Today we're going to talk about origin beers. There's increasing discussion in niche beer circles about the accuracy of some of our beer vernacular. What constitutes farmhouse ales, for example? Most leading farmhouse beer producers don't operate a farm at all. Rather, they hold close to some of the prevailing traditions of those styles largely lost to history. And increasingly, farmhouse producers are located in urban environments, pulling extremely far away from their inspiration, but perhaps ...
Oct 15, 2016•1 hr 11 min
This week's episode features one of Chicagoland's newest production breweries—Miskatonic in Darien, Illinois. My first memory of these guys was sitting at Owen & Engine, an English-inspired bar on Western Avenue that routinely puts together a great list. Scanning down through it, I noticed a name I'd didn't recognize, and next to it, a simple, refreshing style designator—"Mild." Now, I fully admit that, as someone who drinks for a living, I'm in a bit of a bubble at times. But I was thrilled...
Oct 08, 2016•1 hr 24 min
A while back, when we were shooting Grit & Grain in the Goose Island barrel warehouse, there were a series of barrels set aside for a special project lead by Innovation Manager, Mike Siegel. All I knew at the time was that it was a Brett Pale Ale of sorts. Other details were kept close. Today, I got to taste the final results of that experimental beer. But more importantly, I got the back story on the collaboration between Goose Island and beer historian Ron Pattinson—who, over the years, ha...
Sep 30, 2016•1 hr 5 min
Longtime GBH readers may recall the article I wrote about Hill Farmstead back in January 2014. For GBH, and myself as a beer writer, it was a bit of a turning point. That article remains our most-read brewery profile ever. And now that it has two years running on it, I doubt that'll ever change. The reach it's created for GBH opened a lot of doors for me and the team, and it was shortly after that that I first began bringing other writers into the fold. The entire reason many of those writers so...
Sep 23, 2016•1 hr 28 min
Today's guest is perhaps someone who could be described as the "hardest working person in London's beer industry." As well as heading up Marketing, Events & Comms for The Five Points Brewing Company in Hackney, East London, Doreen Joy Barber also co-runs the quarterly London Brewers Market, is an active member of all-female beer group, the Crafty Beer Girls and even finds the time to pull a few shifts behind the bar at The Chesham Arms, also in East London. What's surprising is that back whe...
Sep 17, 2016•1 hr 7 min
My guess is you didn't see this one coming. Neither did I, honestly. Today we talk with Charles Adler, co-founder of Kickstarter and, most recently, the founder of Lost Arts in Chicago. I'm going to let him tell you all about that. But first, I wanted to explain the connective thread I see between Charles and the beer world. First, both are incredibly entrepreneurial. And in many ways, entrepreneurialism has come to define what craft beer is. The things that Charles has created, and what craft b...
Sep 10, 2016•1 hr 6 min
Today's guest is someone I've been waiting to interview for a couple years now. Since I first started the podcast, he was high on my list, but for one reason after another, it always seemed like we should wait. We just didn't know what we were waiting for, exactly. Ryan Burk is the cidermaker for Angry Orchard, specifically running their new innovation cider house in Walden, NY. He was the former cidermaker at Virtue Cider in Fennville, Michigan. And before that, he was a homebrewer in Chicago. ...
Sep 03, 2016•1 hr 21 min
This week's guest is the stuff of legend—Tomme Arthur, the founder and brewmaster of Lost Abbey. He's a brewer associated with both San Diego's hop-forward dominance in craft beer, but also the world of barrel-aged Saison and Belgian-inspired farmhouse beers that continue to carve out a niche amongst the geekiest of beer drinkers in the U.S. And Tomme continues to impress both of these highly critical audiences. But Tomme's also a big part of the future. His voice carries weight. His opinions ma...
Aug 27, 2016•1 hr 35 min
Drew Larson is one of those people that's everyone's favorite person. He's funny, smart, affable, and, other than brewers themselves, I don't think there's a guy in Chicago that works harder behind the scenes to bring you great beer. Drew has an interesting road to beer. He was in the military, went to culinary school, became a sommelier, then a cicerone, then studied draft technology while he was managing the beverage program at the Hopleaf. He's also an incredible hobbyist, and we get to that ...
Aug 20, 2016•55 min
This is going to be another deep dive into the world of brewing malts. We previously chatted with a micro maltster, Troubadour, in Fort Collins. That gave us some insight into the niche world of specialty craft malts. But today's guest covers a much wider spread. She's Sara Hagerty of Malteurop's U.S. division. She has an incredible technical background in biology, chemistry, yeast, and now, malt sales. It's an interesting role, working across so many different kinds of breweries in a large regi...
Aug 12, 2016•1 hr 8 min
The landscape of the British beer industry has seen a seismic shift over the last few years as the influence of American craft beer culture has become ever more pervasive. But what we're seeing now is breweries that were influenced by U.S. beer culture when they were young are now shaping this to form their own ideal. A new, brighter, and more energetic British beer community. One of these breweries is Beavertown, of Tottenham, North London, which was founded by Logan Plant—son of none other tha...
Jul 31, 2016•59 min
One of the amazing things about the beer industry diversifying like it has is that there are so many unique roles that simply didn't exist before. And today's guest has one of them. Dave Kahle, one of the rare Master Cicerones in the world is a specialist at Breakthru Beverage, formerly Wirtz beverage, in Chicago. A few years back, they decided to branch out from wine and spirits, and take on a role as a craft beer distributor. To do that, they knew their sales force needed a serious education, ...
Jul 23, 2016•1 hr 41 min
For anyone who's been following GBH since the very beginning, today's guest will seem like a blast from the past. One of the first interviews I ever transcribe wasn't with a beer guysat all — it was with the owner of a wine shop. Perman Wine Selections in Chicago's West Loop is one of the city's gems. It's an unassuming storefront with a well-edited selection. But the real story of the place and its impact on Chicago food and beverage is its owner, Craig Perman. He conducts a lot of his business...
Jul 16, 2016•1 hr 21 min
Sometimes it feels like every small craft brewery is in constant expansion—and the numbers back up that general sentiment. More capacity, bigger brewhouses, contracting out, and bringing canning lines in—there's an endless number of dependencies when you're building out an expanded space in the hopes of meeting demand or chasing a growing market. And on the surface, these expansions seem obvious, almost simple. Afterthoughts in a market where success still seems inevitable for many. But behind t...
Jul 09, 2016•1 hr 35 min
We're 84 episodes in, and that means that some of the breweries we profiled when we first started this thing are a year or two old by now. And that's a year or two of hindsight and lessons learned that anyone in the industry would benefit from. Why kind of problems has a two-year-old brewery had to solve? What kind of assumptions did they make that were completely off-base? And how did they adapt to the always-evolving nature of the market for beer? Today, I'm going to bring you the perspective ...
Jun 25, 2016•1 hr 5 min
Hosted by our London Contributor, Matthew Curtis—For my first episode, I invited one of my best friends in the UK beer industry up to my apartment, here in North London, to record an interview. These days, Chris Hall works for a cool little brewery in South London called Brew By Numbers as their sales and media guy. I'll be bringing the full story of Brew by Numbers to GBH soon, but before then I wanted to talk to Chris about how he worked his way into the beer industry His job encompasses every...
Jun 18, 2016•1 hr 32 min
So I'm just going to start by saying this might have been my favorite interview ever. Maybe it's the Pennsylvania connection, or maybe it's just Bill's way of giving zero fucks while also being a strong competitor in the market, or maybe it's just the lame-duck ease with which he's handling himself after the sale and partnership with a private equity group and Southern Tier Brewing, but yeah, I think this is the one. It summarizes everything I love about doing the podcast. People sit in that cha...
Jun 11, 2016•1 hr 38 min
Today's guest is one of those chance encounters in the beer world where an online voice becomes a smile and and a handshake in person. Andrew Nations of Great Raft Brewing in Shreveport, Louisiana is a guy on Twitter to some. One of those lone rational voices in a literal wilderness of craft beer zealously run amok. And not long ago, he ventured to Chicago, and subsequently to the GBH Studio for a live podcast taping. That's when he and his wife stepped out of the virtual and into the physical r...
Jun 03, 2016•50 min
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist, has an interesting way of describing what progress looks like — he paints a picture of a boat, tacking back and forth with the wind, as it makes its way across the ocean. From a distance, it appears to go in a straight arching line towards its pre-determined destination. But of course, up close, it's a thousand little zigs and zags, working with the momentum of the wind in order to propel itself forward. The final destination may be determined...
May 28, 2016•1 hr 24 min
Welcome to the second GBHypecast, an episode devoted to helping a brewery share an important story that deserves to be told. This episode is about Goose Island's ongoing research into the off flavors in Bourbon County Stout this year, something that's been on a lot of people's minds since January. It's an ongoing situation, but the good news is that the science is in—and there's a lot of detailed insight to share. Sometimes when we're working with our clients in a creative or strategic capacity,...
May 25, 2016•52 min
Today's guest is one of those people that many industry folks know and love. As for the drinkers, well, depending on who you rub elbows with online, it's quite possible you've encountered Lisa Zimmer on Twitter from time to time. She has a beer job that only exists at a large brewery. At one time, it was called "digital and consumer outreach specialist." But her influence is so much broader than the title implies. In Chicago, she's known as the woman who started the Brewers Unleashed series wher...
May 14, 2016•1 hr 15 min
I feel like the past 18 months have been a sort of reconciliation for craft beer drinkers and brewers, with a lot of folks focusing on beers that are highly drinkable, or sessionable, but still quite flavorful, exciting, and ultimately easy to find. There's been a surge in the market of craft Lagers, Pilsners, Session IPAs and Sours, along with some renewed appreciation for beers like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. And in about a month we'll be seeing an ode to Fat Tire in a collaboration 12-pack from ...
Apr 30, 2016•1 hr 11 min
I was in North Carolina for a quick minute helping launch a start-up, and I had about a 2-hour window on my last night in Raleigh to record a podcast episode with one of the city's best known breweries — Trophy. I visited both their locations — known as little Trophy and big Trophy — and we really hit it off. From as far away as Chicago, I could tell Trophy had something special. Sometimes you can just see it. And my first visit didn't disappoint. Clean, well-fermented beers with character. A gr...
Apr 23, 2016•1 hr 11 min
