Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

“Be your authentic self, and they will come to you,” says Burning Beard cofounder Jeff Wiederkehr. It’s not about marketing calculus or cynically appealing to here-today, gone-tomorrow hype chasers. Instead, Burning Beard has built a rabid fan base by remaining small and embracing fun, all while quietly working in the brewhouse to refine, tweak, and experiment. From spontaneous coolship beers to t...

For Collin Castore and Colin Vent of Seventh Son Brewing in Columbus, Ohio, the focus has always been on quality and constant improvement over hype. Eight years on, the core brands they launched with are still strong performers for the brewery. They haven’t locked in those beers and let them languish over time. Instead, they’re constantly looking for small ways to increase quality, so that they ta...

Wolf’s Ridge Brewing started as a cramped basement brewpub setup below one of the best-regarded restaurants in Columbus, Ohio. On Chris Davison’s watch since 2014, the brewery grew to add a 30-barrel production brewhouse. Wolf’s Ridge notched its first Great American Beer Festival medal in 2019 with a silver medal for Daybreak, a cream ale with coffee and vanilla—its golden appearance failing to p...

Alstadt Brewery is a remarkable creation—a gleaming brewery, taproom, restaurant, and event space designed in the form of a European-style chateau, plopped down in the German-American community of Fredericksburg, Texas, amidst wineries and farms. No expense was spared, and it’s quite possibly the most costly build-out of a 12,000-barrel-per-year brewery in the recent history of brewing. It could b...

In today’s brewing world, big and bold flavors tend to attract drinkers with an an endless thirt for what’s next. But for Austin’s St. Elmo Brewing, , those aren’t the beers that are going to get people coming back week after week to enjoy a sunny afternoon in their beer garden. Instead, they focus on optimizing quality that whispers rather than screams, making beers that don’t need to tell you ho...

Great lagers require commitment and focus, and it’s no surprise that the Austin Beer Garden Brewery has been so successful at making them—with three-plus decades of lager-brewing experience between them, cofounders Brian “Swifty” Peters and Amos Lowe have put in the time and learned through brewing thousands of batches of pils, helles, and more. The accolades they’ve accumulated together under the...

Kevin Davey doesn’t understand why Wayfinder’s “Cold IPA” has gone viral in brewing circles. This proponent of genre bending approaches to brewing that respect tradition but recombine elements of tradition in curious ways has been vocal in the past about what they’re doing—making “IPA” in a way that respects the flavor while twisting the technique. They haven’t been hiding anything, so why the hub...

“If it’s a pain in the ass, we usually do it,” says Live Oak head brewer Dusan Kwiatkowski. Brewing the hard way has been a core tenet of the brewery since their start in the mid ’90s. While most breweries launched around the time focused on ales (to distinguish themselves from the “macro” beer of the time), Live Oak committed to craft lager from its earliest days. Its Czech-inspired pale lager, P...

It’s been a busy and momentous year for Marcus Baskerville. The co-owner and head brewer of San Antonio’s Weathered Souls Brewing made national news with his Black Is Beautiful initiative in 2020. To date, more than 1,200 breweries in all 50 states and 22 countries have patrticipated in the open-source collaboration to raise funds and awareness for diversity and racial justice. However, well befor...

For Zack Adams of Connecticut’s Fox Farm Brewery , the reward in brewing is found in working and reworking a smaller lineup of beers, over and over again, until he gets them just right. While they make and love IPAs, they’ve focused their other brewing energy on simple and small beers—think German-style pilsner, Kölsch, English-style dark mild, and Belgian-inspired mixed culture farmhouse beers. T...

For many brewers, winning a medal at the Great American Beer Festival or World Beer Cup is a career-defining accomplishment. Winning two or three establishes a reputation. Win a dozen and it’s a legacy. Yet Matt Brynildson, the brewmaster and creative force behind so many now-classic Firestone Walker beers, counts more than 90 such medals over his brewing career, now stretching into its third deca...

Jonathan Moxey cut his teeth at St. Louis craft trailblazer Perennial Artisan Ales before leaving in 2018 to head the brewing program at Rockwell Beer . Over the years, he's developed a love for finely tuned mixed-fermentation, wood aging, session beer, and lager—all things for which he’s developed different but equally compelling takes in his new digs. In this episode, Moxey discusses: Designing...

For Fair Isle Brewing in Seattle, Washington, the founding concept was simple—focus on a narrow niche of the beer world, and do it really, really well. It’s one thing to state an audacious goal, and it’s another to actually deliver on it, but the tightly executed saisons they’ve produced over the past year exude a confidence and class that belie their young age. In this episode of the podcast, cof...

If you’ve had a beer from Placentia, California’s The Bruery at a festival or in their taproom over the past half-decade, there’s a good chance that Andrew Bell designed it or brewed it. The longtime innovation brewer has developed a reputation amongst industry peers as one who has tried just about anything that can be legally added to beer—from powdered cream cheese to obscure spices and fruit in...

Reuben’s Brews’ Adam Robbings has always been a thoughtful and mission-driven brewer, who focuses as much on building a business that delivers on the promise of “craft” as he does on compelling beers that fit within the craft category. That approach to brewing has been a successful one, with GABF and FOBAB medals and a Craft Beer & Brewing Beer of the Year earned all in the space of the past y...

Anyone can put beer in a barrel, but brewing compelling (and award-winning) barrel-aged beers requires a more conscious approach to design, brewing, and fermentation. Verboten ’s Josh Grenz knows a thing or two about the subject, having won bronze at both GABF and the World Beer Cup, as well as 2018 and 2020 golds at the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers (FOBAB), for three separate barrel-aged beers....

When approached with creativity, passion, and clarity of purpose, any beer style can be great. Quick sours—in the hands of Urban Artifact’s Bret Kollman Baker—are an object lesson in this intense approach, which transcends style basics to achieve a high level of sophistication and nuance. Urban Artifact only make sour beer, and that singular approach means they have no choice but to make them well...

Shawn Johnson of Birds Fly South dreams about brewing. In fact, their solera system for fermenting farmhouse beers came to him one night in a vision of sorts—as Jolly Pumpkin’s Ron Jeffries appeared in a dream with a command to “keep the beer moving.” Funk is always on Johnson’s mind, awake or asleep, and five years in, the brewery continues to adhere to their mantra of “Funk First!” In this episo...

As an attorney who, earlier in her career, worked for the US federal government's Small Business Administration, Denizens Brewing cofounder and Chief Brand Officer Julie Verratti has a working knowledge of mechanisms of government that brewery owners and operators everywhere can learn from as they chart a course through this difficult and heartbreaking second wave of COVID. In this special episode...

For Yvan de Baets of Brasserie de la Senne, what’s old is new again. All brewing styles shift and develop over time, as tastes change and things come into and fall out of fashion. But for this student of Belgian brewing history, the lack of hops in contemporary Belgian beers was a stylistic travesty that he needed to remedy. Enter Brasserie de la Senne, which—when it officially opened in Brussels...

Seattle’s Fremont Brewing is known for fresh hop beers, and over the past decade they’ve engaged in a level of problem solving (on both the logistical and technical sides) that is relatively unparalleled. What started as a small organic experiment with a well-established hop farm has turned into a yearly logistical dance, as harvesters, trucks, and brew staff work in concert to pick hops at the ri...

Brick West head brewer Sam Milne is fanatical about process and technique, and it’s this love of fine tuning small details that stoked his love of brewing lagers years ago. After moving up the ranks at Kulshan Brewing in Bellingham, Washington, he received a full scholarship from the Glen Hay Falconer Foundation to study at the World Academy of Brewing at the Siebel Institute (Chicago) and Doemans...

In the second of our two-episode Best in Beer podcast extravaganza, Jamie and Joe talk with beer writers Kate Bernot, Samer Khudairi, Stan Hieronymus, and Alex Kidd about their top ten beers of 2020, trends in brewing, impacts of COVID-19 on the beer world, other outstanding breweries, and more. From their outposts in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Missoula, Montana, these respected...

2020 was a challenging year for trying new beer, but like everyone has done over the past eight months of shutdowns and socially distancing, we persevered. We were able to taste thousands of beers over the past year at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® , between our blind-panel reviews, those sent to us to consider for general coverage, those tasted at various festivals (remember festivals? Yes,...

For Kevin Stafford, Head Brewer and Cofounder of New York’s Finback Brewery, exploration and creative expression has always been the brewery’s goal, as they wholeheartedly embrace the new. But there’s a certain cohesiveness to the range of their experimentation that grounds it. They’re not purists and don’t subscribe to the artificial limitations imposed by style—what matters is that it tastes goo...