Photo credit: The Guardian.
From the moment in March of 2011 that the papers were signed formalizing the purchase of Goose Island Beer Co. in Chicago by what was then called Anheuser-Busch InBev, I began referring to Goose Island (probably the first American brewpub I ever visited, and adored) as Zombie Goose.
That’s because it had ceased to exist in the form we previously knew it, henceforth to be utilized by a corporate monolith to shift money to its shareholders, away from genuine independent brewers. It wasn’t Goose Island any longer. As with Monty Python’s parrot, Goose Island was no more. It had ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet its maker, a late brewery, stiff and bereft of life, and so on.
Problem was that a subculture had come into existence dedicated to the unquestioned proposition that possession of Goose Island’s annual Bourbon County Stout release, and a subsequent diaplay of one’s hoarding on social media, was the be-all and end-all of beer aficionado-dom.
I questioned it, and I’m sure there remain BCB fetishists out there who curse my name each year whe ......
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