Craft Beer Professionals

As breweries look for new ways to grow, many are exploring opportunities beyond their local audience. Travelers are actively seeking out breweries as part of their journeys, creating an opportunity to connect with new faces and drive additional taproom revenue. In this session, we’ll share insights from working with hundreds of brewery partners across the country to highlight how breweries are usi...

With more high-quality beer available than ever before, great beer alone is no longer enough to stand out. Guests may come for the beer, but they return for how they are treated. This session explores the critical role hospitality plays in shaping guest perception, driving repeat visits, and turning casual visitors into loyal brand advocates. Designed specifically for breweries and taprooms, the t...

In today’s competitive market, simply producing high-quality beer is often no longer enough to secure sustained growth. Many forward-thinking breweries are strategically diversifying their product portfolios, expanding into high-growth categories such as hard cider, spirits, wine, RTDs, can cannabevs. While this expansion opens up exciting new revenue streams, it simultaneously introduces a new se...

What makes a good lager? How do we make a good lager? Join us as we explore the various methods used to craft high-quality lager, breaking down the classic techniques to help you choose the best approach for your best beer. Nathaniel Ferguson is one of the owners of Escarpment Laboratories, A yeast manufacturer in Guelph, Canada, where they focus on teaching about yeast fermentation. Additionally,...

Brewhouse design decisions have long-term consequences. Layout, drainage, flooring, access, and workflow choices made early can either support efficient operations or create daily friction that is expensive to fix later. In this session, we’ll bring together an architect, a flooring specialist, and experienced brewery operators to walk through real-world brewhouse design dos, don’ts, and practical...

As breweries grow, the role of the owner or senior leader shifts. You’re no longer just managing people, you’re managing the people who manage people. And that comes with a whole new set of challenges. This session focuses on how to support, coach, and hold your managers accountable in a way that builds trust, creates consistency, and takes some weight off your shoulders. You’ll hear from brewery...

We can’t wait to share beers and see you in person in Philadelphia. We kick off CBC Week with our Welcome Party on April 20 at Yards Brewing Company. RSVP: https://craftbeerprofessionals.org/philly-rsvp/ In this conversation, we will be joined by several of our event partners to discuss how to best plan for CBC, the importance of in-person events, and how to make it a success. Don't miss tips...

Self-distribution gives breweries the opportunity to take control of their growth, margins, and brand experience. It also comes with unique challenges. BrewMan has helped Breweries across the globe self-distribute successfully. In this presentation we will share a practical, insight-driven advice designed to help breweries build and run an effective self-distribution operation with confidence. Thi...

If you're an established Brewery Owner, Operator, or Investor and find yourself asking either "How do we get profitable?" or "How profitable can we get?" you'll find exactly those answers in this session. With a wide range of different brewery types and sizes, true apples-to-apples comparisons are rare, and many owners end up flying blind, running the business with a fi...

The American Craft Beer Hall of Fame is proud to announce its 2026 group of inductees. This highly anticipated event will celebrate the trailblazers, innovators, and visionaries who have made significant contributions to the craft beer movement in the United States. The American Craft Beer Hall of Fame was established to recognize and celebrate those who have significantly contributed to the evolu...

In our “What’s Going on in…” series, we partner with State Guilds to spotlight current successes, challenges, and trends in their beer communities. There’s so much we can learn from each other, and these conversations are designed to give you valuable insights that can be applied in your own state. Next up: Arizona This conversation features: Andrew Bauman (Arizona Craft Brewers Guild) Mitch Penne...

Join us for a live conversation with Maddison Violet, co owner of Ve Oh Lay Acres Winery and Farm in Canada’s Okanagan region. We will explore her journey from barback to opening a multimillion dollar winery, the tasting room experience her team has built, and how their non alcoholic wine line is driving new growth. Maddison will also share the strategies she uses to grow both personally and profe...

More butts in seats, stronger loyalty, and a clearer picture of who your guests really are. What started as the Charlottesville Ale Trail has evolved into a passport program that helps beer trails move beyond simple maps and into measurable taproom traffic. In this conversation, we’ll walk through how to set up and sustain a passport program that breweries want to participate in and guests are exc...

Marty Nachel has been a familiar name in craft beer for decades as a writer, judge, educator, and someone who has logged visits to more than six hundred breweries. He just released The Beer Story Project, a collection of memories and moments from more than a hundred people who have lived through the rise of American craft beer. The book captures the personalities, crossroads, and behind the scenes...

When brewing, you follow a scientific process. You know what yeast characteristics will yield what flavor profiles, and how to intervene if fermentation isn’t progressing properly. Why should the people side of your business be any different? This session will serve as a crash course in evidence-based, repeatable best practices for selecting employees with the right traits, skills, attitudes, and...

Pilot Project was created to support talented brewers in an industry with exceptionally high barriers to entry. Modeled after the music industry, Pilot helps launch and scale start up breweries by supporting recipe development, production scaling, business operations, marketing, distribution, and more. In this live conversation, Pilot Project co-founder Dan Abel will share how this model came to l...

Starting or maintaining a kitchen in your brewery is challenging...and that's an understatement. But a lot of the data is showing that adding or maintaining food options ( beside a small bag of pretzels) is key to longevity and profitability. But many brewers are finding that instead of being in the brewery business, they are now in the hospitality business and they never thought they would ha...

In a rapidly changing craft beer landscape, many breweries are rediscovering what made this industry thrive in the first place: connection, creativity, and community. This session explores how breweries are adapting to tighter margins, shifting consumer habits, and increased competition by leaning into collaboration rather than competition. Drawing from Brew Ninja’s behind-the-scenes perspective w...

Every brewery has them — the late arrivals, the heated arguments, the performance dips that make you wonder what to do next. In this session, we’ll walk through common “oh no” employee situations and show you how to address them in a fair, consistent way. You’ll also learn simple documentation practices that protect your business from costly legal headaches, without adding piles of paperwork. Bail...

Your brewery has a story to tell; actually, it probably has quite a few of them. Those stories are what hook potential fans and help them and your established followers buy into what makes your brewery unique, but how do you get those stories in front of the people who will connect to them? Maintaining a list of news outlets and reporters to send your press releases about new beers, upcoming event...

Navigating wage-and-hour laws can sometimes feel like running a brewery during Oktoberfest—busy, complex, and full of moving parts. With local, state, and federal rules often foaming over into each other, it’s easy for even the most diligent employers to find themselves with a compliance hangover. As your business grows, whether you’re just tapping your first keg or you’ve been pouring for years,...

Payment processing shouldn’t be a mystery. This session offers a straightforward look at merchant services for taprooms of all sizes. Whether you’re launching your first location or reevaluating your current setup, you’ll learn what to consider when choosing a payment partner that fits your business goals. We’ll cover the basics of how merchant services work, compliant pricing programs, and the im...

Tim Hohl founded Coin Toss Brewing in Oregon City, Oregon in March 2015 and ran it for almost nine years before selling in February 2024. The decision to sell started informally in May 2022 — a mix of burnout, financial pressure, and changing market conditions. After hiring a broker later that year, interest was slow. Tim also reached out directly to other brewery owners in the Northwest and had c...

The process of taking a new product from concept to reality is one of the most difficult in the beer industry. With questions of type, scale, promotion, production, delivery, and sales in constant tension with each other, it can create a paralysis that can cripple the potential of even the most promising innovation. Moreover, in an industry built upon a foundation of new product creation and novel...

Join Matt Giffen, Founder and CEO of Bench Brewing, as he shares how sustainability has been part of their story since day one. Since opening in 2018, Bench has focused on “craft beverages with a conscience,” putting real action behind that idea. They’ve created a zero wastewater footprint with a closed-loop system that reuses every drop to water their hops and support nearby farms, repurposed spe...