Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

For Jaron Anderson of Helper Beer, listening to the beer itself, rather than following prescribed rules, is the only way to improve it. He’s well-versed in the theory, but not a slavish adherent to dogma—what matters is the beer itself and how it tastes, so any technique or ingredient that gets you there is worth considering. In 2025, he won GABF gold in the competitive German-style pils category,...

Doug Veliky, now of beverage consulting firm BrightBev , author of the BeerCrunchers newsletter and blog, and the personality behind the Beer Aficionado social media account, has a knack for explaining complex beverage-business goings-on without jargon. Over the years of running first finance and then marketing for Chicago craft brewery Revolution, he developed a keen sense of brand building and m...

De Dochter van de Korenaar is unusual even for Belgium—a country full of brewers who don’t particularly enjoy being hemmed in by style definitions. Founder Ronald Mengerink has a passion for aging beer in barrels, but the expressions take a more vinous, wine-like approach than those more commonly found in North America. And his riff on port-like beer, Tout va Bien, is one that can’t be made commer...

Gert Christiaens loved the beers of Oud Beersel so much that he couldn’t abide the brewery closing in 2003. So, he bought the brewery, learned to brew, and for the past 20 years has focused on preserving the legacy of traditional oude gueuze and kriek. But that mission to preserve doesn’t mean sealing beers in a time capsule. Instead, it involves finding new ways to make these classic styles relev...

In this special year-end episode, we look at the ten most-downloaded episodes of the podcast, share stories behind the conversations, recount personal favorites, and more, with clips from the top ten that illustrate salient points. It’s a look back at the episodes you found most valuable and shared most often, and a crucial big-picture view of brewing today. From biotransformation to decoction str...

Dimitri Staelens spent 15 years directing quality across a range of breweries owned by Duvel Moortgat in Europe and North America. Along the way, he built a deep understanding of ingredients and process across a diverse range of styles and recipes. In 2020, however, he chose to scale down, launching Adept —a small brewery in Winksele, Belgium, attached to a restaurant and meeting space not far fro...

From the corner of the family farm in rural Columbus, Indiana, surrounded by corn fields, 450 North has built a worldwide reputation for intensely flavored fruit beers and supersaturated smoothie sours. Stephen Boardman—now sales director as well as recipe creator and ingredient-sourcing whiz—joins the podcast to share the brewery’s unique perspective on these unapologetically assertive fruit beer...

When President Trump signed the bill to reopen the government on November 12, he also enacted a law that will—unless changed within a year—effectively ban hemp-derived THC beverages and other products nationwide. Virtually overnight, the government had moved to close the book on a broadly popular industry worth an estimated $30 billion—even as adults in many states can, for now, still legally shop...

This week’s episode comes from a live panel discussion on West coast pils recorded a few weeks ago at the Craft Beer & Brewing Brewers Retreat in Asheville, North Carolina, and features Khristopher Johnson of Green Bench, Bob Kunz of Highland Park, and Evan Price of Green Cheek. Over the course of the conversation, these three brewers cover a range of topics, including: the impact of lager yea...

Lager yeast is the focus of this spotlight episode, brought to you interuption-free by Fermentis, the experts in fermentation for more than 160 years. Brewers everywhere depend on Fermentis for yeast that’s consistent, controllable, and high quality—whether you’re brewing an ester-forward Belgian-style beer, your favorite IPA, or a clean lager. In this week’s episode, we focus on brewing with 34/7...

At Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® , we obviously spend a lot of time thinking about beer—talking to brewers and others in the industry, digging into the details of process, and writing about what we learn. Best of all, though, we get to drink beer—and, like it or not, the taste of every drop flashes through these weird brains that have spent an unhealthy amount of time focused on the liquid a...

It’s one of the most anticipated episodes of the year—our annual peek behind the scenes of the Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ™ Best in Beer issue, as editorial director Jamie Bogner and executive editor Joe Stange share perspectives on the beers we’ve named as our best 20 of 2025 —plus, they reveal the results of the annual Readers’ Choice poll. Throughout the year, we taste thousands of beers...

Sheesh! The Establishment (Calgary, Alberta) has built a reputation over the past few years for taking an unconventional, experimental approach to mixed-culture brewing—as well as many other styles—and they’ve brought home numerous awards to prove it. The 2025 World Beer Cup gold medal for Belgian-Style Sour Ale may be the biggest of them all, despite the unabashedly modern approach to the mixed-c...

We recorded this week’s episode live on stage at the Alberta Craft Brewing Convention in Red Deer, Alberta, in early October. The thematic through line is farm-to-glass brewing—something that’s not that hard to do there, since a significant amount of the malt used by North American brewers is grown in the province. Major maltsters such as Canada Malting and Rahr have plants in the province, and so...

Seattle’s Fast Fashion has built a reputation for modern, forward-looking IPAs and hop-focused lagers, and the characterful brewery and taproom in SoDo expresses the eclectic interests and aesthetic taste of founder Matt Storm. It’s a funhouse of sorts—a bit like drinking in a thrift store full of budget mid-century furniture, stocked with kitsch that spans the past six decades. It’s busy and not...

It can be difficult to articulate how to make simple beers extraordinarily well—much comes down to ingredient quality, training and discipline, and the hundreds of small choices a brewer makes throughout the brew day and through fermentation and packaging. At Seattle’s Machine House, founder Bill Arnott will tell you that he doesn’t do anything special, yet the cask ales he brews are favorites of...

The 2024 World Beer Cup was quite a moment for Issaquah, Washington’s Formula. Head brewer Jesse Brown is no stranger to medals, but four in one year at the world’s most prestigious beer competition made a statement. His career as a brewer may look like “Swiss cheese,” with stints in Wyoming, Tennessee, Oregon, and Washington, but it’s hard to poke holes in any of his thoughtfully designed and tho...

Ben Howe’s brewing career reads more like that of a chef than a typical brewer—stints in Denmark, brewing jobs on both the East and West coasts, weeks spent interning at breweries that intrigued him—but one fateful visit to the Zehender brewery in Monchsambach opened his eyes to Franconian lager and inspired a nearly decade-long quest to understand the beer and its mechanisms of flavor. More recen...

What is regenerative farming and what does it have to do with beer? In this episode, presented by Proximity Malt , we tackle that question with experts from each phase of the malt supply chain—farmer, maltster, and brewer. Joining the podcast: Walker Modic, environmental program director at New Belgium and Bell's Derek Heersink, barley farmer and brewery owner Zach Gaines, commercial director at P...

This year marks the 25th birthday of Simcoe, and when Russian River cofounder Vinnie Cilurzo suggested recording an episode of the podcast in Yakima to celebrate it, we weren’t going to say no. Rather than sit around a table, we took to the experimental hop rows at Perrault Farms and recorded while walking the field. The result is a wide-ranging conversation that covers history, business, agricult...

At Craft Coast in Oceanside and San Marcos, California, Blake Masoner is happy if you show up for tacos and stay for a beer. The fairly priced tacos are scratch-made, down to the tortillas themselves, packing loads of flavor into every bite. Fellow San Diego–area brewers refer to them as “The best tacos between here and Tijuana”—but the beer they brew here is anything but an afterthought. Eight me...

Before joining Threes , Josh Penney spent the better part of a decade brewing in Southern California, with nearly half of that time at hoppy-lager innovators Highland Park. Now at the helm of Threes in Brooklyn, he’s taking the knowledge he built in lager fermentation and layering in hops of various formats to create beers that pop from the package and the glass. In this episode, Penney discusses:...

The Untappd Community Awards offer an interesting barometer of consumer excitement around breweries and beers, but for Noble Savage in Glen Cove—east of New York City, on Long Island—landing two beers among the top three hazy IPAs in the United States proved quite an accomplishment. Founder and head brewer Frank Bilello has kept things small, tinkering as he goes and using an unusual creative proc...

Making beer commercially in New York City is so difficult that it all but stopped until the previous decade’s craft-beer boom rekindled the fire. Today, about 40 breweries make beer in the city, but doing so comes with its own set of rules. Beyond the regulatory and logistical hurdles, there’s an underlying creative challenge: NYC is the culinary capital of the United States, and competition for s...

Ben Clayton of Brooklyn’s Test honed his approach to brewing while working in the context of a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City. Today, building a deep, meaningful supply chain for interesting ingredients animates him more than lighting up the beer-trading boards. Accolades have followed, and today he’s finding stories to tell in thoughtfully sourced grain and the novel ways he uses it...