THE CRAFT OF STONE BREWING CO.

Stone is one of the loudest breweries in the country, thanks to fire-and-brimstone craft beer preacher, Greg Koch, who co-founded Stone Brewing with Steve Wagner in 1996. In the 15 years since then, Stone has established itself as one of the best American breweries and has accrued a following of dedicated Stone fans. Their new book, The Craft of Stone Brewing Co., by Greg Koch and Steve Wagner with Randy Clemens, gives these fans what they want: a comprehensive guide to everything Stone.

The book is broken into three parts: the Stone story, the beers, and recipes for Stone beers and from the Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens. Part One includes the obligatory beer book “how beer is made” and “history of beer through the ages” section, before getting to the good stuff—Stone’s story.  Written in conversational style (with lots of parenthetical humor asides), Koch starts at the beginning with how he and Wagner met to the early days of the brewery to the creation of Arrogant Bastard to Stone’s perpetual growth and future plans for expansion.

Wagner and other Stone figures, like head brewer Mitch Steele, step in from time to time to share their side of the story too. The best bits are the details, like the story of how the Stone gargoyle was designed (it took about a hundred to sketches to get the first gargoyle logo perfect) and how Stone almost never existed because Koch was planning on packing it in and moving to Prague.

Part two is the complete catalog of every beer Stone has made. This is the stuff Stone beer geeks will happily dig into, as Wagner and Koch catalog each beer, from the regular lineup to the anniversary beers to the April Fool’s Day “releases.” Each beer is a story—like the battle to legally be able to label the Stone Imperial Russian Stout as an Imperial Russian stout (it took five years before it was recognized as a distinctive style). There are also the rare and retired beers like Lee’s Mild, Heat Seeking Wheat and Stone Sawyer’s Triple.

Part three includes beverage supervisor, “Dr.” Bill Sysak’s guide to serving, cellaring and beer pairing along with recipes from the Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens. (Scroll down for recipe for Garlic, Cheddar and Stone Ruination IPA Soup). The 18 homebrew recipes are formulated by Wagner and include the recipe and notes as well as an Advanced column with the percentages of the ingredients. Alas, the Arrogant Bastard recipe is not included.

It’s a good-looking book, with color photographs and plenty of sidebars perfect for coffee table browsing. The trademark Stone arrogance does shine through, but there are also flashes of pre-world fame Stone, like when Koch describes sitting at Pizza Port on the night the first ever batch of Stone beer is released, watching people order his beer. Getting the full history and context behind any brewery is appreciated, but it’s especially neat to hear it from the source and from a brewery of Stone’s caliber.

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INTERVIEW WITH GREG KOCH

What was it like to look back on 15 years of Stone Brewing?

Remembering some of it is like—have you ever opened an old box of photos looking for one thing and then two hours later you realize you can’t pick up any single photo without looking at it and remembering it?

Part of it was literally going through old photos. We only put a handful in [the book] but we sorted through hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands. It was also looking through old materials, early account lists, lists of everyone who worked at the company—“Oh yea, we only had 12 people then.” Remembering people who aren’t there anymore, like, “I wonder why I haven’t talked to Joe in a long time, I wonder what he’s up to. When did I see him last?”

You mentioned at one point in the book how you came very close to not opening Stone and instead moving to Prague and Steve wrote that he didn’t know about those plans until he read the manuscript for the book.

I don’t remember not telling him. Maybe I was planning on holding out just in case. On the plane back I rehearsed and rehearsed how I was going to tell him. I was feeling really reticent about it, but also quite certain.

Looking at all of the Stone beers, are there any beers you wish you had made it differently or wish you had made, but couldn’t or didn’t?

With the Heat Seeking Wheat, it wasn’t one of our prouder moments, although I will stand behind the beer because it was a pretty good hoppy wheat beer for the time. It wasn’t any Gumballhead, which is a really hoppy beer brewed by our friends atThree Floyds. It wasn’t really the beer we wanted to make and it wasn’t successful, ultimately, which I’m glad for.

What about your most memorable beers?

A couple of my favorite beers have been the Stone 5th Anniversary IPA and the Stone 6th Anniversary Porter. There were both quite groundbreaking for the time. You wouldn’t think that an 8.5 percent Imperial IPA is groundbreaking today, but the 4th anniversary and the 5th anniversary absolutely were and it was just such an absolutely delicious hop bomb. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Stone Ruination IPA, when we came out with it the year after on the fifth anniversary, was the first full-time brewed and bottled double IPA on the planet. So it just goes to show how things were changing so rapidly in that short period of time.

And then the 6^th Anniversary Porter was a cranked up version of our smoked porter, but way hoppier, Was it an earlier version of a Black IPA? I don’t know, probably not that far, but it was aged on oak chips, and it was just absolutely delicious.

You write in the introduction, “Think about our story as providing context for your vision, whatever that may be,” which is especially relevant as so many breweries are opening right now. How do you think opening a brewery today is different than it was 15 years ago?

Fifteen years ago was the first bubble to burst. We came from several previous years from an industry of kind of brewing anything against a wall just to see what sticks—all these raspberry wheat beers and lemon beers.

Things frankly, without a lot of soul and without any real artisanry.

Consumers became just disenchanted and that’s what caused the first bubble to burst. You had people who got tired of plopping down seven dollars for a six-pack of something that looked cool and then being disappointed. Of course, at that time seven dollars was a lot of money for a six-pack, so it’s like plopping down your ten bucks now.

Today when a brewery opens up, like my friends at BrewDog or The Bruery or so many others, can barely make enough beer to keep up with the demand, it’s just skyrocketing.

The first couple of years of Stone, nobody cared, nobody wanted our beer.

It was too strong, it was too bitter. Today, you come out with something really out there, extremely creative and people are embracing it. I think that’s great, by the way, there’s no sour grapes here. I think that’s it fantastic, that’s the world that I’ve been a part of helping to create, and I’m proud of that.

It’s also that you needed to really focus on a beer; you needed to have a flagship beer. No barrel aging stuff, sours, crazy hops or ingredients in beer. Not that you couldn’t do any of it, but you couldn’t build a business on it. That couldn’t have worked 15 years ago. But now, today, people are tuned in and turned on to the category and now they’re eating it up, which is fantastic.

Greg Koch will be in Boston on Tues 10.25.11 as part of his national book tour. See him at the Craft Beer Cellar from 5pm-6pm, at Mass Challenge from 7pm-8pm or at Lord Hobo from 9pm-10pm. You can buy the book here.

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GARLIC, CHEDDAR AND STONE RUINATION IPA SOUP