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The Boston Beer Co.’s Brewing Manager, Grant Wood, isn’t as much a celebrity as some of his peers in the craft brewing world — say, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery, or even Wood’s own boss, Boston Beer Chairman and Founder Jim Koch, who has starred in many a Samuel Adams radio and TV commercial.
Wood comes across less like an extroverted spokesman and more like the staid farmer in the iconic painting "American Gothic" — whose creator happened to be named Grant Wood. But under the dry, unassuming demeanor is a guy with an easy wit who is passionate about his job and the company he works for. This is what I discovered after sitting down recently with the little-known brewer behind the most recognized brand in U.S. craft beer.
Wood has been a brewing professional for over 20 years. He’s a Texas native who earned his bachelor’s in food science from Texas A&M in 1984. An avid cook since the age of 11, Wood considered becoming a chef. He came from a non-drinking family and grew up regarding beer as "fizzy soda pop." But after college he took a job as a food scientist at the Pearl Brewing Co. in San Antonio and soon thereafter studied brewing science at the Siebel Institute. He fell in love with beer and has been brewing ever since.
A Boston Beer employee since 1995, Wood is directly responsible for much of the company’s 1.2 million-barrel-per year output. That’s 17 different styles — Sam Light, Sam Lager, and the Seasonal, Brewmaster’s and Extreme Beer collections — brewed at four different breweries (the Boston Beer-owned one in Cincinnati and contract breweries in Rochester, NY, Eden, NC, and La Crosse, WI).
Wood travels frequently to these facilities and is intimately familiar with their distinct characteristics. Such knowledge is required when formulating recipes that must come out of these breweries a consistent product. At press time, Wood was working on the Long Shot series, the latest of which is due out in February. Long Shot beers come from contest-winning homebrew recipes and must be scaled up from 5-gallon batches to industrial-sized volumes. Some of these recipes — a boysenberry wheat beer, for example — "are tough to translate," understates Wood.
He is clearly stoked about the successful year Boston Beer has had — sales increased 17 percent in 2006 — and he feels that "for the first time in 10 years, the company is really hitting on all cylinders. People in brand development like to point to the TV ads. That’s part of it. [The ads are] sending the right message — a focus on ingredients, brewing philosophy, process, quality. We’re talking about that again in public. Another part of it is that our sales force has been executing."
But just as important, adds Wood, "We continue to show that we make quality beer. Our seasonal line is the most popular in the U.S. We’re also coming out with new and different products," like last year’s Imperial Pilsner, exploding with Hallertau hops, and Utopias, which, when it was released in 2003, pushed the very concept of beer off the charts in both strength (25%) and flavor. Koch gives his brewers "free rein to go out and experiment," says Wood.
It’s true. Wood let me sample some of the barrel-aged, experimental beers kept in a special room at the Boston brewery. There was a 3-year-old lambic, and I’m not talking Cranberry Lambic. This mouth-puckeringly sour beer tasted like it had been fermented in a Brussels attic visited by a steady breeze carrying New England ale yeast. There was also a mellow, year-old barleywine — a style Boston Beer has never released and has no current plans to put on the market. In fact, most of the beers in the room were...just sitting there, evolving, enticing visitors like me with their secret existence.
The cool thing about Wood is that the beer that excites him most isn’t an experimental lambic or an extreme beer; it’s Samuel Adams Black Lager, a traditional German schwarzbier that is part of the Brewmaster’s Collection. One of its key ingredients is a small amount of Carafa malt from the Weyermann malting company in Bamberg, Germany. Carafa is a highly roasted malt with the husk removed, resulting in minimal tannic harshness. "All you have is the beautiful middle. The stuff is like butter," says Wood.
The Black Lager has potentially broad appeal, as illustrated by Wood’s account of hosting a brewmaster’s dinner back home in Texas recently. Among the diners was a guy who "was a vocal advocate of another beer...all I’m going to say is that it was a domestic light beer," says Wood. The guy tucked into the main course of lamb shank braised in and served with Black Lager. Wood watched and waited, confident that the beer itself would win over the guy’s tastebuds more effectively than any argument about barley versus adjuncts. And sure enough, "he grudgingly admitted liking the Black Lager," says Wood triumphantly.
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