Those who knew Goose Island at its peak knew that Greg Hall was a perfectionist with a hunger for tradition and a thirst for innovation. You don’t go naming brews after people you love unless you’re certain that those brews are as good as you can make them.

After Hall sold Goose Island to Anheuser-Busch, he didn’t just leave Chicago. He left the States, taking two extended trips to Somerset and Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, and to Normandy, in France. Hall didn’t put much time between brewing and learning. “I left Goose May first . . . ” Hall recalls, “and at the beginning of June, I jumped on a plane.” Hall was a man on a mission: to absorb everything he could learn about cider, and to do it in lands where cider had been king, queen and liege for longer than the US had existed.

When Hall returned, he came back to brewing (but not beer) and the middle of the States (but not Illinois). He came back to Michigan, where he had an orchard full of apples. He came back to cider, and to a nation where most people had no idea what cider could be.  

Photo via Virtue Cider 

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