How Goose Island sale to Anheuser-Busch changed craft beer is detailed in new book

There's no more fascinating brewery in America - or possibly the world - than Goose Island Beer Co.

Across its 30 years, Chicago's oldest brewery has been on the leading edge of beer (it pioneered aging imperial stout in bourbon barrels) and business (its 2011 sale to Anheuser-Busch InBev launched a wild new era of the beer industry).

When I started writing about beer for the Chicago Tribune in 2009, Goose Island was the city's most interesting brewery. Nine years and one sale of the brewery later, that's probably still the case. Goose Island is not only a vibrant local entity, it has become the lead national and global craft brand for the world's largest beer company, with pubs popping up across the globe. It has grown into a story that couldn't just be contained to the pages, whether web or paper, of the Chicago Tribune.

The story deserved a book.

That book, "Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch and How Craft Beer Became Big Business" reaches bookstores June 1. The Goose Island story starts small: one man's idea for a second career in the nascent American brewing industry during the mid-1980s. It winds up telling a story far larger than its own - the story of craft beer: innovation, struggle, wild success and a complicated crossroad.

Life has been anything but simple for Goose Island as part of the world's largest beer company. Here is where the brewery's story began.

Excerpted from "Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business" by Josh Noel, to be released June 1. Copyright 2018 Chicago Review Press, $19.99.

On a Thursday evening in 1986, as a spring storm pounded the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, John Hall sat in an airplane on the rain-glazed tarmac and did something he would recount for the rest of his life. He reached for a magazine.

John was forty-four and had grown from a low-level sales grunt