Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Anchor Brewmaster Tom Riley has been working on steam beer for a long time—38 years, in fact. He started at Anchor in 1984, decades before craft beer was considered a viable career choice, and has watched the entire industry grow up alongside Anchor. He’s a company man, and in 38 years of brewing, this is the only place he’s brewed. Assistant Brewmaster Dane Volek started at Anchor 14 years ago an...

John Harris has been around. From his start at the McMenamins Hillsdale brewpub in 1986 (where they brewed with extract and fermented without temperature control in open-top fermenters), through stints launching Deschutes, the Full Sail pub in Portland, Oregon, and now the past nine years at his own brewery Ecliptic, he’s been eyewitness to a myriad of change in the craft beer world. In this episo...

In this first-ever “Direct Fire” episode of the podcast, listeners from around the globe heat things up with spicy brewing questions for Weldwerks founder Neil Fisher. From IPA to hefeweizen, pastry sour, and stout, every style is fair game as you ask and Neil answers questions around: ideal pH in hoppy beers for aroma and flavor expression achieving pie-crust flavor in kettle sours using vanilla...

Science teacher turns brewer. On paper, it makes sense. But Alesong’s Matt Van Wyk made the career transition long before many in the current generation of brewery owners made similar leaps. With two decades of professional brewing under his belt, Van Wyk has observed, and brewed through, many trends, but the love of barrel-aged beer led him and his partners (including Alesong production director...

Tonya Cornett marks her brewing experience in decades, but the head of R&D for 10 Barrel in Bend, Oregon, isn't resting on any laurels. She’s earned every right to cruise, with many GABF and World Beer Cup medals under her belt—including three at the World Beer Cup earlier this year—but she continues to challenge herself and her team to find new and better ways to express flavor in beer. One o...

Smooj, the heavily-fruited smoothie-like hard seltzer produced by the brewing team at HOMES brewery in Ann Arbor, Michigan, may draw the ire of certain brewing purists, but its approach is captivating consumers across its growing footprint. It flies in the face of conventional logic around hard seltzer, embracing more rather than less—more calories, more flavor, more body. And the novel approach h...

How do you as a brewer identify trends, evaluate their potential resonance with your customers, then develop and deploy your own beers in response? This panel discussion with leading Portland brewers Ben Edmunds of Breakside, James Dugan of Great Notion, and Sam Pecoraro of Von Ebert—recorded at Great Notion as part of our most recent New Brewery Accelerator workshop —explores that very question....

Light lager may not be the style most brewers are passionate about, but it’s one that many people drink. Long dominated by macro brewers and beers lightened by corn and rice adjuncts, it’s a competition category that fewer craft brewers have found success in. But for Andy Hooper, former brewmaster of Seismic Brewing in Santa Rosa, California, the beer style was ripe for craft reinvention. A very t...

Pulpit Rock co-head brewers Bob Slack and Justin Teff have built a reputation for creative “pastry” beers in both the stout and quick sour realms. In this episode, they discuss in depth their process for achieving great results with such adjunct-forward and barrel-aged beers, from managing increased viscosity and extended barrel-aging times, to their focus on ingredient freshness. The conversation...

This roundtable discussion with Allagash, Cantillon, and Russian River kicks off a new series of Tuesday episodes to be released every other week—in different formats, including roundtables and Q&As featuring your questions for the pros. Recorded in the coolship room at Russian River the morning of their Wild Friendship Blend event, the conversation among Rob Tod and Jason Perkins of Allagash,...

Zack Frasher loves hoppy beers about as much as he loves exploring new techniques for maximizing their expression. His past decade and a half of brewing—first as a homebrewer then as a pro—has been marked by research and testing in the hoppy genre, dialing in recipes and processes for clean and tight hop presentation. Over the past year at Slice —in Lincoln, California, just north of Sacramento—th...

Wild Card head brewer Jaega Wise loves breaking down difficult problems with no-nonsense solutions. An early career in chemical engineering gave her the understanding of brewing mechanics that she uses today to hone processes and simplify the brewery’s approach to beer making, yet she remains constantly pragmatic and encouraging. In this episode, she joins the podcast on the occasion of the U.S. r...

The Private Landbrauerei Schönram is one of the most lauded breweries in Germany over the past 15 years, with a tall stack of European Beer Star and World Beer Cup medals to show for its excellence across styles, and for the respect it has earned from peers. Perhaps its most celebrated beers are its Hell—a local staple that accounts for three-fourths of production—and its acclaimed, hop-forward Pi...

Winning medals isn’t everything in brewing, but it sure can help. Seeking out that external validation from a panel of peer judges is often more frustrating than it is rewarding, but that’s by design. It’s hard to win, and it should be. For Ryan and Jacque Fields of Wild Fields Brewhouse, their hyper-focus on improving their odds of winning paid off big at the 2022 World Beer Cup, and the young br...

New Zealand’s population is smaller than the state of Colorado, but country’s exports have had an outsized impact on craft beer over the past decade. From hops such as Nelson Sauvin, Motueka, and Riwaka, to the cutting-edge thiol-optimized Phantasm powder, New Zealand has made undeniable contributions to the flavor evolution of American IPA over the past decade. Jos Ruffell, cofounder of the Welli...

The human brain is an amazing piece of machinery. It’s uniquely adapted to success in the world we live in, and the result of that success is evidenced by the population spread of humans across the planet. Yet one element of the brain that provides a particular evolutionary benefit—the prefrontal cortex—also has a habit of getting in the way of “softer” tasks, such as building social relationships...

Eric Larkin enjoys constraints. Through his brewing career, he’s been drawn to breweries that have set up their own guardrails around the styles of beer they brew—Allagash’s Belgian style focus, or the hazy IPAs of Odd13—and with Cohesion in Denver, he and his wife have fully embraced Czech-style lager. The presentation is top notch, with a focus on foam and a variety of beers and pour styles, but...

Sometimes success comes quickly, and sometimes it’s the result of years and years of working, training, and improving. In the case of Roaring Table , founded by husband-and-wife team Beth May and Lane Fearing northwest of Chicago, it’s a bit of both. Their recent string of successes—including a Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine beer of the year and a World Beer Cup medal—may seem sudden, but Feari...

Brewing isn’t a typical career path for research scientists with doctorate degrees, but for Laura Burns it was a practical way to apply academic learning in a creative environment. After finishing her doctorate, she worked in brewhouses from Tennessee to Chicago before landing at Omega Yeast, where she’s assumed the title of director of research and development. There, she’s helped develop new yea...

Minnesota's Surly Brewing has cultivated a brand image that's bold and in-your-face, but the next chapter of Surly's approach to brewing will be defined by achieving more with less, if head brewer Ben Smith has anything to say about it. From thiol-maximizing yeast in hazy IPAs that achieves big flavor with less hops, to refined and softer bitterness in new West coast IPAs, every assumption about h...

In Rochester, Minnesota, the Forager brewpub that Austin Jevne founded with life and business partner Annie Henderson continues with its mission to provide compelling beer and food to the community. However, Jevne’s Humble Forager brand has set a more far-reaching goal to bring their authentic, grounded approach to flavorful beer to a wider national market. While Forager brews on a seven-barrel sy...

Barrett Tillman’s love affair with yeast started innocently enough—as his small group of homebrewing friends divided up brewday tasks, he arbitrarily chose yeast duty. Little did he know that choice would turn into a passion that would define his brewing career for the past decade. Homebrewing led him to pursue brewing professionally, and over the course of a few years and a few different position...

Passionate people tend to have exacting ideas of how to do things, and Pierre Tilquin is no exception. The founder of Gueuzerie Tilquin has spent more than a decade now buying lambics from classic houses such as 3 Fonteinen, Cantillon, Boon, Lindemans, and Girardin, aging them in his own facility, and finally blending them in carefully considered ratios. A perfect blend isn’t solely based on taste...

Struise Brouwers is scrappy, in the best sense of the word. Small and underfunded from the start, they’ve always made the best of what they have, and figured out no-cost solutions to brewing problems. After all, you can’t spend money you don’t have. Today, the brewery operates with a brewhouse that is as unique as their beers—two mash tuns, with internal vessels and screens that lift and drain the...

Last year, Raf Souvereyns produced virtually no beer. A debilitating and still-mysterious illness kept him largely out of his Bokke blendery and often in the hospital. Now he must live with the condition, without knowing if or when it will strike again. Yet he is back in his blendery, working, upbeat, with a refreshed outlook and plenty of ideas for what he wants to do with his life and his beer....