Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

For San Diego’s AleSmith , funky Belgian-style mixed-culture beers aged on whole fruit may not be impactful to the bottom line. As brewers, however, they love the process challenge of these multi-phase beers as well as the unique flavors made possible by complex fermentations and highest-quality fruit. Late last year, our blind panel at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® rated their Handgeplukt K...

From the very earliest days of what we now know as craft beer, flavor has been a defining factor and a guiding mantra for brewers casting themselves against the monolith of light macro lager that dominated American brewing for so many decades. If you track it back, fruits and spices have been ingredients in beer for as long as beer has been made, so this modern era of craft brewing is more redisco...

If you’ve read any mainstream news coverage of craft beer over the past year, it’s likely you’ve seen something about the “death” of craft beer. The apocalyptic tones and pearl-clutching over the industry’s recent economic woes mostly lack context, often painting a complex and diverse industry with a single brush—yet the stories continue. In his recent State of the Industry presentation at the Cra...

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

Matt Topping of COVA Brewing in Norfolk, Virginia, has a knack for winning medals with his fruit beers—but they aren’t what you think. From the full fruit refermentation to the light herbal spicing, he’s found an equation that’s equally successful on draft in the taproom and on the final judging table at the World Beer Cup. From slightly higher pH to low mash temps for fermentable wort, and from f...

The IPA gang is back together with some special guests for this star-studded episode recorded in front of a live audience of brewers at Union Transfer in Philadelphia. Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River , Kelsey McNair of North Park , and Evan Price of Green Cheek are joined by Ben Edmunds of Breakside and Oregon State University’s Tom Shellhammer —this year’s recipient of the Brewers Association Rec...

The founders of South New Jersey’s Wander Back Beerworks are no strangers to the beer world, but the industry veterans had modest expectations for the young project—barely two years old—when they submitted entries to the 2026 World Beer Cup. Winning a medal in one of the top-five categories, Munich-Style Helles, with over 150 entries, would be an uphill battle. But as the awards were announced, th...

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

Scotty Hargrave didn’t invent extra-pale ale—he reinvented it, giving the style the definition it had lacked before. Tinkering away on his homebrew kit in New South Wales, he developed the recipe for what would become Balter XPA—a beer that took off and popularized what has arguably become Australia’s signature beer style. It’s also a beer that also has inspired certain American brewers, including...

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

Ryan Allen of Soul & Spirits in Memphis loves brewing traditional lager—but when it comes to turning heads at big events like the Great American Beer Festival, he’s not afraid of putting that methodical approach to work on projects that other brewers might view as crazy. Barbecue sauce–flavored beer? Yes. Beer with the taste and consistency of Southern gravy? Check. Barrel-aged stout that tast...

This special episode of the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Encompass Technologies , and explores how breweries are using data to create savvier approaches to distribution and growth. It’s no secret that it’s become harder to sell beer over the past few years, with two consecutive years where brewery closures have outpaced openings. Distributors are far less bullish on craft beer tha...

Chris O’Connor, VP of brewing operations at Prost in Northglenn, Colorado, has built a career on being a process nerd. He spent a decade in engineering for the pharmaceutical industry before switching gears and following his passion for brewing. His analytical approach to colllecting data, testing, and questioning conventional logic is a big part of what drives quality at Prost’s award-winning lag...

This special episode of the podcast focuses on adjusting the thiol dial and is brought to you in partnership with the innovative and industry-leading team at Berkeley Yeast. They’ve been on the forefront of fermentation-related science since their inception, and whether it’s Fresh strains that keep diacetyl ultra-low, NA strains that make nonalcoholic beer that actually tastes like beer, Flavor-se...

Living Waters in Nashville, Tennessee, is a full-service coffee house as well as brewery, and its affinity for strong, well-articulated flavor runs through all the beverages they produce and serve. Recently, the brewery’s Barrel-Aged Dyson Sphere (Construct IV) scored a 97 in Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® —garnering the highest score in the category—so, naturally, we wanted to know more. Tha...

Will Walter grew up in a military family, joining the Marines after college just as his father had. But the pull of brewing proved strong, and in 2022 he and two partners—also former military officers—opened Corn Coast in a small industrial park in Lincoln, Nebraska. That same year, they won a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their hazy imperial IPA, Citra Soaker—and they follo...

Bobby Kros hates interviews as much as he loves brewing beer, and while the cofounder of the La Vista, Nebraska, brewery may occasionally search for words to describe what he’s doing, the beers he makes are perfectible capable of speaking for themselves. And speak they have, winning Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® Best in Beer trophies in 2021, 2024, and 2025, in three wildly divergent styles....

Dan Brouillette has always worked in creative fields—he was a professional photographer before launching Lumen in the waning days of the pandemic—but he’s always been particularly attracted to the technical aspects of creation. Like every IPA-focused brewer, he’s on a neverending search for the most expressive, layered, and interesting hops. But he’s also found that the information upon which many...

Beer collaborations are a particularly effective way for brewers to share and learn, but what if you could take that experience and share it with a wider audience? That's the idea behind this episode, recorded shortly after the brew day wrapped on a forthcoming collab brewed by Kelly McKnight at the pilot brewery of New Belgium in Fort Collins, Colorado, along with Ashleigh Carter of Denver’s Bier...

In this episode, produced in partnership with RahrBSG , we’re taking a close look at process aids in the brewhouse and cellar, from anti-foaming agents and finings to enzymes and more. Whether you’re trying to keep more foam in your beer (rather than lose it while brewing and cellaring), fill tanks with more beer and less headspace (by limiting foam height within tanks), or clarify beer while redu...

Last week, we hosted a series of three webinars focused on different aspects of nonalcoholic brewing. In this episode of the podcast, we share an excerpt from the first session—focused on formulation—featuring Notch founder Chris Lohring, Halfway Crooks cofounder Shawn Cooper, and Abstrax Hops technical sales manager Craig Thomas. Through the course of the conversation, the trio discuss malt choic...

Generally speaking, there’s some correlation between brewery scale and lager quality—and while there are plenty of exceptions to that rule, there’s no denying that honing lagers into the best versions of themselves requires repetition, time, and access to the best ingredients. Over the past few years, however, an ever-increasing number of very small breweries have found success in major competitio...

Through his decades of work in the brewing industry, many spent in R&D and quality at Sierra Nevada , Tom Nielsen has played a critical role in getting craft beer a seat at the broader brewing table. While industry advocacy groups were once dominated by macro brewers pursuing their own narrow goals, Nielsen (and a cohort of craft contemporaries) helped change the bigger conversation, connect i...

Fritz Family founder Cory Buenning brewed from the mid-90’s through the mid 20-teens for Wyoming craft beer pioneers Snake River, but the itch to do his own thing was strong, and after returning to Colorado after a few years in Kentucky, he leased the old Bootstrap brewery in Niwot, installed a new brewhouse and cellar, and got to work making the beers he wanted to make—a variety of primarily lage...