Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

The best beer isn’t brewed in a vacuum—it’s brewed with your guests in mind. Every pour, every seasonal release, every new recipe starts with one question: What do people actually want to drink? In this episode, we dive into how breweries are using real taproom data to answer that question—and brew what sells. From tracking style velocity to spotting daypart trends, our guests break down how they...

Hemp-derived THC products, including beverages, have exploded on the market in recent years as producers take advantage of a federal legal loophole that leaves the products legal—or at least not-illegal —in many states. Much of this nascent beverage market is focused on seltzer-style minimalism or sweet, fruit-forward drinks, but Connecticut’s Float House is making the case for beer aroma and flav...

In Whitestown, Indiana, just outside Indianapolis, this small-town lager brewery has made big waves with multiple World Beer Cup golds for its märzen, Follow the Lederhosen—not to mention a WBC silver for its pale Skool House Bock, knockout scores from Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® judges, and five GABF medals for various lagers. However, Moontown’s success is a story of working within the c...

Portland, Oregon’s proximity to hop country gives its brewers an enviable perspective on hop flavors, aromas, evolving technologies, and seasonal expressions, and the brewers at Ruse don’t take that for granted. When developing recipes, cofounder Shaun Kalis loves pushing the envelope to find additional intensity using the latest flowable hop products, but he also finds punch and flavor density in...

This special low-carbohydrate and low-calorie focused episode of the podcast is brought to you interruption-free by the yeast and fermentation specialists at White Labs. White labs has been on the forefront of innovation in the fermentation space for many, many years and brewers around the world depend on their yeast and related brewing products to brew so many beloved beers. Today’s episode focus...

Whitney Burnside built her résumé at some of the best breweries in the Pacific Northwest, so when she and her husband Doug—a celebrated chef—embarked on their post-COVID project of working together on a brewpub they dubbed Grand Fir , the Portland beer world grew excited (we did too—for more, see Kate Bernot’s case study on Grand Fir from our Spring 2024 issue of the Brewing Industry Guide ). Now,...

This week’s interview wasn’t initially intended for the podcast and wasn’t recorded that way (Brewing Industry Guide subscribers read it last month ), but the topics are salient and the audio listenable, so we thought it would be an interesting change of pace. Lester Jones is the VP of Analytics and Chief Economist for the National Beer Wholesalers Association, and has some pretty deep data-driven...

For Jordan Childs, cofounder and head brewer of the U.K.-based brand Mash Gang , you don’t hit the right balance in nonalcoholic beer by nudging a traditional beer recipe one way or another. “The best beers feel like a cohesive collection of a bunch of spiky parts pulling apart from each other,” he says. “The outlier flavors are what make craft beer interesting.” If there’s a method for making non...

It’s no secret that the craft-brewing industry is facing headwinds, and with that comes brewery closures and a flourishing used-equipment market. But as we all know, buying and integrating used equipment doesn’t mean just plug and play: It requires strategic planning, thorough integration, thoughtful modernization, and on-the-fly creative problem solving. If you’re building a new brewery, an expan...

Montreal’s Messorem strikes an urban pose—the old factory building in a gritty industrial zone is covered with graffiti, and looks more likely to hold underground raves than contemporary brew days. But that’s part of the charm that the founders sought out, as the brand makes no claim to appeal to everyone. If you know, you know, and beer drinkers in Quebec (and now around the United States) increa...

There was a time in Boréale’s not-so-distant past when they might have released a new beer every other year. The brewery is one of Quebec’s oldest craft breweries, dating back to the late 1980s, and over its history it has seen waves and trends come and go. But the changing dynamics of craft brewing in the 2010s posed a different kind of challenge that required a new way to approach innovation and...

Episode 420! It’s an auspicious number that we couldn’t let pass without commemorating in some significant way, and our friends at Abstrax have joined us to bring you this partner podcast interruption-free. Abstrax has its roots in the cannabis world but has taken cutting edge tech and developed a number of applications for the brewing world, from their hop-derived varietal-specific Quantum series...

Don’t tell Jean-Phillippe Lalonde of Silo that craft lager is a “new” trend—he’s been brewing small batches for Montreal drinkers for nearly 15 years. Opened two weeks before COVID shutdowns in 2020, Silo is the second manifestation of Lalonde’s brewing vision. Designed with packaging in mind, Silo also includes some thoughtful choices (such as a direct-fire kettle) that are budget-friendly while...

The focus of this spotlight episode is hot-side process improvements that will make your brew day quicker, more reliable, and more consistent. We get into the nitty-gritty of tank jackets, grist hydration, lauter-tun geometry, pressure differentials, kettle heating, and more, with a clear focus on lean manufacturing, reducing variability with Six Sigma DMAIC models, optimizing systems for the chem...

Estate-grown barley, hops, and fruit are the engines that power the beers at Macallen Farm and Brewery , and multigenerational farmer (and brewery founder) Ryan Allen embraces agriculture as a creative tool in his brewing process. Whether it’s heirloom barley varieties grown in intentional ways to optimize flavor profiles, or it’s Cascade hops that he lets hang for extra weeks to develop deeper fr...

Before he took the leap and started his own, BreWskey cofounder Derrick Robertson was a process engineer who helped design breweries. That background was invaluable when building out a brewhouse and cellar in a building that’s a historic landmark in Vieux-Montréal. With multiple spaces and sprawling patios, BreWskey is popular among travelers who drink plenty of pale lager in warmer months—with ma...

This small brewery in Dunham, Quebec, just north of the Vermont border, features a pub, guesthouse, and extensive beer garden that make it the perfect stop-through or weekend destination for those heading south from Montreal or north from the States. But Brasserie Dunham is much more than a waypoint. Over the past 13 years, the brewery has built a reputation for world-class saisons, finding expres...

Few breweries in the 21st century have been as influential as Hill Farmstead on American craft beer. This rural Vermont brewery, built on the family property just outside Greensboro Bend, captured the beer world’s imagination upon opening in 2010, and enthusiasts have flocked there from all corners of the world ever since. Their IPAs helped to change the trajectory of the style, and their saisons—...

At the turn of the 21st century, it wasn’t uncommon for a hop grower focusing on alpha varieties to replant a field every 25 to 50 years. While the plants in the field inevitably contracted viruses, the impact of those viruses on alpha-acid development and overall yield was manageable. In today’s environment, however—with new varieties bred to be high-performance, high-aroma, well-oiled machines—t...

Over the past two years, five beers that Lapel, Indiana’s Pax Verum sent to Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine for review have scored 95 or above. That naturally piqued our interest, so when we planned our Craft Brewers Conference itinerary we made sure to visit the hip outpost an hour north of Indianapolis. Head brewer and co-owner Colt Carpenter cut his teeth working in a homebrew shop before mak...

Parrotdog has been a craft-brewing mainstay in New Zealand for nearly 15 years, and with national distribution and a production brewery and taproom steps from the beach and Wellington’s airport, they reach a broad audience of consumers across a range of styles. While their core line features everything from a classic C-malt IPA to pils with “vivid passion fruit and white-wine notes,” they also con...

In Wellington, New Zealand, the Fork & Brewer has to live up to a reputation, and head brewer Brayden Rawlinson is up for the challenge. Under the leadership of previous head brewer Kelly Ryan (now with Freestyle Hops), the downtown brewpub garnered numerous awards, and the expectations placed on his successor were huge. Yet Rawlinson brings his own style and swagger to the role, alongside a d...

While hop-forward lager may be a relatively new phenomenon in the States, New Zealand brewers have been brewing their own version of pilsner for decades using homegrown hops. Yet threading the needle in a precise style with hops that can have strong notes, such as mineral and diesel, is no small feat. In this episode, Paweł Lewandowski, the award-winning head brewer at Mount in Mount Maunganui, on...

New Zealand is pretty far from everything, so competing on price for commodity bittering hops was never a great strategy for the country’s small number of hops growers. Things were pretty grim in the early 2000s, when fifth-generation farmer Brent McGlashen joined his dad working on the family farm, Mac Hops , just outside the town of Motueka on the north end of South island. But then something my...

Two straight weeks of nothing but doctors on the Craft Beer & Brewing podcast? This week’s episode is another scientific barnburner with the head of R&D for Wellington’s Garage Project. Dr. Peter Bircham has been working in laboratory settings with yeast for many years, but for the past few he’s taken on an additional role beyond the academic, working on everything from building better Gar...