This special business-focused edition of the podcast is brought to you interruption-free by the transformational beverage-industry technologists at Encompass (https://www.encompasstech.com). As we head into 2024, the brewing industry is facing serious headwinds that have limited growth for many breweries and accelerated the closure of others. Consumer patterns are changing, product preferences continue to evolve, drinking occasions shift as our rhythms of work and life find different beats, and ...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 333
Chicago’s Dovetail (https://dovetailbrewery.com) has earned a reputation for its refined yet flavorful lagers, but the team’s dogged approach to traditional methods is less about religion and more about expression—these techniques and processes allow them to imbue their beers with attributes they want while minimizing those they want to avoid or keep in the background. Each beer they make is like a musical score—a recipe designed to hit the right notes with the orchestra of instruments they’ve a...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 332
Jacob Sembrano loves ingredients, and his background as a chef instilled in him a deep love of connecting ingredients and their stories with the dishes he presented to customers. Now, at the helm of the brewhouse at Chicago’s Cruz Blanca (https://cruzblanca.com), he’s forged a similar identity for his beers—connecting through ingredients with stories, and making beers with unusual methods. Their customers may not realize the technical prowess it takes to brew a 100 percent malted-corn grisette w...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 331
As always, our annual Best in Beer issue includes different perspectives. Our subscribers and listeners—that’s you!—have spoken, and we’ve compiled your votes for the Reader’s Choice lists, including your Top 25 Beers (https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2023-readers-top-25-beers-of-2023/). Plus, our Craft Beer & Brewing Best 20 Beers in 2023 (https://beerandbrewing.com/the-best-20-beers-in-2023/) are the culmination of a year of blind tasting by our review panel and then by our editors,...
Nov 17, 2023•2 hr 20 min•Ep. 330
It’s been another year of great beers—and we’ve tasted thousands—but they can’t all be “the Best.” What sets certain beers apart, to not only light up our palates and our senses, but also our brains and our conversations? Winnowed down by a year of our review panel’s blind judging, and then selected by more blind judging among our editors and top writers, our Best 20 Beers in 2023 represent the highest levels of excellence, character, and drinkability. In this special once-per-year episode, Craf...
Nov 09, 2023•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 329
In Geneva, Illinois, Art History Brewing (https://arthistorybrewing.com) doesn’t want to be everything to everyone, but they’re committed to brewing traditional styles well, while also making them relevant to today’s drinkers. That message has resonated in the broader Chicago beer world, winning them fans among some of the most influential bars and retailers in the city. For head brewer Greg Browne, it’s the logical outcome of a career spent brewing these beers in smaller ways at other breweries...
Nov 04, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 328
In this GABF Gold! edition of the podcast, the last of our 2023 focus on GABF gold medal winners, Jamie is joined by Rob Malad, director of brewing operations for Metazoa (https://www.metazoabrewing.com) in Indianapolis, Indiana. Metazoa recently won gold for William Walrus, a Scottish-style ale and product of necessity, that employed brewing techniques to overcome ingredient challenges while staying true to the spirit of the style. In this episode, he touches on: brewing beers meant to be consu...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 327
In this GABF Gold! episode, we dive into the saison category. First up is Jason zumBrunnen, cofounder of Denver's Ratio Beerworks (https://ratiobeerworks.com), recent gold medal winner for their King of Carrot Flowers carrot saison (and 2020 silver medal winner in American-Belgo style ale for their Dear You saison dry hopped with Citra, upon which King of Carrot Flowers is based). He dives into saison standards, like building body despite fermenting with diastaticus saison yeast, single infusion...
Oct 23, 2023•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 326
e recorded this episode of the podcast live from Odell Brewing on Sloan’s Lake as part of our recent Brewery Workshop: New Brewery Accelerator (https://breweryworkshop.com/) event in Denver. The three panel guests—Jake Gardner, director of brewing operations at Westbound & Down (https://westboundanddown.com); Marni Wahlquist, head brewer at Odell (https://www.odellbrewing.com) Sloan’s Lake; and Sean Buchan, owner and head brewer at Cerebral (https://cerebralbrewing.com)—represent a compellin...
Oct 16, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 325
In this special episode, two 2023 gold-medal-winning breweries discuss their methods and approaches to making wood-aged sour beer. First up is Kyle Vetter, founder of 1840 Brewing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, whose kriek-inspired "I Don't Want To Wait" won gold in the fruited wood- and barrel-aged sour beer category. He hits on the details behind how the beer was made, including: using oak as an ingredient not just a vessel building body with alternative brewing grains selecting barrel stock to best...
Oct 11, 2023•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 324
Over the course of his decade-and-a-half, bicoastal brewing career, Vasili Gletsos has brewed a wide range of beer styles on an equal wide range of brewing systems. But after launching Wunderkammer (https://www.wunderkammerbier.com) as a personal brand while serving as head brewer for Hill Farmstead, he ultimately decided to make it his focus, building out a simple brewery with an old dairy tank mash tun and a wood-fired copper kettle to make mixed culture beers that tell stories. Through foragi...
Oct 02, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 323
Reverend Nat’s Cider (http://reverendnatshardcider.com) has helped change peoples’ assumptions about craft cider in the Pacific Northwest, over their past 12 years of operation. The iconoclastic cider maker has adopted a flavor-forward, reverential-but-forward-looking approach to cider making that has ruffled some feathers and changed default narratives, but one thing it’s never been is boring or cautious. A few weeks ago, West announced that he was winding down operations of Reverend Nat’s Cide...
Sep 22, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 322
When you live and work in Yakima Valley, hops become a way of life. They’re second nature, omnipresent, and a constant topic of conversation—after all, many of the patrons of craft breweries in the Yakima Valley are the same folks who grow, process, study, and sell them. As such, Varietal Beer’s (https://varietalbeer.com) focus on brewing with hops has picked up momentum as fans flock to their taproom—about 30 minutes south of the city of Yakima—to drink their subtle, nuanced, and beautiful IPAs...
Sep 17, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 321
Based in Portland, Oregon, Sam Zermeño is the brewer behind Brujos—a nomadic brand that’s given him the opportunity to make some intensely flavored, highly regarded beers with friends and favorite brewers from around the country. Yet behind the acclaim and heavy-metal imagery is a mind of real technical know-how and experience. Previously an R&D brewer at Portland’s Great Notion, his accomplishment there include a GABF gold medal last year for their Feniks grodziskie. Nor was that his first ...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 320
Boulder’s Upslope (https://upslopebrewing.com) has been brewing Craft Lager since long before lager brewing was “cool,” and today the small brewery has built a production methodology for the longtime core offering that optimizes both quality and production efficiency. In this episode, head brewer Alex Meyer discusses the way the brewery makes their signature lager with a litany of unconventional ingredients and processes, and shares how they employ similar iconoclastic approaches with their Japa...
Sep 04, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 319
Dave Chichura loves brewing, and loves to work. He's always lived simply, and maintained a lifestyle that allows him to move around. And move he has, from breweries in the Midwest as well as up and down the Rocky Mountains. Now, as Director of Brewing Operations at Ex Novo (http://www.exnovobrew.com) in Corrales, New Mexico, he's putting in practice all the lessons he's learned, building and managing the brewing team as they make beers that have brought home four GABF and World Beer Cup medals o...
Aug 28, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 318
If Averie Swanson had her way, saison would outsell IPA among craft beer aficionados. The longtime saison brewer hopes to move beyond stereotypes and romanticized history and show (through beautifully designed and constructed beers) that saison provides a broad palette for brewers to explore flavor. With her Keeping Together (https://www.keepingtogether.com) brand, now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she hopes to write a new chapter for saison brewed in the United States. In this episode, she tac...
Aug 18, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 317
Montana is known for its grain, and Mark Hastings of Überbrew (https://uberbrew.beer) and By All Means (https://byallmeansbeer.com) is in the thick of it. Wheat is the most-grown crop statewide while barley is third; despite their ubiquity, Hastings steered clear of Montana’s brewing grains for the first two decades of his brewing career. Primarily grown for the needs of macro brewers, these grains never quite nailed the flavor and technical performance he sought. However, recent strides in equi...
Aug 11, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 316
This week’s podcast is different from most. A couple weeks ago, I drove down to Colorado Springs to catch up with Jess and Rich Fierro of Atrevida Beer (https://www.atrevidabeerco.com). Jess was the winner of Season One of the Vice TV show Beerland, and they went on to open their small community-focused brewery in 2018. From the start, Atrevida proudly embraced the slogan “Diversity, it’s what’s on tap,” and over the past five years they’ve lived it—women brewers have outnumbered men in their br...
Aug 07, 2023•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 315
The Northern hemisphere hop harvest is just weeks away, and that means one of our favorite times of the year—fresh hop beer season. To help add to the excitement, we invited three experts in the field of brewing with wet and fresh hops—Joe Mohrfeld of Pinthouse (https://www.pinthouse.com), Steve Luke of Cloudburst (https://cloudburstbrew.com), and Zach Turner of Single Hill (https://singlehillbrewing.com)—to join in on a panel discussion on the subject. Over the course of the podcast, they share...
Jul 30, 2023•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 314
Utah’s beer laws are some of the most anomalous in the country—the state does everything it can to make life hard on brewers—but one byproduct of the laws restricting the sale of beers based on ABV is that Utah brewers have had the commercial incentive to hone their low gravity brewing techniques. Today, at Templin Family Brewing (https://tfbrewing.com) in the granary district of Salt Lake City, you’ll find a dozen or so beers at 5% ABV (or less) on tap at any given time—because anything they ma...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 313
When Winslow Sawyer and his partners launched San Diego’s Pure Project (https://www.purebrewing.org) in the middle of the last decade, they weren’t focused on brewing particular styles. Instead, they began with the tenet of building a brewery focused on sustainability, using natural ingredients from small farmers wherever possible, and lowering their environmental impact while also giving back through the 1% for the Planet program. IPA wasn’t the initial focus—San Diego already had plenty of gre...
Jul 16, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 312
Ask most American brewers about their first experience with New Zealand hops, and nine out of ten will probably name one single beer—Alpine Beer’s Nelson. Alpine founder Pat McIlhenney was one of the early ones to import southern hemisphere hops, and it’s hard to speak about the hop now without acknowledging the importance of that singular beer. Son Shawn McIlhenney inherited his dad’s love of hops and experimentation, and today continues to push the limits of ingredients and techniques through ...
Jul 09, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 311
Justin Burdt loves hops, and has developed a unique and somewhat counter-intuitive approach to selecting them for Ghost Town’s (https://www.ghosttownbrewing.com) award-winning West coast IPAs. His focus on tight and lean intensity relies on boosting expression through embracing some hop aroma notes that give other brewers fits, but it’s the push and pull that gives the IPAs such compelling dynamic range. In this episode, Burdt dives deep into hops for the first hour of the podcast, before walkin...
Jun 30, 2023•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 310
As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on West coast-style IPA, featuring Matt Brynildson of Firestone Walker, Ben Edmunds of Breakside, and Sean Lawson of Lawson’s Finest. Over the course of the discussion, the brewers cover: using advanced hop products for more hop punch tucking in small amo...
Jun 26, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 309
As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on wine-beer hybrids, featuring two of the leading brewers in that space—Cory King of Side Project and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River—alongside inspiring winemaker and brewer (and Napa Valley proponent) Nick Gislason of Hanabi Lager. Over the course of t...
Jun 18, 2023•55 min•Ep. 308
As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on hazy IPA, featuring some of the most inspiring brewers in that space—Henry Nguyen of Monkish, (https://www.monkishbrewing.com) JC Tetreault of Trillium, (https://trilliumbrewing.com) and Neil Fisher of Weldwerks. (https://weldwerks.com) Over the course...
Jun 12, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 307
New Zealand’s climate, latitude, and singular terroir offers the right environment for hops of unique expression, but it’s their longstanding breeding program that has made possible so many of the signatures aromas and flavors we’ve grown to love. Ron Beatson of NZ Hops (https://nzhops.co.nz) is the plant geneticist behind many of these beloved varieties, and on this episode recorded at the Craft Brewers Conference, he discusses the complex genetics and processes behind developing hops like Nels...
Jun 02, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 306
Matthias Trum is the sixth-generation brewer at Bamberg’s Heller-Trum Bräu—better known as Schlenkerla—and he is as obsessed with local history as he is with producing world-class smoked lagers via their old-fashioned methods. Bamberg has a long history of brewing, and Trum is a great student of that history—and his family has played an important role in it. In this episode, he immerses us in that story, discussing: old family brewing logs that detail strong beers as well as lower-strength ones ...
May 27, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 305
The town of České Budějovice in South Bohemia may be better known to North Americans as Budweis, the German name that’s been appropriated by a couple of famous beers. The real Czech pale lager from here is known as Budvar—sold as Czechvar (https://czechvar.com/) in the United States, for legal reasons. It’s an easygoing showcase of light, pure malt flavors and soft, balancing bitterness, nearer in profile to a Bavarian helles than a typical Czech světlý ležák. Joining us to tell this iconic beer...
May 20, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 304
