Beervana Podcast

In Show 175, we are delighted to be joined by pFriem’s Campbell Morrissy. Campbell is currently the Head Brewer at pFriem, and recently crafted the recipe and formulation for a collaboration pFriem is doing with Jeff. In designing the beer, a pub-strength pilsner, Campbell used a California-grown floor malt. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to have him on the show and dig into malting. It’s a...

In part two of our conversation, we talk to Ben Love and Van Havig about some of the challenges facing breweries as the year nears its end.

Today we join you from the industrial tract in Southeast Portland that Ben Love and Van Havig selected ten years ago when they founded Gigantic Brewing. At the time, they expected it would blend in with its surroundings, and they devoted little attention to the tiny taproom space they called the Champagne Lounge. To their surprise, it has become a success, encouraging them to open a second taproom...

The cold weather seems to come fast. Through October, crisp mornings often give way to sunny afternoons. After Halloween, however, the days grow short and the sun disappears behind gray clouds. Once we fall back after daylight savings end, darkness starts arriving at the end of the workday and the sun makes a slow, sleepy return. Winter is coming, and bringing the cold and wet with it. On today’s...

A few weeks back, Jeff’s editor at Craft Beer & Brewing wrote to explain that the magazine was shifting to its original quarterly format. The reason wasn’t declining revenues, but efficiencies—it’s less expensive and simpler to put out four issues a year than six. That got us thinking: how do magazines work? How has Craft Beer & Brewing survived when so many other magazines folded? How do the inte...

For most of the 20th century, if you wanted to point to an actual American style of beer, you had to face San Francisco. Steam beer, a frontier concoction brewed fast for thirsty gold miners, became a signature of the city. Many breweries made it in the latter half of the 19th century, but they all died out, save one: the Anchor Brewery, which was rescued from bankruptcy in 1965 and helped jump-st...

We join you from the best place on the planet for Show 169—a pub, smack dab in the middle of fresh-hop season. We recorded this show on-site at Portland’s Loyal Legion, which is reliably stocked with these little gems throughout the season. While we sipped on them, we discussed hops, the harvest, and the seasonal, regional delight that are fresh hop ales.

[Warning: raw audio of spotty quality] In this Pod Extra, Jeff interviews legendary London brewer Derek Prentice, beer historian Ron Pattinson, and Goose Island Innovation Brewer Mike Siegel. They teamed up on a special project to recreate a 1960s barley wine made by London's now-defunct Truman brewery--where Derek started brewing in 1968, Double Eagle combines a wood-aged barley wine inoculated w...

It’s hard out there for a brewer. Heat, drought, supply-chain issues, metal shortages, war, and inflation—all these things seem to be conspiring against them. On today’s show we’ll have a look at these headwinds, assess how bad they are, and how soon brewers might see some relief.

Though many Americans may not realize it, Scotland is one of the world’s great old brewing countries. Even if you have heard of 80 shilling ales and wee heavies, however, you may not be familiar with the vat-aging tradition Gareth Young mines at Epochal Ales in Glasgow. Drawing on archival records, Young is bringing attention to beers like stock ale and Glasgow porter. In Show 167, we get on the h...

When Stone Brewing launched in the mid-90s, its aggro “you’re not worthy!” vibe captured the counter-culture zeitgeist of craft brewing. It was able to build a brand on the rising popularity of IPAs—one that took it to Virginia and ultimately Berlin. Yet all that reversed itself in recent years and Stone found itself flailing in a new world that didn’t admire aggro anymore. It got us thinking abou...

If a Portland brewery wants to drive a keg of beer across the river to Vancouver, WA and they have filed the proper paperwork with the state, they’re allowed to. The State of Oregon, however, forbids Washington breweries from doing the same. This rankled Justin Leigh, owner of Dwinell Country Ales in Goldendale, WA. He’s a lawyer, and he was pretty sure that didn’t pass legal muster. A few weeks a...

It has been a while since we did a classic style dissection, but thanks to a listener request, we have a lovely, overlooked tradition to present today: bière de garde, France’s signature style. It has a history dating back to the 19th century, but the current examples look a lot different. In today’s show, we’ll discuss that transformation, what caused it, and what you can expect from this elegant...

Portland has many breweries. Old breweries, new breweries, big breweries, small breweries. But which, among this dense thicket, are the best? For visitors to Portland, that’s an important question, and we’re here to help! This past week, Jeff posted his annual Best Portland Breweries list, and we go through it and discuss the breweries he chose—and whether his choices are correct.

Today's post kicks off Portland Travel Week. To get things started, I’ll offer an overview of the Rose City, a bit of beer-centric history, and some of the key features of the local drinking culture. Craft breweries follow a familiar model, and if you just go from one to the next, you might miss some of the character behind all that steel.

On June 11th, Portland’s English-themed, pro-cask Away Days Brewery hosts a cask ale festival with several regional breweries. As you know, Jeff and I love cask ale and have been promoting it for over a decade—all to little apparent effect. Something changed in the past few years, though, and now several Portland-area breweries have regular cask offerings (we toured a chunk of them on a podcast ex...

Old breweries compact time and preserve it. The hands of old brewers are evident in every dent and scuff. Their habits are preserved in the movements of the brewers they trained. When I stepped into Caledonian’s brewhouse, wort steaming and foaming in weird bespoke coppers, it might have well been 1869.

On today's show we hear from Kjetil Dale, one of two dozen or so farmhouse brewers practicing an ancient craft in the western Norwegian valley of Voss. Brewing here is knitted into the culture of the region, beginning in the classic eldhus, or "firehouse," common on farms here. As the fire crackles nearby, Kjetil describes this tradition and some of his background. Beer tasting: Kings and Daughter...

If you’ve been following us on social media, you’ve probably seen some photos Jeff posted from his recent visit to Norway. He was invited to participate at the Oslo Craft Beer Festival. We’ll hear about that and what he learned of the Norwegian beer scene. Craft beer is only about twenty years old, but the brewing tradition goes back centuries—and perhaps millennia. While he was in Norway, Jeff vi...

On Show 159, we are joined by Tobias Hahn and Nick Greiner, founders of the Rosenstadt Brewery. They tell us about their unusual approach to the business, what it’s like to focus on German beer in the American Northwest, and how gemütlichkeit fits into all this.

Way, way back in Pod 16, Jeff and I tackled the Trappist beers of Belgium. In the time since that program aired, four new monastic breweries have opened, and in all a baker’s dozen have started in the past decade. We thought it would be fun to revisit monastic brewing, discuss whether abbey ales are more or less a style with their arrivals, and taste a couple of the new ones.

Among living beer styles, rare is the is the case where a single beer accounts for the survival of a whole tradition, but it’s mostly true in the case of saison. Well, a single beer, an English writer, and an American importer.

The Labor Department recently reported that inflation was up 7.9% over the past year, sending the stock markets down, and causing the Federal Reserve to begin raising interest rates. This news landed amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the biggest grain producers in the world. Add to that the rising costs of aluminum, a historically bad year for barley, and high gas prices, and it’s clear...

Throughout most of the past ten thousand years, brewing was a farmhouse chore, one of the many ways people preserved their harvest throughout the year. In more recent times it has become a commercial and industrial activity. Yet in a verdant pocket of Loudoun County, Virginia about an hour NW of Washington DC, the husband and wife team of Bonnie and John Branding are conducting an ambitious experi...

Our Friday: a two-mile, four-pub crawl (with a short tram ride) where we stopped in and had our choice of two cask beers at each location. We encountered three milds along the walk. The crawl happened in Portland, Oregon. Because we're podcast professionals, we recorded our thoughts at each stop. Have a listen and learn about this remarkable development.