Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Anyone can put beer in a barrel, but brewing compelling (and award-winning) barrel-aged beers requires a more conscious approach to design, brewing, and fermentation. Verboten ’s Josh Grenz knows a thing or two about the subject, having won bronze at both GABF and the World Beer Cup, as well as 2018 and 2020 golds at the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers (FOBAB), for three separate barrel-aged beers....

When approached with creativity, passion, and clarity of purpose, any beer style can be great. Quick sours—in the hands of Urban Artifact’s Bret Kollman Baker—are an object lesson in this intense approach, which transcends style basics to achieve a high level of sophistication and nuance. Urban Artifact only make sour beer, and that singular approach means they have no choice but to make them well...

Shawn Johnson of Birds Fly South dreams about brewing. In fact, their solera system for fermenting farmhouse beers came to him one night in a vision of sorts—as Jolly Pumpkin’s Ron Jeffries appeared in a dream with a command to “keep the beer moving.” Funk is always on Johnson’s mind, awake or asleep, and five years in, the brewery continues to adhere to their mantra of “Funk First!” In this episo...

As an attorney who, earlier in her career, worked for the US federal government's Small Business Administration, Denizens Brewing cofounder and Chief Brand Officer Julie Verratti has a working knowledge of mechanisms of government that brewery owners and operators everywhere can learn from as they chart a course through this difficult and heartbreaking second wave of COVID. In this special episode...

For Yvan de Baets of Brasserie de la Senne, what’s old is new again. All brewing styles shift and develop over time, as tastes change and things come into and fall out of fashion. But for this student of Belgian brewing history, the lack of hops in contemporary Belgian beers was a stylistic travesty that he needed to remedy. Enter Brasserie de la Senne, which—when it officially opened in Brussels...

Seattle’s Fremont Brewing is known for fresh hop beers, and over the past decade they’ve engaged in a level of problem solving (on both the logistical and technical sides) that is relatively unparalleled. What started as a small organic experiment with a well-established hop farm has turned into a yearly logistical dance, as harvesters, trucks, and brew staff work in concert to pick hops at the ri...

Brick West head brewer Sam Milne is fanatical about process and technique, and it’s this love of fine tuning small details that stoked his love of brewing lagers years ago. After moving up the ranks at Kulshan Brewing in Bellingham, Washington, he received a full scholarship from the Glen Hay Falconer Foundation to study at the World Academy of Brewing at the Siebel Institute (Chicago) and Doemans...

In the second of our two-episode Best in Beer podcast extravaganza, Jamie and Joe talk with beer writers Kate Bernot, Samer Khudairi, Stan Hieronymus, and Alex Kidd about their top ten beers of 2020, trends in brewing, impacts of COVID-19 on the beer world, other outstanding breweries, and more. From their outposts in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Missoula, Montana, these respected...

2020 was a challenging year for trying new beer, but like everyone has done over the past eight months of shutdowns and socially distancing, we persevered. We were able to taste thousands of beers over the past year at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® , between our blind-panel reviews, those sent to us to consider for general coverage, those tasted at various festivals (remember festivals? Yes,...

For Kevin Stafford, Head Brewer and Cofounder of New York’s Finback Brewery, exploration and creative expression has always been the brewery’s goal, as they wholeheartedly embrace the new. But there’s a certain cohesiveness to the range of their experimentation that grounds it. They’re not purists and don’t subscribe to the artificial limitations imposed by style—what matters is that it tastes goo...

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...