Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Over the past two decades, the amount of hops sitting in cold-storage warehouses has more than doubled . While the volume of those stocks is inching back down from its peak in 2022—and while it’s important that the industry has a buffer against climate challenges and bad harvests—a fundamental question remains: Just how useful are those hops two, three, or four years after harvest? Through a serie...

Mike Stein and Pete Jones are brewing buffs and historians based in the Washington, D.C., area, and the intersection of those two interests has proven to be fertile ground over the past decade. Through their consultancy Lost Lagers and Extinct Ales , they’ve done the research and helped surface recipes and process information about brewing in the founding years of the United States—for example, th...

For Nick Tedeschi, a great beer evokes memories, and the beer lineup at any of the Post’s five Colorado locations is designed to feel familiar, whether you’ve ordered one there or not. Like the food and the environment, the intention is comfort, with beers designed to tuck into the experience rather than define it. But that doesn’t mean they can’t stand out on their own, and the World Beer Cup and...

When Wynn Whisenhunt launched Wondrous in the compact Bay Area town of Emeryville, California—wedged between more well-known neighbors Oakland and Berkeley—he brought with him big ideas about what it would take to make great beer. After growing up around well-known homebrewers like Mike “Tasty” McDole and Jamil Zainasheff, studying brewing in the Siebel-Doemens program, and working at breweries of...

For brewing industry veterans Ben Allgood and Brady Jones, the chance to open their own brewery in Sacramento, California— Geisthaus —meant endless possibility, but they chose to intentionally limit themselves to lagers. Despite that self-imposed restriction, they’re finding space for a range of creative expressions within the familiar worlds of pilsner and helles—but they’re also not shying away...

In this special episode, we talk about efficiency and managing assets in your brewery, as well as proactive and preventive approaches that extend the lifespan of your equipment and reduce equipment downtime. There’s more data available to you than ever before, but understanding how to use that data to make smart decisions and anticipate issues before they happen can save you money and avoid costly...

“There can be a stand-offishness of, ‘These are complex flavors, you may not be ready for this,’” says Mike Schallau of Chicago’s Is/Was . “And I’m like, ‘Why?’ You can make those things, but if that’s everything you make, that’s why you don’t get to make that much saison, I guess. I want people to drink the beers, and I want them to drink a good amount of them.” In a post-pandemic era when craft...

To some, Chicago’s Suncatcher must appear to be a typical neighborhood brewery. The bar is classic Midwest, salvaged from a midcentury tavern. The patio is expansive and inviting, thanks to the plant nursery next door. And the beers come without clever names—just the style, often defined by color, spelled out in plastic letters pressed into the sign board. But when you consider that it was the cof...

One of the key features of craft beer today, that doesn’t get enough press, is just how much information brewers have at their fingertips. While companies that serve the industry test and provide information about the performance of their products to brewer customers, it’s the two-way flow of information back from brewers to those companies that supercharges the learning cycle and helps everyone m...

Chicago’s Hopewell has, from its start, charted a different aesthetic and stylistic path than many of its contemporaries. In this episode, cofounder Stephen Bossu shares their approach to building a compelling array of lower-ABV beers designed around the times in which one might drink them. From the eight-ounce stubby can of Lil’ Buddy—it makes a perfect shift beer—to Pocha, the Korean-style lager...

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

For San Diego’s AleSmith , funky Belgian-style mixed-culture beers aged on whole fruit may not be impactful to the bottom line. As brewers, however, they love the process challenge of these multi-phase beers as well as the unique flavors made possible by complex fermentations and highest-quality fruit. Late last year, our blind panel at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® rated their Handgeplukt K...

From the very earliest days of what we now know as craft beer, flavor has been a defining factor and a guiding mantra for brewers casting themselves against the monolith of light macro lager that dominated American brewing for so many decades. If you track it back, fruits and spices have been ingredients in beer for as long as beer has been made, so this modern era of craft brewing is more redisco...

If you’ve read any mainstream news coverage of craft beer over the past year, it’s likely you’ve seen something about the “death” of craft beer. The apocalyptic tones and pearl-clutching over the industry’s recent economic woes mostly lack context, often painting a complex and diverse industry with a single brush—yet the stories continue. In his recent State of the Industry presentation at the Cra...

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

Matt Topping of COVA Brewing in Norfolk, Virginia, has a knack for winning medals with his fruit beers—but they aren’t what you think. From the full fruit refermentation to the light herbal spicing, he’s found an equation that’s equally successful on draft in the taproom and on the final judging table at the World Beer Cup. From slightly higher pH to low mash temps for fermentable wort, and from f...

The IPA gang is back together with some special guests for this star-studded episode recorded in front of a live audience of brewers at Union Transfer in Philadelphia. Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River , Kelsey McNair of North Park , and Evan Price of Green Cheek are joined by Ben Edmunds of Breakside and Oregon State University’s Tom Shellhammer —this year’s recipient of the Brewers Association Rec...

The founders of South New Jersey’s Wander Back Beerworks are no strangers to the beer world, but the industry veterans had modest expectations for the young project—barely two years old—when they submitted entries to the 2026 World Beer Cup. Winning a medal in one of the top-five categories, Munich-Style Helles, with over 150 entries, would be an uphill battle. But as the awards were announced, th...

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

Scotty Hargrave didn’t invent extra-pale ale—he reinvented it, giving the style the definition it had lacked before. Tinkering away on his homebrew kit in New South Wales, he developed the recipe for what would become Balter XPA—a beer that took off and popularized what has arguably become Australia’s signature beer style. It’s also a beer that also has inspired certain American brewers, including...

When you look at the top restaurants around the world, no matter what cuisine they may focus on, there’s one commonality they all share, and that’s deep relationships with those who grow and raise the very best ingredients. It’s the same in beer—you can’t be the best at what you do without the meaningful, personal, financial, and long-standing relationships that ensure the brewery has access to th...

Ryan Allen of Soul & Spirits in Memphis loves brewing traditional lager—but when it comes to turning heads at big events like the Great American Beer Festival, he’s not afraid of putting that methodical approach to work on projects that other brewers might view as crazy. Barbecue sauce–flavored beer? Yes. Beer with the taste and consistency of Southern gravy? Check. Barrel-aged stout that tast...

This special episode of the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Encompass Technologies , and explores how breweries are using data to create savvier approaches to distribution and growth. It’s no secret that it’s become harder to sell beer over the past few years, with two consecutive years where brewery closures have outpaced openings. Distributors are far less bullish on craft beer tha...

Chris O’Connor, VP of brewing operations at Prost in Northglenn, Colorado, has built a career on being a process nerd. He spent a decade in engineering for the pharmaceutical industry before switching gears and following his passion for brewing. His analytical approach to colllecting data, testing, and questioning conventional logic is a big part of what drives quality at Prost’s award-winning lag...

This special episode of the podcast focuses on adjusting the thiol dial and is brought to you in partnership with the innovative and industry-leading team at Berkeley Yeast. They’ve been on the forefront of fermentation-related science since their inception, and whether it’s Fresh strains that keep diacetyl ultra-low, NA strains that make nonalcoholic beer that actually tastes like beer, Flavor-se...