Greg Hall (left) with Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement. (Photo: Greg Hall)
Goose Island head honcho Greg Hall talks to Zagat about the ascendance of U.S. brewers, as well as his role in New York’s Craft Beer Week, for which he's organizing a multi-course beer dinner:
"When I try to match up beer and food, the first, and really only, rule is to match flavor intensity. There’s no 'ales with meat,' 'lagers with fish' or silly rules like that. A well-seasoned dish deserves a flavorful beer and a more delicate dish really works better with a more mild-flavored beer. The difference between beer and wine – and I’d like to clarify that I’m not an anti-wine guy – is that wine is for little flavors that sometimes you have to hunt for.
"Beer is full of big, aggressive flavors, and because of that I think that beer works especially well with cuisines that have really assertive flavors. You always think of spicy cuisines, like Mexican, Southeast Asian and Indian, as being beer food, and they absolutely are. Beer has a little bit more residual sugar that really absorbs the heat and allows the flavor of the spice to come through instead of just the heat of the spice."
