Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

St. Petersburg, Florida's Green Bench Brewing toes a delicate line with sophisticated beers in a still-developing beer state, but from the looks of the crowds, they're on to something big. In this conversation, cofounder and head brewer Khris Johnson talks shop on their emerging lager program as well as their firmly entrenched mixed fermentation cellar. This episode is brought to you by: G&D C...

Over the past decade, Cycle Brewing (St. Petersburg, Florida) has made a name for themselves with big barrel-aged stouts. These stouts make up more than half of the brewery’s yearly production, and are so important to the brewery that they custom-designed a brewhouse with a massively oversized mash tun (more than twice the capacity of the kettle) in order to brew they efficiently. In this episode,...

There are as many ways to make sour and funky beers as there are brewers, but for Phil Joyce of Amalgam Brewing (Denver, Colorado) and Westbound & Down Brewing (Idaho Springs, Colorado), the things some brewers focus on have less impact on the finished beer than the things they tend to overlook. In this episode, Joyce tackles some misconceptions, and shares the things that make their sour and...

Three years ago, homebrewer and professional chemist John Rowley and his partner (chef Jeffrey Kaplan) launched Rowley Farmhouse Ales as a brewpub with a particular focus on sour beer. This past October, they brought home three medals (gold, silver, and bronze) in different sour beer categories at the Great American Beer Festival, and that medal count locked up Small Brewpub of the Year honors for...

An 11 year veteran of Oskar Blues, Tim Matthews now holds the lofty title of VP of Global Brewing for the Canarchy Craft Brewery Collective, where he's hyper focused on improving everything from product innovation to ingredient sourcing and grower/broker relationships. In this episode, he discusses their process of reinvention for popular beers, and what they've learned about the impacts of variou...

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more bombastic, opinionated brewer than Purpose Brewing & Cellars’ Peter Bouckaert. But with decades of experience in both Europe and the US, leading the brewhouse for iconic breweries, he’s earned the right to speak his mind. In this episode, he shares thoughts on a range of technical brewing subjects, from using wood as a spice, to malt biotransformation, usin...

With two gold medals in hotly contested categories and Small Brewing Company and Small Brewer of the Year accolades at the 2019 Great American Beer Festival, Denver's Comrade Brewing firmly established their credentials as one of the most important new school IPA producers in the country. Here, they discuss philosophy and techniques behind their hoppy beers before delving into brewing thoughts on...

Malt is subject most take for granted—a commodity that is generally fungible and often overlooked. But for Troubadour Maltings’ Chris Schooley, it’s a subject of endless fascination and professional obsession. In this deep dive into the subject, Schooley expounds on the value of thinking about malt beyond extract numbers, explores the history of malt and why certain malt styles are what they are t...

Civil Life Brewing is a brewer's brewery. The biggest beers on the menu top out around 6.5%, the taproom is comfortable and pubby, and everything across the board is finely crafted with character and intention. It's wonderful space in which to drink beer, staffed by folks intensely passionate about what they do, serving beer confidently unflashy yet thoroughly satisfying. To build such character a...

We taste thousands of beers per year at Craft Beer & Brewing, between beers our blind panel reviews, beers sent to us to consider for general coverage, beers tasted at various festivals, and beers shared when we visit breweries. Once a year, we put our collective heads together and create our Editors' Picks for the Best Beers of the Year. In addition, we poll our readers and listeners for your...

If you brew IPA, you’ve probably read Mitch Steele’s book on the subject. His storied brewing career has taken him from from positions as Brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch and Stone to his newest venture as Brewmaster at Atlanta’s New Realm Brewing. This latest chapter has posed one of the biggest creative challenges he’s faced—designing an entire beer program from scratch. In this episode, Steele disc...

August Schell is not a new brewery, and sparking attention from today’s craft beer consumer is more difficult than ever. But in this conversation, Jace Marti (Assistant Brewmaster and 6th generation of the Schell family) dives deep into the storied lager brewer’s evolution of recipe and technique for marquis beers like their Pilsner, explains how they develop and change beers over time, and outlin...

Since their founding in June 2017, Green Cheek Beer Co. has pulled off an impressive list of awards—a silver medal in American-style IPA at the 2018 World Beer Cup, two bronze medals at the 2018 GABF, and most recently a silver and gold (in American-style IPA and Australian-style Pale Ale) at the 2019 GABF. In this conversation, recorded a few days before Price and Green Cheek collected those 2019...

When Long Beach, California's Beachwood Brewing set out to create a wild and sour beer program years ago, they did it with an intentionality one would expect from a brewery that has racked up so many accolades over the years. In this episode, Beachwood Blendery head brewer and blender Harrison McCabe walks through the various ways they've controlled environmental factors in the brewhouse for optim...

Keith Villa is an unlikely advocate for cannabis-infused non-alcoholic beer. The cerebral PhD with a molecular biology background spent more than three decades working for Coors, with two decades focused on creating and building the Blue Moon brand, and today he approaches the subject of cannabis beer with a scientist’s rigor and a marketer’s soul. In this conversation, he lays the groundwork for...

"If we’re just going to come out and make the same beers as everybody else, what’s the whole point of this?" says Off Color Brewing Cofounder John Laffler. "I could make more money working somewhere else, and work a lot less, if we’re just going to make the same pale ale as a brewery down the street. I don’t get the point of doing all this if you’re not doing it for a reason, and for us it was to...

In this special 100th episode of the podcast, we take a quick look back at your favorites of the first 100 episodes, before Side Project Brewing's Cory King and Neil Fisher of Weldwerks take over the podcast in a previously subscriber-only conversation recorded at the Firestone Walker Invitational earlier this year. This episode is brought to you by: G&D Chillers ( https://gdchillers.com ) : A...

Ask ten brewers about the secret to brewing a great hazy IPA, and you’ll likely get ten different answers. For Gary Gulley and Alarmist Brewing, the answer is “threading the needle”—riding that delicate line between hops intensity, bitterness, sweetness that brings out the hops character, and dryness for drinkability. Achieving that elusive balance is no small feat, and in this episode Gulley disc...

Once upon a time, brewing barrel-aged stouts was a simple case of putting one batch into a barrel then pulling it out and releasing it. But for Revolution Brewing, a happy accident led to a new way to think about blending stocks of barrel-aged beers in order to achieve more depth and complexity. Today, the brewery now intentionally brews to replicate that effect, and has extended the concept behin...

The brewpub model might be seen by some as a relic of craft beer's past, but it's actually a helpful barometer of what is happening among customer preference. This week Mark Edelson, one of the cofounders of Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant, now with nearly 20 locations in the east, talks about why staff training is important, a useful path towards a brewing career, and how sometimes you need to...

The cofounder of St. Louis’ most popular brewer of progressive hazy styles shares the techniques and philosophy behind their sought-after beers, and debunks some misperceptions in the process. Creating a sense of unique character and difference within a popular beer style like hazy IPA can be a challenge for brewers, but for Jeff Hardesty and Narrow Gauge Brewing, the answer is nonstop experimenta...

The Referend Bier Blendery uses its own mobile coolship and other people's breweries to create spontaneously fermented beers. In this episode, founder James Priest talks about process, pitfalls, and working in the elements and his relationship with farmers to secure the best produce possible. From pre-acidification methods, to using the right wood, Priest dives into his methodology. This episode i...

The brewing duo behind Festus, Missouri’s local brewpub-turned-stout factory share their thoughts on adding adjuncts to stouts, blending batches, parti-gyle brewing, and more. When he launched the business in 2011, Main & Mill cofounder Denny Foster had no idea they’d be bottling barrel-aged stouts that would be shipped around the country by zealous traders. The goal at that point was a standa...

When you’re more than 2,000 miles from the nearest country there’s a tendency to rely on all things local. That’s what Batch Brewing Co., a Sydney, Australia brewery has in mind when it is creating recipes. From supporting local maltsters to getting the pick of Southern Hemisphere hops, cofounder Chris Sidwa talks about why he’s happy to stay local and what that can mean for the overall health of...

Troy Casey has built a reputation for his eponymously-named brewery by crafting gorgeously nuanced mixed-fermentation farmhouse ales and thoughtfully edited wild and sour beers (many with fruit sourced from local growers and processed by hand). In this conversation, he discusses his approach to open fermentation, using hops to control acidity in mixed culture and sour beers, the seasonal impacts o...