Grit & Grain Podcast

The ghosts were restless, the beer and cider were flowing, and somewhere inside Tacoma’s magnificent Armory, Grit & Grain was operating without adult supervision. Welcome to Boo Five Three, Tacoma Arts Live ‘s wonderfully spooky reinvention of Brew Five Three , where Halloween costumes, haunted brewery booths and the seductive darkness of a smaller, more intimate festival proved th...

We are just over a week away from Halloween! With everyone prepping their costumes, candy shopping, and hanging SO MUCH FAKE SPIDER WEBBING all over their houses, we thought this would be a perfect time to crack a few of our favorite spooky season beers and see what beers pair with all the candy you’ll be eating after your kiddos fall asleep. Who’s making the best Halloween-y beers rig...

Here comes a special one! This week we are joined by prolific beer journalist, author, beer sales rep, and former editor of Beer Advocate Magazine , Ben Keene . After spending the beginning of his beer career on the East Coast writing about breweries, authoring a beer tourism book, and helping to run one of the most popular beer websites and magazines of the 2010s, Ben made his way to Washington t...

It’s time for homebrewing world update!  There are some rumors going around that a few local homebrew supply shops may be nearing their respective finish lines (unless any listeners with a little investment capital and an eagerness to answer beer nerd questions all day have any to say about out it? Hmmm?).  And it is, of course, fresh hop season! For which the Brown’s Point Homebrew Club tends to...

We are rounding the corner to the fresh hop finale of 2026. Some of the year’s best and most anticipated releases are hitting shelves, and Ron just got back from making his own collab fresh hop beers — the perfect time to crack a few cans of our favorites and catch up! While sipping on a few incredible beers from Grains of Wrath , Single Hill , Lumberbeard , and more, Ron fills us in on some of hi...

We’re keeping it Odd for one more week with local beer-fluencer, event organizer, and bartender, Cecelia Grogan! When she’s not serving up your Odd Otter Brewing pints, Cecelia is curating some of the best local beer-focused content you can find on Instagram.  While doing stints at some of our favorite local craft beer spots, she leveled up her understanding of algorithms, trends, and content crea...

We’re keeping it Tacoma this week with a fresh face to the show and one of the newer faces in the local beer industry. Odd Otter Brewing sales rep/general manager/all-around hype machine Max Beckstrom joins us this week to talk everything from his Army days to kitchen management to jumping over to the sales side of the craft beer world — representing Odd Otter all over Western Washington. Th...

This week’s episode will be a little different than usual.  As many of you may know, this has been a complicated few weeks for our friends at E9 Brewing . Since the reveal of some rather unsavory political contributions by members of the ownership team, we’ve heard quite a bit from local politicians, upset community members, and wealthy property owners. But, we haven’t had the opportunity to hear...

Its September!  Which means it’s time for Oktoberfest, right?  We’re pretty sure that’s how that works. … Either way, among all the fresh hops and pumpkin ales gracing the doorway to fall, sits the most historical seasonal style, and we wanted to dedicate an hour to it! This week the team sat down talk all the ins and outs of Oktoberfest .  From where and why it started, to historical...

Kings & Daughters co-founder and brewmaster Kyle Larsen joins Grit & Grain on the eve of his brewery’s fifth-anniversary Tacoma celebration to trace the wonderfully indirect route that eventually became Kings & Daughters. Larsen’s brewing life winds from Full Sail and his formative years at Double Mountain through brewing science at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University , a family move to...

Washington Wild Brewshed Alliance Director Chris Chappell returns to Grit & Grain to explain what happens when the forests, rivers and public lands that make great beer possible suddenly need the beer industry to return the favor. The conversation moves from efforts to sell federal public lands and weaken the Roadless Rule to the nearly 90 breweries and beer businesses using their collective v...

Last weekend, we packed up the cars and made the trek over to Spokane for the amazing Grainmaker Fes t — the annual celebration of specialty malt with more than 50 participating breweries and 25 special collaboration beers on tap. We were lucky to be joined by our best buddies Brian Estes from LINC Malt and Leslie Shore from Cold Stream Malt & Grain for a tag team episode where we talked about...

We made it fam! Two-hundred episodes officially in the book.  We continue our special double-header with Georgetown Brewing Research & Development Brewer Matt Edwards and tagging in for Part 2 is co-founder, Roger Bialous. Georgetown has been in the news lately with the announcement of their brand-new production, packaging, and storage space across from their current state-of-the-art-facility....

It’s crazy to think we are one episode away from 200! To celebrate the occasion, we got together with The Pink Boots Society and Georgetown Brewing , put together a special collab beer, and released it for this special doubleheader episode. Long-time Georgetown brewer and Research and Development Brewer Matt Edwards and Pink Boots Society Seattle Chapter Leader Ali Himmel-Smith came to hang on the...

We are rounding the corner to Episode 200, which is insane! We definitely didn’t want to hit the next milestone without spending a Sunday morning goofing around with our previous co-host and best buddy, Sean Jackson.  We pulled him out of bed, shoved barleywine and lambic in his face for breakfast, and caught up on everything we could squeeze into an episode. Tune in to find out why Sean and Ron w...

This weekend has some of the best annual events we know of — all happening at once! On that list is the insanely popular Lagerhead Festival at No Boat Brewing in Snoqualmie. The 3rd annual... The post Episode 197: It’s Lagerhead Weekend!  appeared first on Grit & Grain Podcast .

We’re back, baby! The team took a week off for the holiday and some travel, and we’re pumped to be back on the mic to catch up on what everyone has been doing. Bethany was off in France fantasizing about how French brasseries clean their draft lines. Doug was crushing every cask ale he could get his hands on in England and Wales. Phaedra bounced around Hood River, reconnecting with old beert...

We know many of our listeners have tried their hand off-flavor tasting .  Whether you’re studying for certification exams or just leveling up your brewing game, off-flavor identification is a must. But many of the options for isolated flavor compounds are prohibitively expensive for many of us.  So, what if there was a better way? This week, Matt sits the crew down for his own off-flavor exp...

This week, we’re on location at Washington Brewers Fest . Held each year smack dab in the middle of Seattle Center , with dozens of Washington breweries and cideries, local food, and all the funk music you can handle.  We scoured the festival floor, found a few familiar faces, and made some new friends. The folks at Capitol Hill’s Outer Planet Brewing joined us for a few minutes to talk about owne...

A little over a year ago, we had the fantastic folks behind Burien’s own Logan Brewing on the podcast to celebrate our amazing collab with them and Lander Coffee for Tacoma Beer Week 2025 .  Since then, they’ve opened a new space, acquired some new toys, and made the leap into beer distribution ( with someone we know! ). Michael and Chris are back this week to fill us in on all the changes they’ve...

The 2026 Firestone Invitational Beerfest was amazing.  Matt, Ron, and Phaedra had all planned to meet up for the festival, but Ron had to rain check this one as he had a staff emergency and hung back to cover the bar, because he is an absolute saint of a business owner.   BUT! with our long-time industry friend Melissa having gone for the first time this year, we wanted to hang out for a beer and...

The World Beer Cup added a “Rice Lager” category for the first time in 2026, and two Northwest breweries promptly earned medals in it — which is pretty amazing. Much like Mexican lager, rice lager, or Japanese rice lager, as some folks call it, seems to remain relatively ill-defined outside of the newly instituted guidelines.  This week, we sat down with a flight of five iterations of this wonderf...

Way back when our episodes were still in the double digits, the stellar brewing talent Mike Hunsaker sat down to tell us about his journey setting up shop in Washington and winning every award in the book brewing at Grains of Wrath . We’ve been long overdue in getting the rest of the Grains of Wrath team behind the mic and thankfully they were in town and made it a point to swing by and hang for a...

Happy Seattle Beer Week! A bunch of amazing brewers and beer folks have converged on Seattle this week to celebrate all things beer.  We took advantage and dragged Michael Messenie down for a quick pod to talk all things cask, English brewing traditions, and recipe tweaking. Michael started Dutchess Ales to bring the balanced, refined English beer he loved to New York, where he lived. It quickly g...

Happy Cinco de Mayo / May the 4th week! Owners and operators of Vice Beer , Michael and Bria Perozzo are in the house! We are flush with Star Wars-themed beers, and we just couldn’t wait to bring the Tournament of Beer Best PNW Breweries champion onto the pod.  Round after round of single-digit victories led Vice to the top spot of Peaks & Pints ‘ 10th iteration of their famous bra...