Welcome to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. Today's episode is one of those great conversations you don't want to end, when you're talking with someone talented and uniquely good at what they do. You'll see by the timestamp that there is, in fact, a stop time to my chat with Kate Bernot, but I can only hope you g...
Feb 06, 2019•53 min
On every home game day, tens of thousands of baseball fans filter into the San Francisco Giants' ballpark. Many of them will buy beer, and thanks to Brian Carriveau, their options now include more than the predictable lineup of macro lagers. Last season, after convincing the eco-conscious ballpark managers to allow him to sell aluminum cans, baseball fans found they could buy 16 ounces of locally-made craft beer by nearby breweries — some of which weren't available elsewhere in the city. Carrive...
Feb 02, 2019•47 min
What does it take to open a brewery these days? And what happens after you do? These questions are at the center of two conversations we have in this Sightlines addition of the podcast. First, we hear from Scott Janish and Michael Tonsmeire, co-owners of Maryland's Sapwood Cellars. I sat down with the pair for episode #144 from October 2017, and have been tracking their progress since. Back then, they were working on recipes and trying to perfect an approach to New England IPA, all while finding...
Jan 30, 2019•51 min
Today's guests represent a kind of brewery that lives, sometimes tenuously, in the spaces in between traditional brewery models in American craft brewing. They's very small. They have an alternating proprietorship arrangement with another local brewery, which means they use another brewery's system to brew their beer. But on that particular brew day, they technically own the license. They brew, package, and sell that beer via self-distribution. And their portfolio, for reasons both of constraint...
Jan 26, 2019•1 hr 9 min
Welcome to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and journalist and media folks from within the beer industry on topics of writing, beer, and the stories you read and hear from GBH and others. In this episode, we're going to catch up with Bryan Roth, our Sightlines editor. He's in charge of the research and analysis GBH conducts into trends and business dealings in the beer industry, but also dives ...
Jan 23, 2019•58 min
[photo by Jim Henkens] How do you become one of the largest breweries in one of the most beer-loving states in the country these days, and not sell a single drop to drink in your taproom? The incredible growth of Seattle's Georgetown Brewing Company, and the way they've done it, could leave a lot of beer lovers and business owners scratching their heads. And yet, Manny Chao and Roger Bialous have successfully zigged when everyone else has intentionally zagged. Bodhizafa IPA won gold at the Great...
Jan 19, 2019•56 min
Welcome to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. In this episode, we're leaving the confines of the U.S. to visit with Luke Robertson, a GBH contributor living in Melbourne, Australia. Originally from New Zealand, Luke built up his reputation and writing chops in his adopted home country through the Ale of a Time blog...
Jan 16, 2019•36 min
San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood looked a bit different in 2013, when Cellarmaker Brewing Company opened here, on Howard Street. Tech companies were moving in, and the city's new young and affluent workers moved into a part of San Francisco plagued by homelessness and drug use. It might have seemed difficult place to open a brewery, let alone any public-facing business, but Cellarmaker broke out, quickly gaining recognition as one of the city's best breweries. In their five years in business, t...
Jan 12, 2019•1 hr 5 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.
Jan 09, 2019•2 min
Welcome to the very first Sightlines episode of the Good Beer Hunting podcast. These episodes are where we dig in to a timely topic with experts from around the country, working to make you and us smarter about what's going on in the beer industry right now. This week, brewers around the country are dealing with the ramifications of the government shutdown, which means that key agencies like the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau—often referred to as the TTB—are entirely unresponsive, and ...
Jan 05, 2019•25 min
It seems like beer enthusiasts, myself included, are always looking forward. When we're not trying to figure out what the next IPA is going to be, it's easy to prognosticate about upcoming business plans, releases, and who needs to learn more about whoever the next, hot brewery may be. But as we've heard so many times before, you don't know where you're going, unless you know where you've been. Liz Garibay is the person you may want to call when it's time to bridge these things as both historian...
Jan 05, 2019•49 min
Welcome back to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. In this episode, we're joined by a name you may be familiar with if you're a beer fan, especially if you're on Twitter, and very much so if you live in New England. For years, Carla Jean Lauter has shared stories from Maine on her blog, beerbabe.com, and more recen...
Jan 03, 2019•49 min
Today's episode is one of those where just a couple weeks difference in when we actually sat down with each other would have dramatically transformed the focus of the conversation. For anyone who's been paying attention to Avery, you certainly know it's been a couple years of transformation for the brewery, as they took on a minority investment of Mahou San Miguel, completely reconfigured their portfolio to better align with market trends, and launched a visual re-brand. Of course, all these cha...
Dec 31, 2018•57 min
Welcome to another Fervent Few episode of the Good Beer Hunting podcast where myself, Jim Plachy, and GBH's strategic director, Michael Kiser, catch up. We'll talk about the topics and discussions that took place in our membership community in the last couple weeks. Our 500 or so subscribers are scattered all over the world. Sometimes we meet up with them when we're on the road, or they hang out with each other, but it all comes together in our community forum on Slack. If you value the content ...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 6 min
A decade in beer can feel like a lifetime. As Tottenham's Redemption Brewing Company approach their 10th birthday, looking back is kinda dizzying. Redemption was one London's first craft brewers, but is now just one of more than 100. Founder Andy Moffatt has grown his business slowly and organically with a focus on sessionable cask ale, despite a consumer shift to the hop-focused, high-ABV American styles brewed by those who came in his wake. In barely a year, Redemption went from sign of the fu...
Dec 22, 2018•1 hr 4 min
It's another episode of the GBH Collective, an ongoing series of interviews where we dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. In this episode we're checking back in with another member of the GBH team, Alyssa Pereira. You're likely to have come across her words in recent months, as she's profiled Russian River, told the story of Firestone Walker's unexpected flagship 805 Blonde Ale, and given an in...
Dec 19, 2018•38 min
I met Shannon Vinson not at a beer festival, or a beer bar, or at Creature Comforts Brewing Company in Athens, Georgia, where she works, but in New York City seven years ago. We were both getting our masters degrees at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Beer being a relatively far cry from the art world, probably neither of us had any foresight we'd ever end up here in this community, but we stayed in touch through social media, watching each other progress in this industry. Eventua...
Dec 15, 2018•1 hr 8 min
This week's episode is a fun one for me, largely because I'm not on it. About a year ago, we started a subscriber community called The Fervent Few . And since then, hundreds of people from all walks of life, all kind of professions, and all over the world have joined to support GBH financially—and to commune with each other over beer. Some of them are experts and producers, others are distributors, retailers, sales reps, and the like. Plenty of them are homebrewers and people trying to break int...
Dec 12, 2018•28 min
We've all heard the adage of "location, location, location." The idea that when it comes to real estate, it's about where you are—something that can be doubly important for a business. When Marie and Jamie Fox set out to find the spot for their brewery, it was not easy. The effort, which became a journey, took them all over Boulder, Colorado to look at practically any space that may have been usable for brewing. It eventually led them to sign a lease in 2016 on a 20,000 square foot facility in t...
Dec 08, 2018•1 hr
Welcome back to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors, and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. We're stepping outside our normal lineup of GBH writers this week to visit with someone you may not be familiar with, but will likely want to know more by the end of our conversation. Kyle Clark does not work in beer. He doesn't write about beer. He has a lot of b...
Dec 05, 2018•42 min
This week's episode is a unique one for us. It brings together a bunch of voices who were in Nashville for the 2018 Craft Brewers Conference. In order to capture the feelings of that particular moment in the beer industry, we invited people into a private room at the Flying Saucer, set them up with one of our hosts (myself, Bryan Roth, and Matthew Curtis), and conducted a sort of beer version of speed dating. Each guest flipped over a card to see the topic, and then they talked to us about what ...
Dec 01, 2018•1 hr 24 min
Welcome back to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. It's been exciting to bring you the voices of those behind our stories, and if you haven't had the chance to better know Good Beer Hunting's Claire Bullen and Kyle Kastranec, those episodes are waiting in our podcast archives. In the meantime, we're switching it up...
Nov 23, 2018•1 hr 1 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.
Nov 19, 2018•2 min
This week's guest comes at the beer world through a unique angle—the legal lens. He's a lawyer based in New York State whose firm works with small brewers on a variety of business issues, but his personal focus at the firm is in trademark and IP. You've probably come across his thoughts on Twitter, where he shares updates on major trademark disputes like the Lagunitas and Sierra Nevada battle over the term IPA and Stone's fight with MillerCoors over the Keystone brand. Brendan's commentary—which...
Nov 17, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Welcome to another Fervent Few episode of the Good Beer Hunting podcast where myself, Jim Plachy, and GBH's strategic director, Michael Kiser, catch up. We'll talk about the topics and discussions that took place in our membership community in the last couple weeks. Our 500 or so subscribers are scattered all over the world. Sometimes we meet up with them when we're on the road, or they hang out with each other, but it all comes together in our community forum on Slack. If you value the content ...
Nov 14, 2018•33 min
The more of the beer world I've seen during my travels, the more dots I've been able to connect between certain kinds of breweries. Not just with the kinds of beers they make, like a Hazy IPA brewery, or a sour brewery, but broader than that—something that sort of gets to that phrase you hear so often amongst brewers" "like mindedness." Sometimes this phrase makes me queasy, as it sounds a bit familiar in the larger context of the monoculture that plagues craft beer. But when it's used with inte...
Nov 10, 2018•1 hr 19 min
At GABF in Denver this year, we teamed up with the folks at New Belgium to host a conversation called Within Reach to talk about exploring new markets and winning new fans for craft beer. Hosted at the Source Hotel, where New Belgium has a new, small brewery, a diverse panel of industry professionals gathered to talk about diversity and inclusion, which are central to this effort. With an industry that's largely still white and male, it's become increasingly clear there's a need to invite more p...
Nov 06, 2018•1 hr 35 min
Photo by Clara Rice When Dave McLean moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood after college, he was chasing one particular thing: the Grateful Dead. McLean was a small part of a wave of hippies, idealists, and rock mega fans who came to the city at the same time for a similar reason, but unlike many of the others, Dave actually stuck around. And then he built a business here: the Magnolia Brewing Company. With the nearly 20 years Dave was at the helm of Magnolia, he became part of th...
Nov 04, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Welcome back to another episode of the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. This week's conversation is with a fan favorite: Kyle Kastranec. As one of the longest-tenured writers for Good Beer Hunting, you may have become familiar with his work through a variety of feature stories he's written over the years. But more re...
Oct 31, 2018•34 min
Everyone wants to talk about innovation in beer these days, which could mean anything from playing with a new ingredient, or piece of equipment, or working to create a whole new style of beer. With a new record number for breweries in the U.S. being achieved daily, there are conscious and constant decisions breweries make as a way to differentiate themselves. And while all brewers certainly have a hand in innovating for their respective companies, there aren't a ton who have a job to specificall...
Oct 27, 2018•55 min
