The SAVOR Beer and Food Festival takes place this weekend and for the past week, D.C. has been crawling with several top figures in the beer crafting industry. To kick off this week’s beer festivities, DCist got a chance to sit down and talk with Garrett Oliver, Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster, food and beer pairing expert, author, and — though maybe not as glamorous as the St. Pauli girl — the face of top-notch, traditional beer brewing. We caught up with him before an Italian beer tasting at the National Geographic.

So you’ve got your book, The Brewmaster’s Table…

Yes, and now I’m working on the next one, which is the Oxford Companion to Beer, from Oxford University Press.

I know in the first book, you mentioned that you had received some beer and food pairing recipes from some well-known chefs: are those going to be in this book?

Those will probably end up somewhere else. This is a really massive project: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Oxford Companion to Wine, but it’s about 800 pages of relatively small type. This is basically a big reference book on thousands of topics that have to do with beer. Everything from technical topics to things like beer pairing, etc. So it’ll take at least three years, I’m the editor-in-chief. Nobody writes one of these books by themselves since it’s like an encyclopedia. In the wine guide there were 40 writers… typically the editor-in-chief writes maybe a third of it, and then edits everything to make sure that it all makes sense. So yeah, I kind of threw myself under the bus, but when the guys who do the Oxford English Dictionary come to you and say they want you to do the definitive book about beer, you can’t say ‘no.’ I kinda tried to, but they got me.

Recently the hop shortage has been driving beer prices up, and other economic factors like higher fuel costs and higher grain costs (barley) will probably compound that price increase. Do you think the economic situation will start to inspire more people to drink even more local beer, similar to the locavore movement in food? And further, do you think local breweries will start brewing more Belgian or German styles to supplant the fact that those imported beers at going to be skyrocketing in price?

What you’re going to find, I think, is upward pressure on all beer prices. That’s coming from overseas and from, like you said, the hop shortage: hops costing 600-700 percent what they cost this time last year. It’s pretty crazy. So I think food miles, as they call it, is definitely an issue as well. However, on the east coast and on the west coast, for more than 100 years, we’ve gotten our grain from the middle of the country. So it’s been a long time since anyone in D.C. was very close to a field of barley. And I don’t remember if there were ever hops grown down here, although I doubt it, since it’s very humid. So you’re going to have some of those issues regardless. I do think that, independently of the economic pressures, people are going to look to eat things and drink things that come from their local breweries. And look at us: we’re in 22 states, but I always say ‘Support your local brewery first. If you’ve got a Brooklyn tap on, that’s great that you’re getting our beer. But if your local brewery is making good beer, get your first pint from them. I’ll take the third pint.’

Photo by Eric Denman