Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Denver's Off Script has built a rabid fanbase of hazy IPA drinkers who line up for can releases and special draft events like it's 2015 again, and founder Ryan Taylor has done it by focusing tightly on plush and saturated hazy IPAs. But he brews the beer themselves at Aurora, Colorado's Milieu Fermentation, where cofounder Rob Bessett also makes some high-scoring hazy IPAs of his own. Together in...

In this special episode produced in partnership with Scott Labs, we focus on beer spoilers and how to protect your beer from them. Today’s rapid growth in low- and no-alcohol craft beer and beverages presents quite a challenge for brewers because alcohol itself is one of the best ways to prevent microorganisms from turning the beautiful beverage you crafted into something less delicious or less he...

Kyle Gregorash of Madison, Wisconsin’s Young Blood didn’t initially set out to build a brewery around fruit beer, but over the past six years he’s worked tirelessly to perfect it and solve that intractable brewing problem—how can you make something that’s sweet and crowd-pleasing but that finishes with a snap and encourages the next sip? And how do you do that when brewers’ favorite tool—hop bitte...

For a brewery with a well-loved flagship brand, changing the recipe is fraught with opportunities for failure. Mess up a beloved beer, and customers will let you know that you blew it, but make it better (or give it more longevity in the package), and you’ll likely hear nothing at all. Flagstaff, Arizona’s Mother Road Brewing rose to the occasion recently, redesigning their Tower Station IPA with...

"Pacific Northwest Coast IPA" might not be a thing, but it's a jumping off point for this week's panel discussion on IPA featuring three noted and award-winning brewers—Whitney Burnside of Grand Fir (Portland, Oregon), Chris Baum of Varietal (Sunnyside, Washington), and Ben Edmunds of Breakside (Portland and Milwaukie, Oregon)—recorded live at our Brewer's Retreat in Yakima, Washington. Through th...

This week’s episode is another panel discussion recorded live at our Brewers Retreat in the hop country of Yakima, Washington, and features three brewers with decided experience brewing fresh hop beers—Kevin Smith of Bale Breaker, Zach Turner of Single Hill, and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River. Through this ranging conversation, the three discuss celebrating the current harvest through the raw fla...

Episode 500! It feels surreal to achieve this latest milestone, but in this episode, recorded live at our Brewer's Retreat at Bale Breaker in Yakima, Washington, we talk hazy IPA with three luminaries in the category: Henry Nguyen of Monkish, Sam Zermeño of Brujos, and Kelsey McNair of North Park. Along the way, we discuss everything you'd expect us to discuss: dry hopping at warm temperatures, ma...

Nashua, New Hampshire’s Spyglass may not have a unique origin story—engineer friends with a knack for homebrewing started the brewery to focus on the styles they were tired of driving and trading for—but after honing their processes and recipes for the past eight years, and growing into a 20 bbl brewhouse and large-capacity taproom, they’ve grown more comfortable tackling technical brewing problem...

Andrew Sabatine of Around the Horn (Groveland, CA) may have learned much of his trade at breweries on the hazier and more fruit-driven side of the brewing equation, but serving a small mountain town with a huge tourist population means making all the beers that people might want to enjoy. Lagers play an ever-growing role in that product mix, but Sabatine doesn’t fully throw out the rulebook when c...

Over the past 30 years, the Glenwood Canyon Brewpub has earned an impressive 18 Great American Beer Festival and eight World Beer Cup medals. Mostly recently, there have been back-to-back GABF golds in festbier and a 2024 silver in helles, plus a score of 99 for that same helles from our blind panel at Craft Beer & Brewing—so, they’re showing no sign of letting up. Brewing lager on a 10-barrel...

While UPP Liquids may be their latest home, Tonya Cornett and Ian Larkin have been brewing together, then apart, then together again, across three different breweries over the past decade and a half. Over that time, they’ve won countless medals in competitions large and small—including Cornett’s prestigious Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Craft Brewing—and they continue that tradition of...

Many of the historic brewing yeasts we have today are products of their time and place. The ingredients brewers used with them, the tanks they fermented in, and the styles they made have all played a role in how that yeast grew and hybridized itself over hundreds or thousands of generations. Today, however, brewers typically brew into tanks far different than those of a hundred years ago. The hops...

With 19 Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup medals, an Alpha King win, and nine beers scored 95-plus by Craft Beer & Brewing—including two in our upcoming Fall issue— Sunriver has become a medal-winning powerhouse of a production brewery and brewpub. But while their hop-forward offerings get much of the attention—and a fair amount of time in this podcast episode—they’re equally ade...

In both 2024 and 2025, Jake Watt, head brewer at Trap Door in Washougal, Washington, took home gold medals in the GABF fresh hop category for his beer, Fresher Than Fresh. Interestingly, the recipes for each of those beers was quite different—and the recipe for the 2026 edition that he’ll submit this year will see more changes as well. Fresh-hopped beers are a moving target, ephemeral in nature, a...

The vast majority of brewers we talk to for this podcast—and for the magazine—start out as homebrewers. And anyone who’s listened to more than a few episodes knows how common it is to hear about how an influential brewer’s journey started with a simple extract-based brewing kit. Making it easy for people to brew and enjoy beer at home is an important part of the craft-beer story—that’s where the s...

Over the past two decades, the amount of hops sitting in cold-storage warehouses has more than doubled . While the volume of those stocks is inching back down from its peak in 2022—and while it’s important that the industry has a buffer against climate challenges and bad harvests—a fundamental question remains: Just how useful are those hops two, three, or four years after harvest? Through a serie...

Mike Stein and Pete Jones are brewing buffs and historians based in the Washington, D.C., area, and the intersection of those two interests has proven to be fertile ground over the past decade. Through their consultancy Lost Lagers and Extinct Ales , they’ve done the research and helped surface recipes and process information about brewing in the founding years of the United States—for example, th...

For Nick Tedeschi, a great beer evokes memories, and the beer lineup at any of the Post’s five Colorado locations is designed to feel familiar, whether you’ve ordered one there or not. Like the food and the environment, the intention is comfort, with beers designed to tuck into the experience rather than define it. But that doesn’t mean they can’t stand out on their own, and the World Beer Cup and...

When Wynn Whisenhunt launched Wondrous in the compact Bay Area town of Emeryville, California—wedged between more well-known neighbors Oakland and Berkeley—he brought with him big ideas about what it would take to make great beer. After growing up around well-known homebrewers like Mike “Tasty” McDole and Jamil Zainasheff, studying brewing in the Siebel-Doemens program, and working at breweries of...

For brewing industry veterans Ben Allgood and Brady Jones, the chance to open their own brewery in Sacramento, California— Geisthaus —meant endless possibility, but they chose to intentionally limit themselves to lagers. Despite that self-imposed restriction, they’re finding space for a range of creative expressions within the familiar worlds of pilsner and helles—but they’re also not shying away...

In this special episode, we talk about efficiency and managing assets in your brewery, as well as proactive and preventive approaches that extend the lifespan of your equipment and reduce equipment downtime. There’s more data available to you than ever before, but understanding how to use that data to make smart decisions and anticipate issues before they happen can save you money and avoid costly...

“There can be a stand-offishness of, ‘These are complex flavors, you may not be ready for this,’” says Mike Schallau of Chicago’s Is/Was . “And I’m like, ‘Why?’ You can make those things, but if that’s everything you make, that’s why you don’t get to make that much saison, I guess. I want people to drink the beers, and I want them to drink a good amount of them.” In a post-pandemic era when craft...

To some, Chicago’s Suncatcher must appear to be a typical neighborhood brewery. The bar is classic Midwest, salvaged from a midcentury tavern. The patio is expansive and inviting, thanks to the plant nursery next door. And the beers come without clever names—just the style, often defined by color, spelled out in plastic letters pressed into the sign board. But when you consider that it was the cof...

One of the key features of craft beer today, that doesn’t get enough press, is just how much information brewers have at their fingertips. While companies that serve the industry test and provide information about the performance of their products to brewer customers, it’s the two-way flow of information back from brewers to those companies that supercharges the learning cycle and helps everyone m...

Chicago’s Hopewell has, from its start, charted a different aesthetic and stylistic path than many of its contemporaries. In this episode, cofounder Stephen Bossu shares their approach to building a compelling array of lower-ABV beers designed around the times in which one might drink them. From the eight-ounce stubby can of Lil’ Buddy—it makes a perfect shift beer—to Pocha, the Korean-style lager...