It has a few unique abilities when it comes to food. It’s a good response to that great culinary challenge, straight Marinara Sauce. Marinara sauce is basically unpairable, there’s lots of acid in tomatoes. If you try and pair that with most beers, it won’t work but there’s something about the character of the Sorachi Ace hop, it’s almost Basil-like. The little bit of acidity grabs onto the acidity in the sauce — it works really well. It’s great with salmon, too, and it can even work with a steak. It’s one of our most versatile beers.

Brewing Ethos

This sounds hokey, but the centre of what we’re doing is an attempt at beauty. We’re not interested in shocking you, we don’t want to make the biggest or the strongest beer. Those are clown ideas. The single obligation of the beer is to be beautiful; it should play out on your palate like a short story — there’s a beginning, middle and end, there’s an engaging storyline — and when you get to the end of it, you’re sorry.

What that requires is structure, elegance and balance. All those come together in what we think of as deliciousness. That goes for an IPA at 80 IBUs or a beer like Half Ale that is 3.4 per cent, or a barley wine that’s 13.9 per cent.

We don’t have a house flavour but we do have a house character. We’re a lot less traditional than people tend to think. Lots of people say: ‘Your things are all based on style’. That’s laughable. Look at Brooklyn Lager, what style is that?

We do have things based on styles, and when we brew to style we like to stick to those parameters — because why use the style name if you don’t really mean it? With saison, the modern form is based on Dupont. It’s foundational, it’s a style definition. My background is in filmmaking and I’d compare a style to a James Bond movie. There’s only really one plot, but some of them suck and some of them are great. What makes the difference? It’s this: can you do this thing with style and verve even though everybody knows what’s going to happen?

Future of Brewing

What I would like to see next in brewing is the Nordic idea of food: what does this place smell like, taste like? What’s our history? Not just taking things from other places, but inventing your own idiom based on where you are.

My favourite expression of that idea came when I brewed with the Wäls Brewery in Brazil. We made a beer called Saison de Caipira which was based on sugar cane. We cut 700 kilos of sugar cane, crushed it into the kettle; that was 15 per cent of the fermentable sugars. Sugar cane has a really powerful flavour but the thing is, when we get sugar at the table, the sugar cane character has all been processed out.

It’s the flavour of Brazil: you go down any road and someone is going to be making Caldo de Cana where they crush the sugar cane straight into a glass and people drink it over ice.

That’s the next question: what is the flavour of Japan, Brazil, Britain? Brewing American styles is great; we sure brew British styles. But the next evolution is to see people doing things that are indigenous. I think we are going to see a lot more acidity, a lot more funk.