All right, folks, you're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat Brophy. I handle specialty spirits here at Binny's. With me is Greg. Hey, Pat, how you doing? I'm good, how are you? What do you do here? I do communications for Binny's. All right, it sounds not as fun as my job. AKA The Podcast. What about you, Roger? Hi, Roger, beer marketing education. Cool, also sounds kind of fun, but not that fun. All right, we got a special guest today. We got Greg Hall from Virtue Cider in with us today. Thanks for joining us, Greg. Hey, guys, thanks for having me. Oh, yeah, I appreciate your time. How would you describe your current role at Virtue? Well, it says founder on my cards. That means you can do whatever you want. Well, yeah, my hands are a lot softer than they used to be. My hands used to be pretty rough, but now they're pretty soft. That's kind of an emeritus role. That's what you did. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I kind of like that point of pride of having rough hands for a long time. You should find a way to get emeritus on the business cards. Founder of emeritus. That would be a really good feeling. Yeah. So I started Virtue back in 2011, and we made our first cider that fall and released it in 2012. So while that's not very long ago, it's pretty long ago in the cider business. Oh yeah. I don't know, that feels like forever ago at this point, but you were one of the first on the scene in what's become kind of a booming craft cider business, especially here in the Midwest. Michigan always had these little mom and pop cideries around, but that was kind of like, if you come for the pumpkin picking, you can maybe leave with a bottle or two of cider, and there wasn't really something available before. Exactly. If you come on Saturday and honk twice, they might come out and sell you a bottle. But yeah, now cider's gotten big. It's kind of funny. I went through the same thing with beer. It started off really small, and then it got big, and I got over that just in time. Yeah, you don't have to deal with the hazy and pastry boys anymore. Really? Not even in the world of cider? Not even in a cider podcast. Well, I'm not trash, hazy IPA. There's... Hold on a second. You just buried the lead there, because you're also the Greg Hall from Goose Island. That's right. Greg Hall is the son of the founder of Goose Island, John Hall. And you worked at Goose Island for pretty much ever, right? I mean, was that your first job? Yeah, that was my first kind of more real job. You know, I did the college BS jobs, but yeah, I worked in bars a little bit. But that was my first job that I was at for more than six months, probably. So I was there from 88 until 2011 when I left to start Virtue. You bring up pastry stouts. In a way, do you ever feel like you have become death destroyer of worlds? In a lot of ways, you kind of helped create the monster that is craft beer right now. Yeah, I apologize. You heard it here first. So Virtue's got a lot going on. You have this kind of sprawling farm, right? And you're doing some agronomy type stuff. You're doing some pretty classically fermented kind of old world inspired ciders. And you got some new world stuff too, like what's sitting in front of us here. We've got some cans of rosé and brut. So where do you want to start with all this? I think start with where I started. The first time I had interesting cider was in 2000. My brewer friends and I took a trip over to England to visit English breweries. Because back in 2000, we were Honker's Ale and we were IPA and Hexnut and really focusing on English style beers. So we thought, okay, let's go over there and check them out. And we visited a bunch of great breweries. But we ended up walking into a cider festival that we didn't expect to walk into and they had 40 ciders on cask. We thought, wow, might as well try them. I mean, cider, how good can cider be? But we'll try them and all of a sudden, we had seven ciders in front of us. And they were all super interesting, way more interesting than anything I had before. We had, you know, there was clearly Barrelade Cider and Super Tart Cider and Super Clean Crisp Cider and then stuff that was like super duper funky, like a lambic. It really opened our eyes. We ended up staying there all night drinking ciders. And then the next day, we actually had a rezo to get a tour at Timothy Taylor, which is one of the hardest places to get a tour in. And then we skipped it so we could go back and drink the other 20 ciders. That's how excited we were. And that was 2000. So we came back to Chicago. And I told my father, wow, there's this whole cider thing that nobody knows about in the US. And we could be the first ones doing it. He's like, okay, do you want to do that? Or do you want to do these Belgian style ales and barrel-aged beers and all this other stuff you want to do? You got to pick one. So we picked Bourbon County to start with. And then we started doing Matilda and Sophie. And we kind of didn't get to cider, so. So really it's just unfinished business. Absolutely, yeah. I've been excited about it for a long time. You know, and I'll always be a beer guy. But back in 2011, if you wanted good cider in the US, you had to come to Binny's and look for a couple bottles of French stuff. I mean, back then, you guys probably had 5,000, 10,000 bottles of wine, 1,000 beers, 500 whiskeys and like five ciders. Oh yeah. There was woodchuck and it came in like two or three flavors. Yeah, there was woodchuck. You could usually find a bottle somewhere of DuPont and that might have been it. So you had a lot of sweet stuff and like six-pack bottles usually, but it's pretty unique. If you got lucky, you'd find one of the DuPonts and that was it. But to see cider the way it is now and it's exploded into six-pack cans, I mean, that's pretty interesting to think that it wasn't that long ago that we just had 750 cork and cage like you're talking about. Yeah. Well, when we started, our first year was just draft and then our second year, first package we released were 750 bottles. With the Mitten and Lopunette and Percheron, we still make all those. But part of it was we were really small operation. There wasn't a market for a lot of cider. If we would have done six pack cans back then, everyone would have said, what are you doing? Who's going to drink this? So we made the fancy stuff and we think it turned out really well. The timing was good because it helped make the Virtue name respected in some quarters at least. It paved the way for us to do more stuff. As we grew and the cider market grew, there's opportunity to first put stuff in 12 ounce bottles and then go into the 12 ounce cans. You're the perfect person, maybe, to talk to this about. It seems like cider has always struggled from this misconception that it's beer-like. You always say, did you visit the cider brewery? Or even in our stores, we typically have it closer to beer than the wine departments, and we have people usually looking for it in beer. Yeah, if I had an apple tree for every time somebody said cider beer to me, I would need a lot more acres, that's for sure. I think that started with seeing cider sold in 12-ounce bottles and on tap. It was presented to the American customer exactly the way beer was. So I think it was pretty easy for a generation ago to really experience cider that way, like beer, rather than like wine. And you go to some places in New York, that was the first place I really saw a decent amount of cider in restaurants. They would have 750s, some of the French stuff, some of the Spanish stuff, and sell it by the glass, and that was cool. But it took a while to get that going here in Chicago, and it still hasn't happened in the rest of the country. It's still being sold primarily like beer, even though it's produced pretty much exactly like wine. Yeah, legally, it is a wine, correct? Yeah. We think of it as a cider, but the feds, you're right, they tax us, and they license us like a winery. So we have a large winery license in the state of Michigan. Would you say the production itself is closer to wine or closer to beer? You can make cider both ways. You can make it like beer, where you can buy kind of more like homebrew, where you buy apple juice concentrate, and then mix it with water, and then add in a bunch of flavor to make a cider. Which is, you know, other than the heat part, and you may even have a heat part, depending on who you are. That's kind of the way cider is brewed. And then there's the way, much more like wine, which is what we do, and most of the craft ciders do. Where you're like pressing. Yeah, you buy apples, and generally locally, and then you press them into juice, and then that juice, some of it just ferments on its own, like a natural wine. And then sometimes you add yeast. So we do both. We do some natural fermentation, and then we also will pitch yeast, but pitch yeast at a different type of yeast, and at different levels than a brewer would. So I like to say that making beer is kind of like playing a symphony. If everybody plays, it's all about control. If everybody plays the right note at the right time on the right instrument, you know, Beethoven's Fifth comes out, right? No matter, like, if you're playing it in Philly or Chicago or Sydney or Vienna, it's going to come out the same. And that's kind of the way beer operates, you know. You have a recipe that you control. You have a process that you completely control, you know, the amount of moisture, the amount of time and temperature, all that stuff you control. And then in the end, you'll have the beer come out that you decided to brew. With cider, it's more like wine, and the grapes are different every year. Everybody knows that. The grapes are different, vineyard to vineyard. You know, if you got three guys making Pinot Noir, you know, it's the same grapes. Shouldn't it taste exactly the same? Well, of course it doesn't, because it's a natural occurrence. You know, it's growing in a field, and maybe the vines are 10 years old, or maybe they're 60 years old. You know, maybe the vines on a south-facing hill, maybe it's flat. You know, maybe it gets X amount of rain, maybe it gets Y. Then you get the microflora that's floating around there. So that makes the wines all different. Cider is exactly the same way. You know, if we're buying one variety of apple, and all our ciders are made with many varieties of apple. If you look at just like Macintosh, if you buy Macintosh, you know, from 10 different farms, the fruit's gonna be different. If you buy it from the same farm, but you buy it at some in late September, and some in mid October, you know, the ripeness is gonna be different, so the fruit's gonna be different. Even if you get it from the same tree, three weeks apart, it's gonna be different. So it's impossible to have the control that brewers have when you make it that natural way. But we think it makes it so much more interesting. You know, the first question I usually get asked is what kind of apple do you guys use at Virtue? When I say, I give them the answer they're not expecting, Michigan apples. And they're like, well, what's that? And I'm like, well, apples grown in Michigan. So, you know, they're expecting we're gonna have some recipe of like, you know, 30% Spies and 50% Macintosh and 20% Golden Delicious or something, nobody makes cider like that. Zero people make cider like that. We basically get what comes in off the tree. There are some fruit that we like better than others. But we press as it comes in. Like, we'll press a lot of Macs early in the season because they're early harvest. And then later in the season, we'll start getting a lot of other stuff. And when we press it, we have no idea what cider it's gonna go into. We press stuff, it goes down into our cellar. Yeah, we dug a cellar 20 feet underground. You know, we don't have any glycol. We just do it that old fashioned way. And we do it that way because when I went over to England and France to see how the best guys made cider, you know, I went over with my typical brewer's list of questions, you know, what's your pitch rate, what's your real degree of fermentation, like pH, all sorts of things. You know, what kind of apples do you use? And they're all like, what are you talking about? We get the apples, we press them. Nobody over, most of those guys over there don't pitch anything. They're all just natural fermentations. So they're like, okay, if it's September and you press and it's still warm, it might be ready in a month. You know, but November, it's getting cold. You know, it might take like six months to be ready. And I'm like, how do you manage that? And they're like, what do you mean? It's like, we sell it when it's ready. And it's like, oh. Now, when you're, so you're pressing these different varietals of apple at different times. If different varieties come in at the same time, are you fermenting them together or do these each get fermented by varietal separately? No, it, you know, it depends in the, in this, usually in the fall, most stuff comes in mixed. So we're getting like in the same bin, we might have two varieties or we might have 20 varieties. And it doesn't say like, it'll say, okay, here are the varieties in there, but it won't say like 5% this, 6% that, 30% the other one. Interesting, I would have never thought that. Yeah, it's just like complete run of field. You'll never have a box that's exactly that same again. You know, and then again, it depends on the farm, where the farm is, where the orchard is, what kind of microflora is floating around. You know, if they've got animals on the farm, you'll have some of that character. If they've got, if they grow raspberries, you know, the raspberries, you're past the raspberry season, but whatever was growing on the raspberries is still probably floating around, especially in the early part of the season. You know, if you've got cherries, same thing. If you've got other kind of late crops, you'll have, you know, different microflora. So, there's no way to control that. The only thing we do is really exploit that and get as much character into our cider as possible. So, the finished product that's in a can is like your best blend for consistency, or do you even care about consistency? Yeah, well, we care about consistency. As I said, beer is like playing a symphony. Cider is much more like playing jazz. So, if you get like Thelonious Monk playing Round Midnight, he probably played Round Midnight 10,000 times, you know, in his life. There's no chance he ever played it the same. He purposefully, you know, would throw in some notes here, a pause there, you know, he had different players with him. It was different every time. I've probably got like 20 recordings of Thelonious Monk playing Round Midnight, they're all different. But you know, they're Round Midnight. You don't think he's playing something else. You know, it's easily recognizable as Round Midnight. So that's the way we kind of look at cider. You know, can we make a batch of Brut exactly the same from batch to batch? Like, you know, Goose can make their IPA the same. We can't do that. We don't have that level of control. And then, you know, especially you start with the fruit and the microflora. And then all of our cider, of course, is barrel aged. So, that's the one part, when you're a brewer, when you give up control. When you put beer in a barrel, then it's not your beer anymore. It's the barrel's beer, you know. And you've got, if you got 60 barrels, or three barrels, or 12,000 barrels, you know, they're all going to taste a little different. Well, let's try this Brut, speaking of. Great. Good idea. Talking about this kind of neutral barrel character, are you actively looking for that same kind of thing in most of your barrels? I mean, I know obviously mitten is a bourbon barrel-aged cider with maple syrup added, right? I mean, that's got barrel character, you know? That you can tell has bourbon notes to it. But this Brut, for example, the Michigan Brut here, it is blended with barrel-aged cider, and I'm not really tasting a lot of wood or anything. Crisp and clean. Yeah. Yeah, well, we want it to be with everything in our, kind of our core ciders. Yeah, put on apples there. And our core ciders, everything gets barrel, but gets a lower amount of barrel. And we don't want it to be necessarily barrel-forward. We want, but if you tried this exact cider without the barrel component, it would taste flat. It would not be nearly as interesting. And you'd tell the difference immediately. And when you were drinking the one without any barrel character, and then you went back and tasted this, you'd be like, oh, I get all kinds of barrel now. So how does that show itself, like breadth or spice? Or what's the note you might pick up? You get a little bit of oak and vanilla because our barrels are now not that old. We get another batch every year. Buying them new? We buy them used from Burgundy. So they're all white burgundy barrels. We started getting them from California, like pretty much everybody else gets their wine barrels. We were buying enough. We said, why don't we just get a container straight from Burgundy? So that's cool because not only do we get French oak from France without having to go over to California, but we get French microflora in that barrel too. It's not like most French burgundies are like the cleanest wines of all time. We want some of that in there. So all of our ciders have a little bit of French terroir in them. That's really cool. Yeah. How do you manage the wildness of these ciders? If you want it to have a more pronounced kind of Brett character, is that something you can plan to do? Well, it's all in the blending. So if you go down into our cellar at any given time, we've got 32 tanks down there and there's 32 different ciders basically in there at any time. And then really the magic for us is doing the blending with the barrels. Because no two tanks are going to taste the same because of different apples, different ripeness, different orchards, and then different microflora, all that's different. And then we put it in the barrels and the barrels are all a little bit different. Kind of the most difficult and definitely the most fun job there is doing the blending. Yeah, easily the most difficult though. I mean, whether you're making wine or Scotch whiskey or something like that, or any blended product like this, getting the balance and repeatability is, you know, I would find near impossible. You're doing the spirit stuff now, so I'm sure you've been down to Kentucky and, you know, you go to Scotland and it's just like, it's incredible how their barrels are so different, you know, but it ends up being pretty consistent. You're describing everything like wine production, which has really cyclic in terms of production schedule. I mean, you're putting out fresh product year round. Not exactly. Okay. We do our pressing in the fall. So in the fall, we have access to apples and we get, you know, 90 plus percent of our apples in the fall from probably within 30 miles of our farm. We press in the fall and then once we get to the winter, kind of after the holidays, there's not a lot of guys around us who have a lot of storage of apples. So we get stuff out of the field from them because they're not the really big producers. The really big producers in Michigan are up on the ridge, which is a little bit north of Grand Rapids. And that's where they grow like 70% of the apples in the state. So the first couple of years, we were buying fruit from the ridge and then bringing it down and pressing it outside when it was like 20 degrees below zero. And that was not fun, that sucked. And we didn't make the best cider that way either. So most of these guys are a lot of the big producers. They also press their own fruit. So we get them to press their own fruit and then ship tankers down to us after the new year. So we're using juice. So you're saying the juice comes in at the end of May? The juice comes in until the end of May. Yeah. It's not as fun as when we're pressing. We've got fields of apples out front. And it takes a little more. Because a lot of times there we're getting, we don't know exactly what the blend of apples is. But it's always going to be a blend of stuff. So we'll have some barrels from the fall that will blend in to give it a little bit more character if we need to. Can you paint this picture for somebody who doesn't know anything about cider, like Pure 101, actual pressing? What kind of press do you use? Yeah. We use a Good Nature press. So it's like an accordion press. So we get the apples in a box, which is 20 bushels. So a bushel is 40 pounds, more or less. So it's like a box the size of a pallet. Exactly. A box the size of the pallet, it's like a big square. That'll be full of apples. It's supposed to be around 800 pounds. Of course, it's never 800 pounds. It's like 750 to like- That's because they dried off on the way over. 950, somewhere around there. So just from the start, it's not like taking a 50-pound bag of malt and throwing it in there. Everyone's a little different. First, we rinse them. So they go through a water bath, and we don't scrub them and clean them. We just rinse them to get any residue off or any sticks and leaves. They shouldn't have dirt on them because all apples in the US are picked off the tree rather than drops. Whereas in England, in France, in Spain, they use primarily drops. So the apples over there look disgusting. That's what they make cider with. That was gonna be one of my questions too. They make delicious cider. So are these somewhat beat up apples or are they all pristine? They're not necessarily pristine, but they're generally in pretty good shape because American growers are used to the customer demanding them to be in good shape. Well, then they'll wait outside usually a little bit, so they, what we call sweat, we sweat them. When you sweat them, what happens is the apple will start to lose some of its moisture. When it loses moisture, it's really just losing water. It's not losing any of the sugar, any of the tannin, any of the acid, any of the flavor compounds, the phenols, all that stays in the apple. So you're concentrating it by sweating it. So we'll let them sweat for a little bit, and then we'll run them through the rinser, and then what's called the Scratter, that's an English term for it, which is kind of like a big Cuisinart that just chops them up into apple pulp. We'll let the pulp rest for a little bit, and then we'll pump it into the filter, and it looks like a big accordion. It's about 38 pads that has little bags hanging in between them, and we'll fill up those bags, and then we squeeze it hydraulically, and the juice comes out the bottom, and then that drops in a tray, and from the tray we pump it over to a tank. When it's done, we take that pomace, and the whole thing turns upside down and drops the pomace out, and then that pomace, we feed some of it to our pigs, and then we sell the rest to a beefalo farmer who raises beefalo. I want to point out that the squeezing it motion you made was one of impersonating one of those machines that takes a 1996 Toyota Corolla and crushes it into a little cube. Yeah, it looks like an accordion. You know, it starts out out, and then it goes in. Yeah. So here we got the Rosè. We started making Rosè about now five years ago. We started playing with a bunch of stuff. Once we had a good idea, we went down to our friends at Calsec. Calsec is the Kalamazoo spice extract company. You could do a whole show on them. They were started by the family who grows all the peppermint and spearmint for Wrigley. And they also buy cinnamon, so they are like a big flavor agent for Wrigley. They were traditionally like the third generation son. He is like, we could do this with anything. Our process is really good. We could do this with any flavors. And they are like, yeah, that seems complicated. We are going to stick to this. So he left and started his own company called Calsec, and they started doing all these other things, including hops. That is how I got to know them. We basically sat down with them, talked about what we wanted. We did a bunch of research before that on Rosè. We drank a ton of Rosè, like, I don't know, probably a couple hundred. It's terrible works. Right. You know, and made tasting notes, and we also read some of the reviews, and like, what are the flavors that show up the most? You know, you get like strawberry, melon, and citrus, and floral stuff. And so we said, okay, that's what we want to put in there, because we want it to be Rosè-like. We came up with the blend, you know, it took us probably most of a year to get it to where we wanted to, and then we got it, what we felt was pretty right. And that's what we do now. We make a dry cider, and then we take this botanical blend from our friends at Cal Sac, and blend it with the dry cider, and some barrels as well, and then we get this. It smells kind of vegetal. It smells kind of floral. Is there fruit on the nose? That's not apple fruit. I think so. It's kind of like that soft, overripe strawberry kind of thing. I like how approachable it is. I usually get a little more fruit than this can. This seems a little more green than I'm used to. It's a great cider, though. I think it's a great example of how all Rosè's are not created equal. And again, we're starting to get people stereotyping and thinking that, well, the cider will remain nameless, but that a Rosè is a bright red cider. It's sweet. It's super fruity. This is much more complex and nuanced. It's not bright, bright, bright pink. It's very wine-like. Yeah, and that's what we're going for. Yeah, right now, these are probably our two lead ciders, the Brut and the Rosè. We also make the apple, which is another one that's back-sweetened. We ferment that dry and then back-sweeten it with some fresh-pressed apple juice. Have you ever done like a just for fun, kind of not even necessarily a production level, but there's so many great fruits in Michigan, like almost a stone soup type of thing, just a bunch of different fruits fermented together? We do that stuff all the time up at the farm. So if you come back up to the farm, Brophy. Coming, coming. You can taste, we've got, in the summer especially, sometimes we'll make enough of something that'll last a little longer. But we do stuff with blums, we do stuff with pears, we do stuff with peaches, we've done stuff with rhubarb, you know, you name it. Raspberry, we make a great framboise cider that we've also thought about blowing up a little bit because it's so darn good. We haven't done blueberries yet. We'll let the other Michigan guys, they kind of own the blueberry cider thing, so we'll let them have that. But yeah, we love playing with different stuff. We're also playing around with a lot of different botanicals right now, doing some crazy stuff. We've got a randal up there. Obviously, you know what a randal is. Listeners, a randal is a thing that you draw a draft beer or cider through and it kind of infuses it with whatever flavor you pack the randal full of. Exactly. Yeah. Our friend Sam over at Dogfish Head, there's still a little dogfish sticker on every randal. We bought the randals from Sam, the dogfish. Yeah. What do we have this weekend? We had a mint one. We were putting our honey cider through. I bet that was great. It was great. When people are like, can I get a six pack of this? We're like, you can get a growler. Yeah. We do new stuff all the time and it's really fun. I love the small farm concept behind all this. Well, this guy down the road growing rhubarb, or this guy next door growing cherries, and it's just got such a farmhouse feel. Greg Hall, you have done beer, you've grown a craft brewery to a nationally recognized level. You've done cider. You're going to do cider forever? I think I am because I've got a house now up in Michigan, that I'm trying to spend more time up there. Actually, I came down for this and I'm going to drive back up afterwards because it's so nice there. I feel like we should get him a hot dog or something. Well, yeah, I like being up there and it's like that's where I spend my time. I tell my kids, my kids are 18 and 20 now and I'm like, I don't know what I want to do and it's like, okay, find something that you make excuses to do rather than make excuses to not do, and that's what you should do. That is great advice. That's the best way I've ever heard that phrase. Yeah, and then find a company with cool people that you're going to like hanging out with because you're going to hang out with them more than your significant other, most likely. And then have enough money so you don't have to ask me for money. Awesome great advice. Yeah, you know, bing, bing, bing. You get those three, you're in good shape for life. All right. That brings us to the Q&A segment of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, where we answer your question for a $20 Binny's gift card. Write your questions to us via email, comments, binnys.com, or hit us up on social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at Binny's Bev. This is real, I'm sorry. The question this week came in via Twitter, at Keegke, whatever. What is your favorite beer of all time? Pat? My favorite beer of all time? Yeah. Ham's. Oh, come on. That is so trite at this point. Okay. If it's not Ham's, it's probably Iyanger, Oktoberfest. Oh, yeah. It's around. Well, it's around in the fall, but yeah, that's probably one of my favorite beers ever. It's hard for me to pick one. I mean, probably some awesome Goose, more likely. We were talking Sour Beer last episode, probably like a Boone Marriage Parfait Goose. Yeah. Roger? This is an impossible question. No, what's your favorite color? What is your favorite color? Absolutely impossible. Is it the only drink every single day? What kind of style? I mean, I don't know. The closest I've ever come to answering this question is to say Duval. Really? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to say Galactic Double Daisy Cutter, and not just because I had one last night, but because when I heard that it was coming out, I was excited and I knew I was planning a purchase before it actually hit the shelf, and I don't really do that That's a good barometer for that. Yeah. Greg Hall. So I'm going to exclude beers from Goose Island because those are I could think of at least five or 10 that I could- You didn't make your favorite beer? That I could name. Well, I mean, I would say that probably my favorites that Goose Island has made. I've certainly drank probably twice as much Honker's Ale as any other beer or maybe all other beer. All other beer. That's a lot of Honkers, folks. It is a lot of Honkers. So I'm a big fan of that style, the English bitter or special bitter style. That's what I always start with when I go to the pub and sometimes end with as well. Then ironically, two beers that we've made over time with a bunch of our brewers. So they're not at all my direct recipes. But Sophie, the Cezanne. But you can get it Wrigley now. You can? Can't you? I'm pretty sure you can get Sophie and Wrigley. Sophie and like Parajoc or something like that? No, Parajoc is not around. Oh. Lolita and Matilda. Sorry to step on you. That's good. That's good. Yeah, I'm a Sox fan. You can get all kinds of stuff down there because they're desperate to get bodies into the park. No, it's because they appreciate the finer things on the south side of town. Floodable parking. What's important is that it's still a bottle-conditioned beer. We were just talking about bottle conditioning and how under-appreciated or just glossed over it is. Underutilized. Sophie, I don't really care for fresh, but aged, it is phenomenal. Good. Good. So back to Greg's favorite beer. Yeah, so what he was saying. Obviously, very proud of Bourbon County and all the stuff that's happened with that. But after we made Rare, the year after we made the first batch of Rare, we made King Henry with those same barrels, second use, and that turned out way beyond my expectations. That was so damn good. Yeah, that was a phenomenal beer. Yeah. Phenomenal. I'm not a barley wine guy. Like that is one of my, I'm not really a Bach guy. I'm not usually a barley wine guy. You know, it just got too much body and sweetness and not enough crispness. But that barrel-age barley wine was crazy good. So yeah, those are like three of my favorite goose beers. And then, you know, there's a lot of beers that I admire and I love to drink, but I'm much more of a beer drinker than a beer sipper. I have no problem saying my favorite beer outside of Goose Island is still Sierra Pale. Great answer. Yeah, it's so good. It smells good, it tastes good. You can drink it all day, or you can sit down with it at the end of the night and enjoy it by the fireplace and find new stuff going on in there. So yeah, I'll say that. That is $20 worth of answer for our favorite beers. What's your favorite beer at Giga? Everybody else can email their questions to us at comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social media at Binny's Bev on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Greg Hall, thanks for coming. So yeah, cider. It's been great. Virtue's great. Go visit their farm. I owe them a visit too, although you can't come with me. So until next week, Barrel to Bottle. I'm Pat. I'm Greg. I'm Roger. Greg Hall from Virtue. Keep tasting.

Hey, this is Greg, you're listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Earlier this week in your stream, we dropped an episode with Greg Hall of Virtue Cider, formerly of Goose Island. When you get a bunch of beer nerds in the room together, they just end up talking, and that's inevitably what happened. You had Pat, Roger, me, I'm Greg, and Greg Hall in the room. The conversation got pretty good. We didn't want you to miss out on it. Here's some more bonus content. Greg Hall, our interview part 2. I have a follow-up question. Oh, really? Yes. What is your favorite? because you mentioned Goose Island beers that everyone's loved and that did tremendously. What's your favorite Goose Island beer that unfortunately didn't track, that people didn't get all excited about, and they should have? Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, Peer Jacques that you mentioned, that was as good as anything we ever made. I mean, that was like so on style. I agree. Yeah, and it just didn't really take off. I mean, it sold steady, but it didn't sell as much as we thought it would. You know, and a lot in that kind of in that range. Night Stalker, Big Muddy. Yeah. The tragic collapse of Nut Brown. Yeah. Loved our Nut Brown. You know, the funny thing is we entered that in a bunch of contests every year like everybody else does. That was in GBF probably six or seven years. And then whatever the other thing they do is the like... World Beer Cup. World Beer Cup, that's what it's called. So we entered in that and then we basically announced we were going to stop making it, and then it won the gold at the World Beer Cup. So yeah, I mean, I think that was always a great beer. I'm generally a session beer guy. So that was a great beer. Hey, Galactic Double Daisy Cutter counts as a session beer for a certain caliber of drinker. I think for a certain calorie of a drinker. Yeah. Problem drinkers. The nice thing is there's so many damn good beers in Chicago now. Are there any beer bars that only sell Chicago beer? That's a good question. because you go to Michigan, and it's like half the bars in Michigan only sell Michigan beer. You go to Denver, you go to Portland, you go to Seattle, you go to Vermont, you go to New York City. But I don't know why there isn't- My theory is that Chicago is populated by guys like me that are transplants, who want to act like they're from Chicago. Yeah. But at the end of the day- Yeah, but really, they're from St. Louis, Cincinnati, columbus, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Omaha. Yeah. Then they hear that there's a great San Diego beer, so then they get pissed off when we can't get the only keg that comes into the market. Yeah. I think the time we might be there now where it makes sense, but in the past, they don't know that they've, especially when there was this escalation. The American ground probably only had Chicago beers for a while. They would be one that would have done that. That's a good call. I'm not sure though. They always had Bell's on now. Oh, yeah. While a lot of people consider Bell's to be a Chicago beer, it's like Old Style being a Chicago beer. Yeah. Old Style has always been a Milwaukee beer, right? Or was always made in Milwaukee. It's LaCrosse. LaCrosse. How long ago were you the beer buyer? It's been a few years, man. He's done everything he can to distance himself. His answer was hams, for Christ's sake. Yes. Well, you know what? It's a great beer. Hams is a great beer, and there's a- Vindication. There's a pub in Portland, Oregon, called Saravesa. It's a great beer bar there, and Sarah is from Wisconsin, so it's like a Wisconsin supper clubby looking place. Nice. And every time I go there, the first beer I have is hams, and I usually drink hams all night there. It's a great beer. Also, the next time you visit Mr. Brophy's homestead, you're gonna drink hams all night. That's all we have at my homestead, hams, underberg or bourbon. That's it. And a basement full of lamb eggs. Yeah. Those are for admiring, not drinking. Yeah, they're for just hoarding. Yeah. Yeah. Good game. One final question. Bulls**t. You have four more final questions. I have the end list, but I'm just gonna keep saying it that way. This relates to a previous Barrel to Bottle. Do you, being at the crux of these two, cider and beer, enjoy cider with beer? As in like a beer cider drink. He wants to know what a snake bite is. Yeah. So we argued about if do you call cider on the bottom with stout on top a snake bite? because I've heard in England that might mean cider and lager. Here in America, it might mean Yukon Jack, which we don't want to go anywhere near. But we asked a gentleman from the venerated Samuel Smith Brewery, who happens to make fine beers and stouts, as well as fine ciders, if he ever mixed the two. And he said, he goes, no. No. And there was no follow up. We're like, really? Okay. But I don't know. I like that drink. I think it's underutilized, underappreciated. I could see that maybe being something that in today's world, where people need something new every other day, mixing your ciders with beer. Yeah. We haven't done that. So. To get another no. Way to wind up that question. Yeah. No. Okay. Yeah. We've talked about making a beer called, a cider called cider beer or a beer called cider beer. because so many people ask you about the cider beer. Right. Well, I think you should just mix, not trying to do a hybrid that might not turn out well. It's like the yingling black and tan. Yeah. It's like, is that really two beers or is that? No, it's a brown ale, but it's pretty tasty. Yeah. It is. All right. The final, final question is, how do you not have a basque pour at Virtue? That was the one thing I loved the visit. I wanted someone to pull a nail or a spigot from a barrel, and watch a gigantic stream of cider go into a glass. Can we make that a reality? We have a lot of barrels with nails in them, and we've talked about doing that, and we just haven't got to that for the guest experience part yet. You could sell that all day long. You could have somebody doing that literally all day long. Yeah, I agree. There's actually a guy down in Durham, North Carolina, Black Twig, I think it is, which is the name of an apple. But they've got a cider pub down there, and they have a big barrel that's kind of outfitted with a, like a cold box attached to it. It's like a little wooden faucet that you open up, and it comes screaming out. We do Perron's a lot up at the farm, though. If you want to get some cider in your beard, that's a good way to go. If you really want Roger's idea to sell, make it limit one. Limit one. There you go. All right, final, final, final question. What's your favorite apple? Oh, that I can tell you. Cox's Orange Pippin. Quite the name. It is an English apple that is so delicious on its own, makes great cider too. And the cool thing is, it was first cultivated by, I think his name was Richard Cox, who was a retired brewer. Cox's Orange Pippin. Yeah. Look for it at your nearest Julio's. Can we get a photograph of that for the episode? Yeah, of course. You know who grows them though is Nichols Farm. So you can go to the Green City Market and pick some of those up. You have to fight off the Orange Pippin. It is the Green City Market. You have to fight off the apple truck chasers. If you want to learn more about that apple variety and others, you can go to orangepippin.com, which is a database of apple varieties. You're right. You're right. And if you want to learn even more about fruit, download and subscribe to Roger the Fruit King Adamson's Fruit Podcast. He knows all the fruits, like literally every fruit. That's great. Cider producers need to talk more about the fruits, but it is kind of hilarious how you're like, well, we just use all of them. But still, there's some romance there that's been under explored by cider makers. We think that the fruit is great, obviously. It's our primary ingredient for everything we do. You do some single varietal stuff every once in a while too, right? We have not. No, you do single farm. Single farm. Yeah, I'm sorry. I had a question for you. One time, I went to the cheese counter when we had cheese counters. I miss it because it was my lunch every day for three years. I wanted a cheese sandwich and they were like, what kind of cheese? I was like, you know what? Let's go big roller. I'm going to get that expensive brie. And she was like, you want to put the good brie on your sandwich. And she turns to the other cheese monger lady and she's like, he wants the brie on the sandwich. So you ever take a Cox's orange pippin and make it into a pie? I'm not the baker in the family, so I haven't done that. Northern Spy, which there are a lot of up in Michigan, is I'm told is a fantastic pie apple. And believe it or not, I'm more of a cherry pie guy. Than an apple pie guy. I like my apples pressed and fermented. It's a better use of them. It's efficiency, you know? Or straight out of hand. just a mouthful of apple. Does anybody grow Arkansas black in Michigan? Virtue Farm. I love that. I had that this year for the first time. Yeah, I got one of those on my arm too. Nice. I was one of the best apples I've ever tasted. Roger, you were super deficient in the fruit tattoo department. Yeah, clearly. How apropos was that, though? Well, I've heard of it all right. I have a tattoo on my arm. Yeah, you want to throw out your obscure apples? You gonna show up or you just gotta name the ones that are already on his body? Eventually you're gonna get to a picture of a f***ing apple on his ass. Well, anyway, thanks for talking so much that we have to release a two-parter on this. Yeah, this is fun.