Brewmaster Proves Beer is Classy, Too

Garrett Oliver, one of the craft beer movement's brightest stars, hosted a beer pairings dinner at the Mountain Lakes Club in Morris County Thursday night.

Dressed in a blazer and pressed pants, Oliver stood at the front of a tony room and held up a 750ml caged and corked bottle of a beer he brews at The Brooklyn Brewery.

“If you remember just one thing from tonight’s dinner,” he intoned to the crowd, who’d paid $100 per plate to dine with him, “We do not put beer into Champagne bottles. Winemakers put Champagne into beer bottles.”

Oliver’s words formed just a small part of the overall message that he famously brings to audiences around the world and, in this case, to a fundraiser for The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms: beer can express elegance and pour at the very finest of tables.

He makes for an ideal ambassador for the craft beer movement: He co-founded Slow Food USA, won a James Beard award, edited The Oxford Companion to Beer and authored The Brewmaster’s Table, the definitive guide to pairing beer and food. But he might not be such a sought-after guest if it weren’t for two factors: he’s actually very down-to-earth and he’s a veritable riot. Oliver had everyone laughing throughout the course of the meal, and he naturally knows how to translate the language of beer into the language of any group of listeners.

He easily moves between topics of jazz, art, history and film, and compares the experience of drinking a beer to listening to music.

“There are different beers for different moods. You can drink or listen to something easy without giving it too much thought or you can put on something really complex and sit down and listen,” he said.

He traveled to New Jersey in part because of his connections to Gustav Stickley, a turn-of-the century restaurateur and father of American arts-and-crafts furniture design. Not only is Brooklyn’s technical director married to a Stickley relative but Oliver’s father worked as a designer and taught him about Stickley as a child. What’s more, Oliver believes Stickley’s ethos parallels that of the modern craft food and drink philosophy.

“We know Stickley used the term farm-to-table,” he said. “And now, we’re right in the middle of a period of rediscovery."

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