Before I started working at Good Beer Hunting, I was a pretty avid reader, and the stories that resonated with me most were the stories that were more about people than they were about the beer themselves. Just a few weeks ago, we published one of the most ambitious and important one of these stories to date. The article is called, "A Story of Resilience—Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, Calif.," and it follows the creation of a beer by Sierra Nevada. The beer, which is called Resilience a...
Jun 12, 2019•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.
Jun 11, 2019•3 min
Every year, hundreds of baristas come together for the United States Coffee Championships. The competitions are heavily anticipated, with folks preparing for months to present their routines to judges and figure out who is the best coffee brewer, roaster, or taster in the nation. The heart of the entire competition is the barista championships. You might be thinking, what could a barista competition even be? Is it who can make the best coffee? Is it who has the best beans? Is it who can make the...
Jun 08, 2019•37 min
It started when i went to the website. "FLOODLAND BREWING" it read in all caps at the top. "Floodland is a brewery in Seattle" below. A spot to enter your email. You want to know more? There's a text file FAQ with some basic points of info. That's it. When I first came across the homepage—if you'd dare call it that—I had no idea what to expect. The business was started by Adam Paysse, one of the original partners of the city's beloved Holy Mountain Brewing. He had decided to go on his own with t...
Jun 01, 2019•1 hr 13 min
Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective Podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind the scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I'm Ashley Rodriguez, and I'm GBH's podcast producer. One of my jobs at Good Beer Hunting is to post all the articles that come through our website. Usually that means lots of cutting and pasting, checking links, setting up their website page, and figuring out where photos go. It also means I get real intimate with some o...
May 29, 2019•29 min
This week, we're bringing you a special episode from our Into the Wild tour with New Belgium Brewing. This is a tour focused on wild, sour, and otherwise aged and blended beers in the vein of what New Belgium Brewing has been making for longer and more continuously than any brewer in America. This tour is visiting at least a half a dozen cities this year and we kicked it off in Seattle with a series of sensory-driven events. We did a sour beer and cheese pairing at The Pine Box with chef Angelic...
May 28, 2019•36 min
The life of an American brewery feels like it exists on a scale like one of our pets. In the same way cat and dog years move at a factor faster than humans, the quick pace of the U.S. industry can make these businesses age rapidly in a variety of ways. If you're not new, or at least keeping up with the latest styles and trends, life can come at you fast. So when a brewery starts hitting milestones — not just its first few anniversaries, but long-tenured ones — it's kind of a big deal. That's wha...
May 25, 2019•1 hr 8 min
As of right now—May 2019—there are about 7,500 breweries in the United States. From 2016-2018, the Brewers Association counted about two new breweries opening every day, and in that time, the size, scope, and potential of what those businesses could become has quickly changed. Year-to-year volume growth for Brewers Association-defined craft beer dropped to 4% last year, a decline of 1% from 2017 and the lowest growth rate in a decade. Industry conversations now focus on going a "mile deep," not ...
May 23, 2019•28 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.
May 21, 2019•3 min
There's a big problem in coffee—we're not paying enough for it. With every clickbait article talking about how much you can save by cutting out your daily latte habit, you might be wondering how that's possible. But coffee, much like other agricultural products like sugar or bananas, has relied on colonialist structures to survive—meaning that while we can buy and sell coffee in consuming countries for $3.00 a cup, most of the folks who actually farm and grow coffee see less than a dollar per po...
May 18, 2019•58 min
In food and drink we often talk about the supply chain—the line we draw between the farm and the glass. The truth is, it's far more complicated, and far more protracted than that. The beer world is a web containing thousands of people who work to get beer in your hands, and only a few of them brew it, still they influence which beers are brewed, how they are packaged, how they get to the bar and how they are served. Even a small scale beer scene like Britain's is full of people you have never he...
May 11, 2019•1 hr 4 min
On this GBH Sightlines episode, we're visiting with several people to get their perspectives and experiences following what some are calling beer's own Fyre Festival. That event, a luxury-music-festival-turned-disaster that spawned two separate documentaries showcasing its incredible collapse, may be on another level than the inaugural Untappd Beer Festival, but it didn't stop some angry beer fans from making that connection on May 4. We're talking with two festival-goers, a vendor pouring for a...
May 10, 2019•22 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 ...
May 08, 2019•23 min
The world of beer is going through an identity crisis—it's changing the self-defined language of what's craft and what not seemingly every few years now, it's doing battle with wine and spirits, except when it's embracing them in the form of natural wine and barrel-aging, it's national, regional, local, and hyperlocal, it's taprooms and bars going to battle over the same customers, it's exploding cans and day-fresh distribution, and festivals are dying except when they're growing, and it's focus...
May 04, 2019•59 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 video series here This podcast series includes: FFT-007: Thinking Inside of the Package, featuring: Andrew Emerton, New Belgium Brewing Patrick Woodson, Brewery Bhavana FFT-008: Interview/Audience Q&A ...
Apr 30, 2019•45 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 video series here This podcast series includes: FFT-007: Thinking Inside of the Package, featuring: Andrew Emerton, New Belgium Brewing Patrick Woodson, Brewery Bhavana FFT-008: Interview/Audience Q&A ...
Apr 30, 2019•39 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 video series here This podcast series includes: FFT-007: Thinking Inside of the Package, featuring: Andrew Emerton, New Belgium Brewing Patrick Woodson, Brewery Bhavana FFT-008: Interview/Audience Q&A ...
Apr 30, 2019•36 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 video series here This podcast series includes: FFT-007: Thinking Inside of the Package, featuring: Andrew Emerton, New Belgium Brewing Patrick Woodson, Brewery Bhavana FFT-008: Interview/Audience Q&A ...
Apr 30, 2019•44 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 video series here This podcast series includes: FFT-007: Thinking Inside of the Package, featuring: Andrew Emerton, New Belgium Brewing Patrick Woodson, Brewery Bhavana FFT-008: Interview/Audience Q&A ...
Apr 30, 2019•29 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 video series here This podcast series includes: FFT-007: Thinking Inside of the Package, featuring: Andrew Emerton, New Belgium Brewing Patrick Woodson, Brewery Bhavana FFT-008: Interview/Audience Q&A ...
Apr 30, 2019•47 min
Today I'm going to introduce you to a brewery that basically just getting off the ground—it's still in its infancy. But the folks behind it, with experience across a variety of well-known breweries, and a killer bar, and the bones of the building having seen a couple breweries itself, well, it's more of a collection of old-but-still-passionate souls. This is Future Primitive Brewing in Seattle. When I visited they were just a couple weeks old and hadn't really dug in yet. But they were close. An...
Apr 27, 2019•52 min
There are lots of ways the business of beer extends far beyond what we find in bottles or cans. The social and cultural side of beer offers a glimpse into who we are, what we value, and in some ways, what drives us. Among one of the more curious trends in the American industry in recent years has been the continued use of trademarked or registered intellectual property. All over the country, there are near-daily examples of small and independent craft breweries using the likeness of people or IP...
Apr 25, 2019•27 min
For just over a year, Good Beer Hunting has focused on a variety of stories to highlight the evolution of wild and sour ale in America as part of our Into the Wild series, brought to readers in collaboration with New Belgium Brewing. Through these stories, however, it's been impossible to ignore what's also going on outside the U.S., where interest in this unique category has also been increasing. In this episode of the GBH Collective, we're checking in with Jonny Garrett, one of Good Beer Hunti...
Apr 24, 2019•37 min
For NYC Beer Week, in collaboration with The Well, Good Beer Hunting's Michael Kiser hosts a pair of panel discussions aimed at understanding the current state of the beer industry and the culture that supports it, from the perspective of both hometown and visiting brewers.
Apr 23, 2019•1 hr 3 min
For NYC Beer Week, in collaboration with The Well, Good Beer Hunting's Michael Kiser hosts a pair of panel discussions aimed at understanding the current state of the beer industry and the culture that supports it, from the perspective of both hometown and visiting brewers.
Apr 23, 2019•1 hr 14 min
There's a case to be made that some of the most essential members of our craft beer communities aren't brewers, or writers, or distributors. They're publicans who influence the industry by connecting people. Chris Cohen is one such person, though he wears many more hats than that of just beer bar founder. He does indeed run a popular bar in Old Devil Moon, which opened in 2016 in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood, but he didn't always know he'd wind up there. He was a former IP lawyer ...
Apr 20, 2019•1 hr 3 min
For generations, a lot about the story of beer has been filtered through advertising or experiences geared toward men. This is rapidly changing, and for the better. In today's GBH Collective, we're talking with Gray Chapman about some of the ways beer lovers are finding new connections in settings that can enhance the camaraderie of something as simple as sharing a collection of beer. Gray recently published a piece for GBH in which she tells the story of a female-only bottle share and why its m...
Apr 17, 2019•44 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 16, 2019•2 min
It's fair to say that mixed fermentation is having a moment in the U.K. Natural wine is buzzing like craft beer once did, and its beer equivalent is starting to do the same. I mean, no one knows what to call it—mixed ferm, farmhouse, wild ale, sour beer, barrel-fermented beer, low intervention beer. They all mean subtlety different things that never quite cover all the bases. Each brewery seems to pick its own word as they launch their side projects, using the volume and margins of clean beer to...
Apr 13, 2019•56 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 ...
Apr 10, 2019•30 min
