Beechwood-aged Bourbon County Stout. Goose Island Light. A Shocktop-Honker’s Ale mash-up.
If beer Twitter had been popular in 2011, imagine the blisteringly hot takes that would’ve followed the sale of Goose Island to AnheuserBusch. Even still, the deal exploded in the craft brewing world and quickly turned ugly. Conventional wisdom following the sale was that A-B would immediately dumb down the popular Chicago based craft brewery’s beers, polluting their respected offerings with the bigger company’s special brand of bland.
Far from messing with Goose’s secret sauce, restricting its access to quality ingredients, or directing it to focus on more widely palatable beers and styles, the predicted nightmares never really came to be. In the Goose deal and those that followed, Big Beer didn’t embark on a cost savings expedition, but instead knew it had a valued commodity in need of nurturing. Goose’s Fulton Street facility modernized and expanded. The brewery intensified its focus on sour and barrel-aged beer production.
This story is from the #127 (August 2017) edition of BeerAdvocate magazine.
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This story is from the #127 (August 2017) edition of BeerAdvocate magazine.
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