Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, has seen that people can surprise you. During our Brewers Congress, held at The Brewery in London, in December 2021, he delivered the closing address in which he told us that you should never assume that you know more than the person sitting in front of you. That we all should be more inclusive, and to have the courage to put ourselves in front of people who don’t look like us and maybe haven’t heard about our beer.

The last time I was next-door in the other room, The Porter Tun room, was 1994. It was for The British Guild of Beer Writers IPA conference. All the great and good were out there in The Porter Tun room, People from all the great British breweries. Though I was somewhat timorous, only having been in the business at that point for about five years.

But I had a keg of IPA that I brought with me. I brought it on the plane as my luggage. It was a mini keg, a five US gallon jobbie about 20 litres…. and it looked exactly like a bomb. British Airways said, ‘alright, put a tag on it and they sent it around the carousel.’

So, things have changed. And when I showed up with a 6.8%, 60 IBU heavily dry-hopped IPA everyone in the room said, ‘Well, that’s very cute, but no one’s ever gonna drink anything like that’.

But 27 years later, I’m back.

You know, from the past and to some extent from the future, because we’ve seen a great many changes over these years. Some things which were just discussed have stayed the same.

So I want to share a few thoughts that have come to me over 32 years or so of brewing and I’m ashamed to tell you the truth that how long it took me to learn this next thing.

I used to give public beer tastings where Garrett Oliver would teach you ‘Beer 101’. I’d look at what I was planning to do. So I thought I’m going to put a smoked beer like Schlenkerla up there and then serious Lambic like Hanssens Gueze. And then I would look at the crowd who came in. And there’s like these four women, maybe they’re about 20, and I’m ask:

‘Well, what beers do you like?’

‘Well, we don’t really like beer. We drink Coors Light when we have to.’

‘But then why are you here?

‘We thought we meet some guys…’

Literally there’s a lady in the back, she looks about at she’s got blue hair, you know, like that blue rinse and there’s another guy he looks even older. And I’m wondering what is he doing here?

Some of these people don’t look like the people I was expecting.

I get to the end of this tasting where I think I don’t know if you guys are really gonna like these beers but I’m going to try to explain them to you. And the thing that I really discovered over time is first of all, when the four ladies left at the end, they said ‘we liked this one, this one, this one and this one’. All of the biggest, boldest, most interesting things on the menu.

The lady with the blue rinse told me how much he loves Imperial stouts. You know, and the older guy in the back said ‘I haven’t had something like this in 30 or 40 years.

‘What are you talking about?’,  I replied

He said: ‘I was stationed in Belgium after World War Two and we used to drink all the Trappist beers and I haven’t had anything like this such a long time. It’s so great for you to bring this back.’

And what occurred to me is, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

Who the hell do you think you are that you know more than the person sitting in front of you. That you know that you have better taste, you know, and that your life experience is somehow more interesting, irrelevant.

You’re wrong. You’re wrong….

You don’t have better taste than the general public. And you don’t necessarily know more than anybody else sitting in the room with you, because you don’t know them. What people really actually want is for you to have the respect to show them the thing that you love.

And then they have an opportunity to walk through a little door and on the other side of that door, they may find a better life.

This is the thing that we do. Somebody played your Coal Train record for the first time and you fell in love with jazz. Somebody took you to a football game and you fell in love with football. It’s just nothing but a chance

But when you don’t give people the chance they can’t respect you.

People came up to me at that tasting and said ‘I didn’t really like this’ and they told me why didn’t they didn’t like it. But that’s awesome, because liking everything is called having no taste.

You know, you’re not supposed to like everything. I like these things, and I’m going to show you these things but people enjoy the fact that I trusted them to put this ridiculously smoky beer, or this very complex Gueze in front of them. And that’s what most people really want.

They want your respect, as well as just giving them the thing that you know they want, because people don’t know what they want. If I had asked what everybody wanted, for the last 30 years, I wouldn’t still be here.

I think you need to brew what you want, and then put it in front of people in a respectful fashion. And part of that is, you know, we all expect the same people to be in the room all the time. Well, if you do it right, you will not see the same people in the room all the time.

You’ll see people who don’t look like you. Because it turns out that everybody really likes beer. You know, you go to China, and you’ll be told that people in China don’t really like bitter beers. And then you look up what the Chinese craft brewers are drinking, and what their customers are drinking, and you find that everybody likes the same good things; everywhere.

I’ve been to African-American beer festivals where you had 3000 black people, just as geeky as anybody in this room, were crying, they were literally crying because they’re happy to see each other.

Because they were not in this room, they’re not in that room, they’re not in most of our rooms because they’ve never been invited. Nobody ever showed up in their neighbourhoods to ask them to show them to talk to them, to invite them anywhere to anything.

In the United States we’d rather sell hard seltzer. Stuff that we never want to drink, never wanted to make, than talk to the other 50% of Americans who are our neighbours. It never occurred to us, that we’d rather do this and sell it to the same people that we already know. So we don’t have to take a little step to the left and do something a little different.

There are a lot of people in this room have had a lot of courage. You’ve had a lot of courage to throw away, whatever you thought you’re gonna do that was gonna make money.

You fools!

I always like the term ‘You fools’  because it’s, you know, gender neutral and it applies to everybody and it bounces back on me, too. I threw away my film degree and jumped into an abyss. A lot of us in this room have done it, and I hope that we’ll all have the same kind of courage to go out and put ourselves in front of people who don’t look like us and haven’t heard about our beer, because it turns out that they’re your future fans, or they could be.

Now some of you know that in the United States, we’ve started the Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling. We are sending people of colour to brewing school and it turns out, these guys show up, and when you go looking for them they’ll tell you ‘No problem, ’m gonna pass the precalculus course, and the physics course, or whatever else’.

And sure enough, they’re booked into Master Brewer for UC Davis and I sign that check for $24,000 to to send somebody to school because even I’m requiring two to three years of experience, or one of these courses.

Well, guess what, if there’s nobody in the brewhouse of colour, then where you’re going to get two to three years of experience? That’s Catch 22. There are no people. Well, you could take this course.

Can you?

People of colour in the United States have 10% of the family assets as European Americans. There’s almost nobody who can pay $22,000 for the course.They can pass the prerequisite for precalculus but they can’t get into the room, they can’t get in the room.

So here’s another thing to think about when you go and you are gentrifying a neighbourhood. You you don’t have to apologise for starting your brewery where you can start it. But you could look harder than we generally have in the neighbourhood to see who could work there, who could work their way up. Send people to school, if that’s what it takes, as there’s a lot of smart people everywhere.

And there are a lot of people everywhere who would really like to discover what it is that we do. That’s actually good news because people that you know, right now they’re gonna get to my age, and we don’t drink as much… some of us.

So you got to bring in new people and they are going to hopefully be diverse. They’re going to hopefully be of all genders, they’re going to hopefully be of all orientations. They’re going to hopefully be of all colours, if you want to have a great business and more importantly, if you want to have a really good time.

If you want to have a really good time, get everybody in the room. Not just some of the people, the same people that you already know, but get everybody in the room.