Vestland is being brewed at an Anheuser-Busch plant [Virtue Cider is owned by Goose Island, whose parent is A-B/InBev]. Since you left Goose before their beers were moved up to A-B breweries, was it hard to transition your recipe to such a larger scale? GH: Here’s my opportunity to really play up our team. The beer was developed not just with me but with Seth Boeve, who is our Director of Innovation. He did all the hard work: Getting the spices right and sourcing them. And then on the production side, our director of operations Mike Stoneburg - we call him Stoney - he’s got a great brewing background. He was a Marine first and then he worked for A-B for a while including in the malt house. From there he was a brewer at Goose Island and then he was the brewmaster at Blue Point Brewing in New York. We got him to come back and try something new with cider. So he's really the guy who did all this setup with the brewing system - he’s an old pro at that. So we've got a really strong team in Fennville now who loves making cider, but loves the challenge of making a beer too.

Bill

Stoney

Seth

MBT: What is the brewing operation going to look like at Virtue Farm once you get it up and running? GH: We got our TTB permit, now we’re just waiting on the state of Michigan and we know that patience is a virtue. We’re waiting patiently - we’ll get it - and once we do, we’re going to focus on what I think is the fun part of brewing, and that’s not necessarily the brewhouse: it’s fermentation and aging and blending. You asked before what's the difference between beer and cider: beer is very brewhouse dependent for a lot of breweries, and the cellar seems a little more secondary there - you just gotta ferment it and put the same yeast in for everything and off you go. But cider is so much different than that. There isn’t a brew house, you simply squeeze the juice. But then, that's when the fun part starts: fermentation, aging, we do a lot of barrel aging. And then, you know, then we still have to blend it. Everything's blended. So we're going to apply a lot of those same principles to making beer. We're going to have a coolship that we'll be able to place outside and do some wild fermentation stuff. We’ll also be able to take some yeast from different fruits and grow that up; ferment with that. So it's gonna be very, very, very much a farmhouse brewery. And then just about everything will probably be in a barrel. We’ve got some foeders on order, and once it's been in there for a while, it's going to be blended like we do with our ciders. And I think that's just going to be really, really fun - being able to build layers of complexity. That's something that Ron [Jeffries] has been doing at Jolly Pumpkin for a long time and their beers have always been so excellent and inspiring. We had some of that at Goose Island too, so we've got a good amount of experience on the team, including our newest team member, a guy named Bill Savage, who before he came to us was running the massive barrel warehouse at Goose Island. So he's the guy who probably has as much barrel aging experience as anybody in the country, so having him on board is really exciting. So, yeah, we've got a few Goose Island “refugees,” or “graduates” if you will. But we think we're gonna make some pretty interesting beers right from the get-go.

MBT: Are you going to be back working on a tiny brewhouse or are you jumping into a bigger system at the start? 10 barrels, 30 barrels…? GH: Here’s the fun part: We're going to start without a brew house. We’re just going to be fermenting and blending. So what we're going to be doing is working with Goose Island and then hopefully some small breweries in Michigan to collab on producing wort, bringing the wort up to the farm and then fermenting there, doing the aging there. The world doesn’t need another brewhouse right now. Certainly, at a small brewery you’ve got a lot of brew houses that are only working two shifts a week, 20 hours a week. There’s plenty of room there. And hopefully we'll be able to do some really cool stuff with [collaborations] so as it comes out we'll be doing stuff that might be probably a max of around 10 barrels. But a lot of stuff will be just a smaller blend - maybe a three barrel [batch] that we bottle off.

MBT: Now that Vestland is in the world, how many people have asked you to put it in a bourbon barrel at this point? GH: [laughs] I...have heard that. And I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised to hear that. Believe it or not, that had not even occurred to me. Our friends at Waypost Brewing, which is the closest brewery to Virtue Farm, they make a lot of great beers, and that’s a place where a lot of the Virtue staff end up on days off or after their shifts. One of the beers I’ve been most impressed with is their foeder lager. It’s just kind of a base lager, based in the foeder, and it’s so, so, so good. It’s one of my favorite beers - I’m certainly inspired by that. So we’ll be putting some Vestland into foeders for sure.

question is Greg Hall, former brewmaster at Chicago’s Goose Island (aka the man who made Bourbon County Stout famous) and it’s his first foray into professional beer making in a decade? That’s big news. These days Hall is known in Michigan as the founder of Virtue Cider, and they’ve been making farmhouse-style ciders in Fennville for a decade. After finding inspiration in the flavors of Norway while also seeing many similar ingredients growing in Western Michigan, he and his team decided now was the time to release Vestland: a lager with juniper, rye and caraway. We wanted to more about how Vestland came about, what’s next for Virtue Farm (the brand his beers will be under), what it’s like returning to brewing after so long away and why the world doesn’t need another brewhouse right now: