Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

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....

The Eighth State is small—very small. The three-barrel, open-vessel brewhouse sits adjacent to the taproom, with brewing gear spilling over on days when they’re not open. Barrels are packed into every inch of unused space, while an assortment of plants help to create a more comfortable vibe in the small ground-floor space. It feels cluttered yet relaxed—in that way that suggests creative minds are...

When Nino Bacelle and Guido Devos started homebrewing together in the 80’s, Belgian beer was in the midst of a sea change. Consolidation was afoot as larger industrial breweries swallowed up smaller concerns, while an earlier generation of brewers had reached retirement age with few of the younger generation interested in carrying on the brewing tradition. The beers that they loved and grew up dri...

It’s a striking spot for a brewery—the site of a former mill on a winding stream, with the village church looming overhead. Out behind Brasserie Au Baron in Gussignies, you can literally throw a rock and hit Belgium in the neighbor’s front yard. Yet this is a French brewery, officially, even if its influences are many—the traditions of Hainaut saison and French bière de garde mingle in beers such...

She’s a native Brazilian, beer sommelier, and former reality TV host. He’s a Brussels native who has worked in every aspect of the industry, including the brewhouse at Fantôme. Together, Paula Yunes and husband Valéry De Breucker launched a brewery in Belgium’s Luxembourg province. Now, Brasserie Atrium , is turning heads with fresh takes on saison and other classics while turning up the heat with...

Antidoot’s Tom Jacobs didn’t set out with the goal of launching a brewery. It was more a natural outgrowth of his and his brother’s homebrewing, which grew too large to remain just a hobby. Still, Jacobs pursues every one of the small batches they brew with the exploratory zeal that informed their homebrewing days. The brewery and batches are small, intentionally, for two reasons. First, Jacobs is...

History can be a heavy weight to bear. Being caretakers for a legacy and advocates for a tradition can win you credibility in small circles, but such victories seem inconsequential in the face of an industry and consumer tide that rolls toward simpler tastes. Cantillon, founded in 1900, survived the industry consolidation and shifting consumer tastes of the 20th century, when the number of Brussel...

Groomed by retired master blender Armand Debelder, a new generation has assumed the stewardship of the 3 Fonteinen lambic brewery and blendery in Beersel and Lot, Belgium. Their focus is on preserving their mentor’s approach to brewing, blending, and passion for the lambic tradition, while also looking for ways to root that product more deeply in its history and in its region. Led by managing dire...

Julia Herz is only a couple months into her new role as Executive Director of the American Homebrewers Association , but she's long been a craft beer voice and advocate with deep experience in the realm of food and beer pairing. As the former Craft Beer Program Director for the Brewers Association, she developed a library of resources to help brewers understand the nexus of beer and food, and to i...

Matt Sampson, director of brewing operations for Hacienda Beer and Door County Brewing in Wisconsin, never set out to be a brewer. The PhD chemist figured on life in a lab—but life had something else in store. He found his way into brewing through the side door—vaulting from a somewhat unique position as brand manager and QC tech. That led to cellar and brewing work. Now, years later, Sampson stil...

Todd DiMatteo never intended to head up the production side of Good Word Brewing and Public House in Duluth, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. However, after a rocky start with a previous brewer forced him to quickly step up to the brewdeck, he embraced the role with verve. Thankfully, his homebrew experience plus more than a decade serving beer at Atlanta’s legendary Brick Store Pub provided a palate...

Denver’s Our Mutual Friend might be better known in brewing circles for their commitment to mixed-culture beers, but ask head brewer Jan Chodkowski, and he’ll admit to being a hophead. It’s no surprise, then, that the case of “palmares” on the brewery wall showcasing their GABF, World Beer Cup, and Craft Beer & Brewing awards is evenly split between funky farmhouse takes such as Saison Tryster...

If there was a Guinness world record for most beer collaborations, Kyle Harrop of Horus Aged Ales would surely hold it. The 400-plus beers Harrup has brewed with other breweries are even more impressive when you consider that brewing is still a side hustle for the full-time accountant. Today, Horus Aged Ales is known as much for its collaborations as for the beers he brews and releases to club mem...

For this final episode of 2021, David Walker of Firestone Walker (Paso Robles, California) joins the podcast to talk about the brewery’s remarkable evolution—from the earliest days of making pale ale to getting lucky with 805 (and not screwing it up), and accelerating the innovation process in recent years with hop-forward series such as Luponic Distortion and Mind Haze. Walker shares his thoughts...

Brewing is in the family for Broken Strings founder Charles Frizzell. His grandfather spent the better part of his brewing career at Puerto Rico’s Corona, and he grew up hearing the stories. Today, Frizzell brews very different beer, and at a very different scale, than his grandfather did. Yet doing it right is a matter of family pride. Like many Florida breweries, Broken Strings is unapologetic a...

Kelsey McNair of San Diego’s North Park Beer still can’t quite fathom how the brewery walked away with two medals in IPA categories in the 2021 Great American Beer Festival—a silver for their Art Is Hard hazy IPA, and a bronze for their imperial IPA, Army of the Kinda Dead-ish. On the surface, it looks improbable—while they’re both IPAs, their executions are very different. However, McNair says th...