Today we're going to dig into a part of the beer business that's hard to crack—distribution. It's typically very difficult to talk about this part of the three-tier system because it's full of confusing laws that vary state-to-state, it's federally mandated and regulated, and probably he most important reason is that no one is incentivized to really discuss it. It's where a lot of the concentration of wealth happens in the beer industry, and when things get consolidated, there's rarely progress,...
Jul 28, 2018•1 hr 14 min
After last week's brief layover in Colorado for a chat with WeldWorks, we're returning to Spain this week. If you haven't already, you can check out a thematic part one to this episode featuring Xavier Losada, brewer and bottle shop owner of Bee Beer Craft Beer and Cheeses. This time around, we catch up with Jeff Cioletti, a fellow writer and prolific traveler who's long covered the world's many alcoholic offerings. I've been lucky to know Jeff for some time, but we typically only see each other...
Jul 21, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Today's podcast is with the folks from Colorado's WeldWerks Brewing Company—and it's a fun one. In fact I might go as far as to say that this is one of my favorite conversations I've had, since I started contributing to this podcast a couple years ago. You'll hear a number of WeldWerks voices over the next hour or so, including owners Colin Jones and Neil Fisher, Ops Director Kristin Popcheff, brewer Arne Garlick and Sales Director Jake Goodman. It's been quite the journey for WeldWerks since th...
Jul 14, 2018•1 hr 13 min
Beer people love to talk about how the beverage they care about so much has brought the same kind of sentiment with other human beings. We're often finding ways that malt, barley, hops and yeast have given us another figurative ingredient: friends. For those of us who think about beer too much, it's always a treat to find like-minded others wherever we go. In June, I found myself in downtown Madrid while staying in the city as part of short media tour hosted by Mahou San Miguel. I wanted to find...
Jul 07, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Today's guest sit at the intersection of so many aspects of Irish craft beer. He's an importer of American brands like Lagunitas. He's a distributor of Ireland's domestic craft brands like Galway Bay. He's also the country's first, and perhaps only official Beer Sommelier. So his perspective accounts for the curation, sales, distribution, and education of craft beer in a small country that's recently flipped a switch in terms of its interests, with many people now drinking small craft, trendy be...
Jun 30, 2018•44 min
For this latest version of the GBH Collective, I sat down with Oliver Gray, a fellow writer at Good Beer Hunting who recently took his love for beer by going pro. He's currently helping launch Guinness' new brewery in Baltimore as the marketing manager for the Guinness Open Gate Brewery and Barrel House. As a bit of disclosure, while Guinness is an underwriter for GBH, the reason Oliver and I sat down together was a rare occasion that we found ourselves in the same city at the same time, having ...
Jun 24, 2018•57 min
Today's guest is Natalya Watson of Duvel Moortgat. Watson's upbringing was something of an adventure, born to Northern Irish parents in Canada, then living back in Northern Ireland before growing up in California. Watson would then go on to live in New York, before eventually putting her British passport to good use, and moving to London in 2015. The start of her new adventure in beer here in the UK began behind the bar at Mother Kelly's—an East London bar and bottle shop that's become something...
Jun 16, 2018•1 hr 5 min
To some, vacation prep can feel almost as time consuming as act of being away itself, sorting through an endless number of online suggestions and guides with what you simply can't miss in whatever location you may be visiting. And like so many other beer lovers, I've got the process down to a science. When I'm off to visit someplace new, I love tips of where to and what to drink. On a recent stop in Kansas City, I was thrilled to have seen one small up-and-comer pop up several times over. BKS Ar...
Jun 09, 2018•1 hr 10 min
Today's guest is basically one of my personal hobbies. He's one of my windows into coffee culture, and following him on Twitter has given me insight into so many of the social, business, product, and values issues within coffee that I find highly relevant to beer. It's not always a straightforward translation, of course, and much of what we talk about today is about the gaps between the two. Coffee and beer, and craft-oriented niches, have so much in common. But the differences are meaningful an...
Jun 02, 2018•1 hr 11 min
On today's episode I'm joined by Jez Galaun and Xochitl Benjamin, two of the four founders behind South London's Brixton Brewery. Six months previously, I had sat down for a brief chat with the same pair, before GBH broke the news that the brewery had sold a minority stake of 49% to Heineken. Now that the dust kicked up by that announcement has had the chance to settle I wanted to catch up with Galaun and Benjamin to find out how things had been going for the brewery post investment. Brixton was...
May 26, 2018•1 hr 9 min
This week's episode is with one of the country's best and most-loved brewers. But unless you follow the industry closely, you probably don't know him. He won the Brewers Association's Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Craft Brewing in 2016 in recognition of his outstanding work at Allagash as their brewmaster, as well as the many committees and teams he serves on for the association itself. So much of what makes the Brewers Association a progressive, impactful part of our everyday drinkin...
May 18, 2018•57 min
This week's guest is a fascinating one for me. I first came to know Alex Tweet, one of the founders of Fieldwork in Berkeley, California, during his run-in with Shaun Hill of Hill Farmstead over the use of the word Vermont to describe one of Fieldwork's farmhouse-style beers. The argument that followed between the two resulted in a Sightlines story on GBH, not so much because there was a disagreement, but because it brought up really interesting thoughts about what constitutes an appellation in ...
May 12, 2018•1 hr 12 min
Our editorial director, Austin L. Ray, lives in Atlanta, which means I've had plenty of reasons to spend some time down there over the past few years getting to know the city through his perspective—its food, music and, of course, its beer. Recently, I watched as Austin's life as a beer drinker in the state of Georgia was dramatically changed with the passage of a new law that enabled breweries to sell their beer directly to drinkers in their own taprooms, over their own bars, and out their own ...
May 05, 2018•1 hr 23 min
Welcome to this special edition of the GBH podcast, which forms part of our Coming to America series, brought to you in collaboration with Guinness. Before we get started today, I want to tell you how excited I am about bringing our Uppers and Downers festival of coffee, beer and coffee beers to London this May. It takes place at Mick's Garage in Hackney Wick on Saturday May 19th and will feature over 30 exceptional brewers and roasters—including today's guests, Boundary—each collaborating on so...
Apr 28, 2018•57 min
I didn't expect to talk about a serial killer when I sat down with Devon Kreps recently, but sometimes life can be full of surprises. For a while, that was a recurring theme for Devon and her brewery, 7venth Sun, which she co-owns with Justin Stange. As you'll hear in our discussion, natural disasters and local tragedies played an unexpected and unfortunate role in the early story of their brewery's new production space in Tampa, Florida. But when we got together, it was in the cozy confines of ...
Apr 21, 2018•1 hr
Welcome to another episode of The Fervent Few podcast. Every few weeks we present you with this bonus episode of the GBH podcast where we chat with members of our subscriber community. The Fervent Few subscribe to GBH like a magazine making a monthly contribution via Patreon. Members join us in a forum to talk about a wide range of topics that doesn't just stop at beer. And every week we pick one of these topics and present the community's answers to readers in the form of an article posted to G...
Apr 17, 2018•39 min
This is our second interview recorded during San Francisco beer week - and it happened to be our second interview with someone who works at HenHouse Brewing up in the north bay. When I first contacted Sayre to come on the podcast, I didn't even know he worked for Henhouse, which becomes part and parcel of the conversation. Sayre Piotrkowski is a great example of someone who's hustled their way through a variety of jobs in the beer world, from door man, to bartender to beer buyer and sales rep. T...
Apr 13, 2018•1 hr 26 min
Our resident composer for the podcast and our commercial video work, Andrew Thiboldeaux, is writing original scores devoted to beers he finds fascinating. These are interpretations of the experience of drinking them. But they're also just great tunes.
Apr 12, 2018•2 min
I was lucky enough to get to the San Francisco and Bay Area for beer week earlier this year, and for the first time, I stayed on the Oakland side. Not only did this give me an entirely different perspective on the evolving scene of the East Bay, it also gave me quick access to the North Bay—and I took full advantage of it. I needed to get up to Santa Rosa for a shoot at Russian River for the Pliny release which was just published as part of Alyssa Pereira's first GBH story. Check that out when y...
Apr 08, 2018•1 hr 38 min
The state of wild and sour beer in America is rapidly evolving. And this year, in partnership with Green Bench Brewing in St Petersburg Florida, the GBH team hosted a series of interviews and discussions at the Foeder for Thought festival. These discussions are meant to help us all dig in to the future of this loosely-defined, but highly-sought-after category of beers. It's also a chance to get to know some of the people and stories behind how these beers are made, sold, and enjoyed all over the...
Apr 06, 2018•32 min
The state of wild and sour beer in America is rapidly evolving. And this year, in partnership with Green Bench Brewing in St Petersburg Florida, the GBH team hosted a series of interviews and discussions at the Foeder for Thought festival. These discussions are meant to help us all dig in to the future of this loosely-defined, but highly-sought-after category of beers. It's also a chance to get to know some of the people and stories behind how these beers are made, sold, and enjoyed all over the...
Apr 06, 2018•29 min
The state of wild and sour beer in America is rapidly evolving. And this year, in partnership with Green Bench Brewing in St Petersburg Florida, the GBH team hosted a series of interviews and discussions at the Foeder for Thought festival. These discussions are meant to help us all dig in to the future of this loosely-defined, but highly-sought-after category of beers. It's also a chance to get to know some of the people and stories behind how these beers are made, sold, and enjoyed all over the...
Apr 06, 2018•38 min
The state of wild and sour beer in America is rapidly evolving. And this year, in partnership with Green Bench Brewing in St Petersburg Florida, the GBH team hosted a series of interviews and discussions at the Foeder for Thought festival. These discussions are meant to help us all dig in to the future of this loosely-defined, but highly-sought-after category of beers. It's also a chance to get to know some of the people and stories behind how these beers are made, sold, and enjoyed all over the...
Apr 06, 2018•27 min
At this year's Foeder for Thought, the festival of wild and sour beers hosted by Green Bench Brewing Co. in St. Petersburg, Florida, the GBH team co-hosted panels and discussions that help us all dig in to the future of this loosely-defined, but highly-sought-after category of beers. WATCH THE ENTIRE SERIES ON VIDEO HERE. This podcast series includes: // State of sour/wild beer in Florida, featuring: Bob Sylvester of Saint Somewhere Brewing Co. Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Matt Manthe of...
Apr 06, 2018•35 min
This week's guest is Mike Benner, Chief Executive of the Society of Independent Brewers, or SIBA for short. SIBA is the largest UK trade body representing the independent arm of the British brewing industry. Founded in 1980 as the Small Independent Brewers Association, SIBA currently represents around 830 brewer members as well as around 300 or so non-brewing supplier associates. Its equivalent in the US would be the Brewers Association, and Benner's equivalent at the BA would be its CEO and Pre...
Mar 31, 2018•50 min
Welcome to another episode of The Fervent Few podcast. Every few weeks we present you with this bonus episode of the GBH podcast where we chat with members of our subscriber community. The Fervent Few subscribe to GBH like a magazine making a monthly contribution via Patreon. Members join us in a forum to talk about a wide range of topics that doesn't just stop at beer. And every week we pick one of these topics and present the community's answers to readers in the form of an article posted to G...
Mar 28, 2018•55 min
Texas continues to receive plenty of attention from the beer world, and here on the GBH podcast, this episode rounds out a trio of recent opportunities to hear about what's going on in the Lone Star State. Jester King's Jeff Stuffings and a whole crew from Austin Beerworks have offered some context of what's going on with them in their corner of the beer world, and now we turn to someone sitting just outside the industry for extra perspective. Arianna Auber has worked as a journalist covering th...
Mar 24, 2018•1 hr
I'm currently sitting in the car outside Black Back Pub in Waterbury, VT waiting for one of my favorite bars in the country to open its doors. I came out to visit Hill Farmstead for the quarterly pickup of their Collected Works membership club. It's my first time joining the club, which I mostly did as an excuse to force myself to visit more often. It's buried in about a foot or two of snow at the moment, but it's as special as ever. And now my bags are full for the trip home. I'm also here for ...
Mar 20, 2018•1 hr 4 min
You may have already heard of Wild Card Brewery's Jaega Wise—especially over the past few months, as she's positioned herself as a prominent anti-sexism campaigner within the British beer industry. I had hoped to highlight the great work Wise is doing within this field in this episode, but was also keen to learn more about her history as a brewer and her businesses plans for future expansion. The danger with conversations like sexism in beer, as Wise and I discuss, is that too often the din of c...
Mar 11, 2018•44 min
Hey we did it - we made it through another year of Uppers & Downers in Chicago, home to our annual festival of coffee, beer, and coffee beers held in collaboration with our friends at Thalia Hall. This time around, of course, we decided to make an entire week out of it, with a series of smaller events leading up to the festival featuring tours of local coffee roasters, espresso demos, tap takeovers, an incredible chef-driven dinner, an Irish cocktail competition with some of chicago best bar...
Mar 08, 2018•1 hr 24 min
