It’s no secret that the craft-brewing industry is facing headwinds, and with that comes brewery closures and a flourishing used-equipment market. But as we all know, buying and integrating used equipment doesn’t mean just plug and play: It requires strategic planning, thorough integration, thoughtful modernization, and on-the-fly creative problem solving. If you’re building a new brewery, an expansion brewery, or upsizing the brewhouse in your current facility by combining used and new equipment...
Jul 08, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 423
Montreal’s Messorem (https://messorem.co) strikes an urban pose—the old factory building in a gritty industrial zone is covered with graffiti, and looks more likely to hold underground raves than contemporary brew days. But that’s part of the charm that the founders sought out, as the brand makes no claim to appeal to everyone. If you know, you know, and beer drinkers in Quebec (and now around the United States) increasing seek out their intensely flavorful IPAs because of their unique and creat...
Jul 04, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 422
There was a time in Boréale’s (https://www.boreale.com/en) not-so-distant past when they might have released a new beer every other year. The brewery is one of Quebec’s oldest craft breweries, dating back to the late 1980s, and over its history it has seen waves and trends come and go. But the changing dynamics of craft brewing in the 2010s posed a different kind of challenge that required a new way to approach innovation and risk-taking. Then head brewer, now vice president of innovation, Gabri...
Jun 27, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 421
Episode 420! It’s an auspicious number that we couldn’t let pass without commemorating in some significant way, and our friends at Abstrax (https://abstraxhops.com) have joined us to bring you this partner podcast interruption-free. Abstrax (https://abstraxhops.com) has its roots in the cannabis world but has taken cutting edge tech and developed a number of applications for the brewing world, from their hop-derived varietal-specific Quantum series that uses ultra-low-temp extraction to preserve...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 420
Don’t tell Jean-Phillippe Lalonde of Silo (https://bieresilo.com) that craft lager is a “new” trend—he’s been brewing small batches for Montreal drinkers for nearly 15 years. Opened two weeks before COVID shutdowns in 2020, Silo is the second manifestation of Lalonde’s brewing vision. Designed with packaging in mind, Silo also includes some thoughtful choices (such as a direct-fire kettle) that are budget-friendly while supporting the kinds of lagers he loves to make and drink—expressive ones wi...
Jun 20, 2025•59 min•Ep. 419
The focus of this spotlight episode is hot-side process improvements that will make your brew day quicker, more reliable, and more consistent. We get into the nitty-gritty of tank jackets, grist hydration, lauter-tun geometry, pressure differentials, kettle heating, and more, with a clear focus on lean manufacturing, reducing variability with Six Sigma DMAIC models, optimizing systems for the chemical and physical processes of brewing, workflow improvement for efficiency with provable ROI, and m...
Jun 17, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 418
Estate-grown barley, hops, and fruit are the engines that power the beers at Macallen Farm and Brewery (https://www.facebook.com/p/Macallen-Ferme-et-Brasserie-100046434972035/), and multigenerational farmer (and brewery founder) Ryan Allen embraces agriculture as a creative tool in his brewing process. Whether it’s heirloom barley varieties grown in intentional ways to optimize flavor profiles, or it’s Cascade hops that he lets hang for extra weeks to develop deeper fruit notes, there are few va...
Jun 13, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 417
Before he took the leap and started his own, BreWskey (https://www.brewskey.ca) cofounder Derrick Robertson was a process engineer who helped design breweries. That background was invaluable when building out a brewhouse and cellar in a building that’s a historic landmark in Vieux-Montréal. With multiple spaces and sprawling patios, BreWskey is popular among travelers who drink plenty of pale lager in warmer months—with many who also appreciate BreWskey’s creative and contemporary approach to ha...
Jun 06, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 416
This small brewery in Dunham, Quebec, just north of the Vermont border, features a pub, guesthouse, and extensive beer garden that make it the perfect stop-through or weekend destination for those heading south from Montreal or north from the States. But Brasserie Dunham (https://www.brasseriedunham.com) is much more than a waypoint. Over the past 13 years, the brewery has built a reputation for world-class saisons, finding expression through refined fermentation, an evolving culture, and intrig...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 415
Few breweries in the 21st century have been as influential as Hill Farmstead (https://hillfarmstead.com) on American craft beer. This rural Vermont brewery, built on the family property just outside Greensboro Bend, captured the beer world’s imagination upon opening in 2010, and enthusiasts have flocked there from all corners of the world ever since. Their IPAs helped to change the trajectory of the style, and their saisons—trademarked as Farmstead Ales—have received numerous honors, including a...
May 23, 2025•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 414
At the turn of the 21st century, it wasn’t uncommon for a hop grower focusing on alpha varieties to replant a field every 25 to 50 years. While the plants in the field inevitably contracted viruses, the impact of those viruses on alpha-acid development and overall yield was manageable. In today’s environment, however—with new varieties bred to be high-performance, high-aroma, well-oiled machines—the same viruses have an outsized effect, and a field’s lifespan may be just a quarter of what it use...
May 16, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 413
Over the past two years, five beers that Lapel, Indiana’s Pax Verum (https://www.paxverum.com) sent to Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine for review have scored 95 or above. That naturally piqued our interest, so when we planned our Craft Brewers Conference itinerary we made sure to visit the hip outpost an hour north of Indianapolis. Head brewer and co-owner Colt Carpenter cut his teeth working in a homebrew shop before making the jump to the world of professional brewing, and his embrace of hig...
May 09, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 412
Parrotdog (https://parrotdog.co.nz) has been a craft-brewing mainstay in New Zealand for nearly 15 years, and with national distribution and a production brewery and taproom steps from the beach and Wellington’s airport, they reach a broad audience of consumers across a range of styles. While their core line features everything from a classic C-malt IPA to pils with “vivid passion fruit and white-wine notes,” they also constantly iterate and experiment on the brewery’s five-barrel pilot with eve...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 411
In Wellington, New Zealand, the Fork & Brewer (https://forkandbrewer.co.nz) has to live up to a reputation, and head brewer Brayden Rawlinson is up for the challenge. Under the leadership of previous head brewer Kelly Ryan (now with Freestyle Hops), the downtown brewpub garnered numerous awards, and the expectations placed on his successor were huge. Yet Rawlinson brings his own style and swagger to the role, alongside a deep love of fermentation in all its forms, and he’s continuing the leg...
Apr 25, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 410
While hop-forward lager may be a relatively new phenomenon in the States, New Zealand brewers have been brewing their own version of pilsner for decades using homegrown hops. Yet threading the needle in a precise style with hops that can have strong notes, such as mineral and diesel, is no small feat. In this episode, Paweł Lewandowski, the award-winning head brewer at Mount (https://mountbrewingco.com) in Mount Maunganui, on the North Island, walks us through the creative and technical process ...
Apr 18, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 409
New Zealand is pretty far from everything, so competing on price for commodity bittering hops was never a great strategy for the country’s small number of hops growers. Things were pretty grim in the early 2000s, when fifth-generation farmer Brent McGlashen joined his dad working on the family farm, Mac Hops (https://www.machops.co.nz), just outside the town of Motueka on the north end of South island. But then something mysterious and wonderful happened: Craft beer took off, and creative brewer...
Apr 11, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 408
Two straight weeks of nothing but doctors on the Craft Beer & Brewing podcast? This week’s episode is another scientific barnburner with the head of R&D for Wellington’s Garage Project. Dr. Peter Bircham has been working in laboratory settings with yeast for many years, but for the past few he’s taken on an additional role beyond the academic, working on everything from building better Garage Project (https://garageproject.co.nz) non-alcoholic beers to developing a testing regimen to eva...
Apr 04, 2025•59 min•Ep. 407
Dr. Ron Beatson is the retired hop breeder who built a storied career at Plant & Food Research developing some of the most popular New Zealand hop varieties today, and Dr. Tom Shellhammer is the Oregon State University professor whose research into hop oils, hop terroir, hop-growing techniques, and more have made an indelible impact on the Pacific Northwest hop industry. Shellhammer is currently on a four-month sabbatical in New Zealand, studying the similarities and differences between U.S....
Mar 28, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 406
Homogeneity is the name of the game in certain circles of brewing—whether it’s massive brewers who standardize their hop lots by blending before pelletizing, or it’s hop companies that blend lots to iron out highs and lows in a particular crop year. On the other end of that spectrum is Pete Gillespie and his team at Garage Project (https://garageproject.co.nz) and Hāpi Research (https://hapi.co.nz), disrupting the collective quest for like-minded optimization while prioritizing the expression an...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 405
Earlier this week, our Industry All-Access (https://brewingindustryguide.com/subscription/) subscribers received in their email inbox this week’s subscriber-exclusive article that Kate reported, parsing the latest industry economic data but reading beyond the surface for a deeper look at what’s really going on. We’ve all read the hyperbolic clickbait articles out there about craft beer’s demise, and for the first time in almost twenty years, we saw a net decline in operating breweries in the Uni...
Mar 14, 2025•49 min•Ep. 404
From their tiny outpost in the ski town of Park City, Offset Bier (https://offsetbier.com) has turned Utah’s challenges—such as a ban on serving draft beer higher than 5 percent ABV—into opportunities. Last year was a breakout one for the budding brewery—we named their session IPA Dopo one of our Best 20 Beers in 2024 (https://beerandbrewing.com/the-best-20-beers-in-2024), while another session IPA, Divi, won gold medal at Great American Beer Festival. Necessity is truly the mother of invention,...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 403
Strong brewing communities produce clusters of great breweries, and the Colorado brewing world, centered in Denver, is no different. Friendly competition drives innovation, exploration, and refinement as well as knowledgeable consumers with higher and higher expectations, and in this episode, we brought together three friends (each medal-winning brewers) for a conversation on their approach to West coast IPA. Brian Hutchinson of Cannonball Creek (http://www.cannonballcreekbrewing.com) has brough...
Mar 01, 2025•1 hr 47 min•Ep. 402
In our latest issue, Louisville’s Atrium Brewing (https://www.atriumbrewing.com) scored a category-leading 98 for their barrel-aged stout Denny-Lou, Blend 1, and that was as good a reason as any to check in with cofounder Mark Rubenstein and head brewer Spencer Guy for some background on brewing stouts. Their proximity to some of the best distillers in the Western hemisphere informs their approach to both aging and blending, and they take the same iterative approach to building flavor in more in...
Feb 22, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 401
For this 400th episode of the podcast, Neil Fisher of Weldwerks (https://weldwerks.com) takes over the host chair and puts Jamie Bogner in the hot seat for a ranging conversation about business, passion, creativity, discipline, openness, and why the current prevailing narrative about the “end of craft beer” in no way describes the reality for many brewers today. It’s a departure from the normal technical conversations that define the podcast—instead, for this special episode, it’s an open conver...
Feb 14, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 400
“If you’re a brewer and you’re not making things that you really want to make, or things you want to experiment with and learn more about, then what are you brewing for,” asks James Herrholz, Chief Creative Officer for Corporate Ladder Brewing (https://www.corporateladderbrewing.com) in Palmetto, Florida. While some may feel “forced” to brew crowd-pleasing adjunct-laden stouts, Herrholz signed on for the challenge, and approaches the style with zeal and a drive to make the very best. Over the pa...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 399
Over the past few years, Denver's River North Brewery (https://www.rivernorthbrewery.com) has collected accolades from top beer competitions around the world—four GABF medals, four World Beer Cup medals, four European Beer Star medals just to name a few—and beers like Father Time (https://beerandbrewing.com/review/river-north-brewery-father-time-1683141881) and Anniversary 11 (https://beerandbrewing.com/review/river-north-brewery-anniversary-11-stout-1683131307) have earned top scores from our b...
Jan 31, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 398
“If you like beer," says Greg Casey, "There’s no better time in the history of mankind to be living in the United States, right now.” And if anyone is qualified to make such a statement, it's Casey. After decades leading yeast and quality programs for some of the biggest brewers in the Western hemisphere, Casey retired to work on his passion project—telling the story of American brewing from the 1830's to the present in a way that showcases its innovation as well as the interplay through that hi...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 397
At its height, Pompano Beach’s Odd Breed in Pompano Beach was one of the best-regarded breweries in Florida, winning four GABF medals over a span of three years, and shipping mixed-culture beers to fans around the world. However, real-estate market forces ultimately worked against the niche brewery, and founder and brewer Matt Manthe closed up shop in the summer of 2024. That’s no reason not to talk brewing, however, and Manthe learned plenty over his years shepherding his mixed cultures from ho...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 396
Mark it down: Baltic Porter Day this year is January 18, always the third Saturday of this month. This year’s will be the 10th edition of a commemoration that began in 2016 in Poland, where rich, hefty, cool-fermented porters reign supreme. Marcin Chmielarz has worn many hats in the industry—bar manager, brewer, video blogger—but one of his most notable achievements is helping to draw Poland’s attention to its own distinctive porters. In this episode, Chmielarz digs into the history of the style...
Jan 10, 2025•56 min•Ep. 395
The city of Grodzisk Wielkopolski was once a major center of brewing in 19th century Poland, but political unrest, world wars, communism, and then misguided capitalism all played parts in closing the previous chapter of the city’s brewing history in the early 90’s. But the rise of craft beer also led to a resurgence in interest for obscure styles like the smoked wheat beer that made the city famous, and by 2016 a new group of owners relaunched the original Grodzisk brewery (https://browargrodzis...
Jan 03, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 394
