Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

For Madison, Wisconsin-based entrepreneur/blender/iconoclast Levi Funk, the apparent conflict in philosophies between his two brands isn’t a conflict at all. While his blendery and passion project, Funk Factory Gueuzeria , is focused exclusively on spontaneously fermented and wild ales, the more recent launch of his Untitled Art brand is a radical departure, with its focus on cutting-edge current...

"I’ve become a traditionalist. I’m more interested in going backwards,” says Mike Karnowski, founder of Zebulon Artisan Ales . “As I see what craft beer is turning into, I’m turning around and running back to the 1800s.” Karnowski loves exploring the rich history of brewing, working together with brewing historian Ron Pattinson to re-create recipes from the forgotten brew logs of the past three ce...

For Jake Gardner, Head Brewer of Westbound & Down (Idaho Springs, Colorado), brewing means defining goals for a beer and mapping out the way to achieve those goals, naming the challenges and articulating solutions at each step of the process. Proceeding in a thoroughly planned and detailed manner brings clarity to the process, and the methodical approach has served Gardner well over his past d...

Grains of Wrath’s Mike Hunsaker has never been afraid to work for his success, and that journey of working and learning has led him to brewing gigs from Virginia to Cleveland and Oregon. Today, as Cofounder and Head Brewer for Grains of Wrath (Vancouver, Washington), he’s focused not just on commercial success, but also on making beers that his peers respect. “I’m happy with making a little less m...

For Matt Riggs, the drive to open a brewery on their family farm in central Illinois was driven by two passions—a desire to sustain the farm into future generations by adding value to their crops beyond typical commodity pricing, and a love of the German brewing tradition fostered by years spent there studying brewing (and brewing professionally). As farmers, the Riggs family has a special love fo...

Chris Colby has been writing about brewing process and techniques for the better part of two decades. His new book from Brewers Publications, How to Make Hard Seltzer , sheds light on the rapidly evolving practice of making this fermented sparkling beverage. More akin to meadmaking than brewing, the process of making hard seltzer will be familiar to most brewers, but with notable key differences t...

Wolves and People founder Christian DeBenedetti wrote about beer for years as a journalist before taking the leap and founding the brewery on the family farm where he grew up in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. While the brewery is small—they produced fewer than 400 barrels of beer in 2019—they’ve focused on beers that reflect place from the very start. One of their most active focuses is yeast, and th...

For KC Bier Company Founder Steve Holle and Head Brewer Karlton Graham, the goal is to make lagers that just “taste right.” As students who’ve studied in German brewing programs and who’ve traveled widely through the country tasting beers and picking brewers’ brains, they set about to create that experience of German beer for their hometown market in Kansas City. Their precision and devotion has w...

Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® contributor Stan Hieronymus, author of For the Love of Hops and Brewing Local, joins the podcast for an in-depth look at the hop industry, trends in hop use, new hops entering the commercial market, and more. Along the way, he covers: Hop agricultural trends past and present, and their impact on the overall hop market Lessons from the hop crash of 2007-08 New and...

Chris Tropeano, known to friends as "Tropes," dislikes more of his beer than he likes. It's not that it's not good beer, but as the head brewer for Resident Culture , he can't not focus on the small things that he should have done better. There are always things to improve, or tweaks that could produce a more characterful or cohesive beer. But it's that constant focus on improvement that has helpe...

The story of malt—from seed to field and harvesting, through the malting and kilning process, and into the tuns of brewers—is far more rich and varied than one might expect when looking at a bag of grain. In this episode, the fifth generation head of family-owned Simpsons Malt, Richard Simpson, sheds light on that story, discussing malt's life cycle in depth. From the agronomic development of barl...

“When we opened, everyone said ‘You can’t open a brewery with three beers,’” says Hogshead founder Stephen Kirby. “And I think the answer to that is ‘You can if they’re good ones.’ I think the truth’s out—I only make three beers. You’ve got guys who want to make everything. I make bitter, I make porter, I make mild.” That approach of doing only a few things but with an obsessive focus is highly un...

Connor Casey and Tim Sciascia of San Francisco’s Cellarmaker Brewing have a well-earned reputation among peers as savants when it comes to hops. From the colorful descriptive language they’ve developed for describing hop attributes, to the tightly iterated processes around blending hops lots, they’ve developed ideas and techniques around hops use that has influenced the way other brewers now brew....

Wilmington, North Carolina’s New Anthem Beer Project has become a force in the world of hazy IPA through their creative and meticulous approach to ingredient quality and process integrity. In this episode, Aaron Skiles breaks down their approach, from ingredient sourcing and evaluation, working with vendors to improve ingredient quality and pinpoint ideal hops lots, building a muscle memory in the...

Drekker Brewing in Fargo, North Dakota, has grabbed the attention of enthusiasts across the country with funky, smoothie-thick, highly fruited beers such as their Chonk and Braaaaaaaains series. Here, Mark Bjornstad, the brewery's president and cofounder—not to mention, part-time nurse anesthetist—talks about building maximum character and body into those beers while maintaining balance via acidit...

The way Chris Harris caught the brewing bug will be familiar to many: It all started with a Mr. Beer kit. From there it evolved into a 20-gallon garage nanobrewery, and later the 2.5-barrel system he fires up twice a week for his neighborhood taproom, where he also pours the beers. At Black Frog , Harris is a one-man show, and at times he sounds like an embodiment of the craft ethos. He's not foll...

While technically considered wine, mead has long had a stronger affinity with the world of beer and home brewing than it has with the wine world, and the growth of flavor-forward ingredient-laden meads has in many ways mirrored the rise of similarly-designed craft beers. Superstition Meadery, in Prescott, Arizona, has been one of the leaders in that new-school approach, stretching the definition o...

Making a great low-ABV, low-calorie beer is a lot more work than just scaling down a larger recipe, so when Bell’s Brewery decided to enter the very hot low-calorie category with a lighter riff on their popular Two Hearted Ale IPA, Brewing Innovation Manager Andy Farrell knew he had his work cut out for him. In this conversation, he leads with a general discussion of the hops selection and validat...

Dickens’ opening paragraph for “A Tale of Two Cities” provides an appropriate metaphor for the past few years of Melvin Brewing’s existence—best and worst, wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, light and darkness, despair and hope. The highs have been sky-high, with eight GABF medals (six gold), four World Beer Cup medals (two gold), and two first- and one second-place finish in the Alph...

It’s one thing to make great beer, it’s another thing to do it consistently, and it’s another thing entirely to maintain such a high standard for three decades. But take a look at Odell Brewing’s medal history at the Great American Beer Festival, and one thing is apparent—they started strong, and never let off the gas. From their first medal in 1991 (their second year of business) through their mo...

Societe’s Doug Constantiner wants to make beer you can drink a lot of. Not excessively, of course, but consistently. “The holy grail of beer is not the beer that there’s a hundred bottles of, and every 25 bottles were aged in a different barrel,” he says. “The holy grail of beer is the beer that you can drink every single day. That you can buy on the shelf at the store. And you can have a couple o...

The conversation about hazy, New England-style IPAs invariably includes Portland, Maine’s Bissell Brothers Brewery . From the early days of the nascent style, they embraced the possibility of expressive yeast, and helped cement the style’s place in the canon of modern craft beer. But unlike other contemporaries, they’ve shied away from the model of brewing a nonstop stream of new releases, and hav...

This isn’t the first time in his 26 years in the craft beer industry that Eric Wallace, Cofounder and President of Left Hand Brewing Co. and former Chairman of the Brewers Association Board of Directors, has had to deal with adverse business conditions. The late 90’s and early 00’s were a period of net contraction for craft beer, as tepid consumer reaction failed to deliver the growth that many ov...

Hazy IPA is all the rage, but what’s actually going on when brewers pile many pounds per gallon of dry hops into a tank still in active fermentation? It’s one thing with a homebrew-scale fermenter to take a flyer and do it, and it’s riskier to do it in a typical craft brewery’s 15-, 30-, or even 60-bbl fermenter. But what happens when you fill a 2000 hectoliter (1700 bbl) fermenter with hazy wort...

You’d have to be confident, or crazy, to open a brewery focusing on New England IPA right smack dab in the turbid heartland of the style, but that’s what Dino Funari, and his partners Peter Kiley, Joshua Sherman, and Richard DiBona, did in early 2019. The brewery got its start, as many do, in the partners’ homebrewing, and they built a reputation over years of give and take, where friends (and fri...