Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

It’s been a tough week for Frisco, Colorado’s Outer Range Brewing. Less than a week ago, customers notified the brewery of an unexpected Belgian-ish flavor in the week’s IPA release. After testing and confirming cross-contamination by one of their aggressive saison yeast strains, the brewery notified customers of a voluntary recall and dumped almost 4,000 gallons of beer fermenting in tanks, then...

Steve Bischoff, lead brewer at Root Down Brewing Co. knows a thing or two about traditional American IPA. Last year he won gold at the Great American Beer Festival in the category and nabbed best mid-side brewer and mid-size brewery in the process. He talks about developing the Bine recipe, layering hop flavors, and why the usual boil times and addition don’t work for him. Bischoff, a long-time br...

The founder of Modern Times Beer talks about how his homebrewing hobby led him into the beer industry and different jobs before starting his own company. Now, with a growing number of breweries and tasting rooms, he advocates for opening in well-saturated and savvy beer areas because the friction of competition keeps his brewery sharp. This episode is brought to you by: CraftBeer.com ( http://craf...

Over his two decade tenure at Allagash, Jason Perkins has made a mark on the world of brewing. The Portland, Maine brewery is best known for their Belgian-style beers, from the iconic witbier Allagash White to their groundbreaking forays into spontaneous fermentation with the Coolship Resurgam series. In this episode, Perkins discusses mash and process regimens for haze stability, the impact of va...

Mash filters are common in commercial brewing—most large-scale commercial breweries use them—but they’re far, far less common in craft brewing. While most breweries use them to maximize efficiency, Modist Brewing (Minneapolis, Minnesota) cofounder and head brewer Keigan Knee has pushed in a different direction, using them to produce IPAs with no barley (only wheat and oats) or pushing the percenta...

In part two with Vinnie Cilurzo, he discusses the story of Simcoe, open fermentation for everything from Pliny the Elder to STS Pils, the impact of tank geometry, the origins and stages of their sour and spontaneous brewing program, de-barreling sour beer without worry about oxygen exposure, the impacts of aged hops, controlling acidity with temperature, macerating with dried fruit, grape processi...

Vinnie Cilurzo is a brewer who needs no introduction. The cofounder of Russian River Brewing Company has been pushing the limits of hoppy beers for the better part of three decades, developing innovative techniques along the way while defining styles like “Double IPA” with ubiquitous beers like Pliny the Elder. In this conversation, he discusses the early days of C-hops, the origins and design app...

The brewers behind Hop Butcher For the World haven’t lost the zeal for exploration that defined their homebrewing days. If there’s a method for adding hops to beer, they’ve tried it, learned from it, and added it to their ever-expanding repertoire. They started small, and have remained relatively small, in order to stay focused on getting fresh beer to their fans while retaining the ability to exp...

Diversity in the craft beer industry still has a long way to go, but steps are being taken to make the beverage more inclusive. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, Ph. D. is the Brewers Association diversity ambassador and is used to having what some consider a difficult conversation with anyone who will listen. The takeaway is that beer should be enjoyed by all, and there are small but significant steps we...

For Josh Pfriem of pFriem Family Brewers, every beer they make—from Pilsner to wood-aged sour—expresses a brewing philosophy that prizes nuance and depth. Still, he’s amazed that craft beer today is embracing lagers to the degree that it is. “If you had told me back in 2011 that pFriem Pilsner in 2019 was going to be our flagship beer, I probably would have passed out from excitement or never beli...

When he finally opened his own brewery, Matthew Steinberg knew exactly what he wanted Exhibit 'A' Brewing Co. to be. This week he talks about lessons learned along the way and the relationship that exists with the brewery down the street – Jack’s Abby. Steinberg is also the brewer behind one of the country’s best Kölsch recipes and he talks us through what goes into making the celebrated but diffi...

Derek Gallanosa doesn’t apologize for making ingredient-laden, flavor-forward beers that may send old school purists into fits—he’s focused on giving his customers rich experiences full of flavors they’re familiar with. In this episode recorded recently on the floor of the Craft Brewers Conference, Gallanosa and head brewer Cory Meyer discuss building base recipes to complement adjunct treatments,...

Randy Mosher is an authoritative voice in beer but he’s still a student at heart. As an author, brewer, and consultant, he’s continuously looking to work with new ingredients, reconsider off-flavors, and try new brewing methods. In a wide-ranging conversation, Mosher talks about the importance of homebrewing and what it means for the future of beer as well as what many of us miss when tasting. Thi...

With six GABF medals and four World Beer Cup medals under his belt (in categories ranging from Pilsner to stout to IPA), La Cumbre Brewing Company’s Jeff Erway has built a reputation as a perfectionist and outspoken proponent of brewing quality. He’s both a traditionalist and an iconoclast, depending on the style, occasion, or issue—not afraid to break a few eggs, but deeply respectful of the hist...

Adam Avery of Avery Brewing has seen a lot of cycles in craft beer over his past 26 years in business, and is bullish on the future. “There’s still a lot of blue sky out there.” Still, the best he can do is react to where he is and what the market is, right now. “Who would have thought that there would be 7500 breweries. If you had told me that five years ago, would I have built this brewery? I do...

We’re catching up with Marc Rauschmann the brewmaster of Germany’s BraufactuM, talking about the misconceptions of and pushing the boundaries of the Reinheitsgebot. The craft beer renaissance was late coming to Bavaria, but now brewers are mixing old traditions with new ones and the results are surprising. There’s even the novel concept (in Germany at least) of putting IPA in a can. Think you know...

Lafayette, Colorado’s Odd13 was one of the first breweries west of the Mississippi to take hazy IPAs into the world of production and distribution, launching Codename Superfan in 2015. In the years since, they’ve continued to experiment with variations on the style, and have learned much in the process. In this episode, they discuss effective ways of using cryohops, controlling polyphenol burn fro...

When it comes to making a low calorie beer that will appeal to the craft beer drinker, there's a lot to consider. Veronica Vega, the head brewer at Dechutes Brewing Co. in Bend, Oregon walks us through the creation, trial, error, and eventual completion of the brewery's new light pilsner. The low numbers matter, but so do the hops and marketing. This episode is brought to you by: BSG ( http://bsgc...

Even with all the progress craft beer has made over the decades there are still boundaries to break and stigmas to change. Lazy Magnolia Brewery in Mississippi has been on the forefront of those fights in the south since it first opened. Cofounder and brewer Leslie Henderson talks about changing perspectives, brewing with nuts, and how harnessing rain water might be one of the next big advancement...

Cerebral Brewing’s Sean Buchan knows what he likes to brew, and isn’t afraid to say it. The Denver, Colorado brewer’s approach to progressive styles like hazy and sour IPA, fruited kettle sour, and pastry stout would seem purely trendy if it weren’t for their equal love of Brettanomyces-fermented saison and wood-aged lager. In this episode, he discusses everything from designing processes around h...

Tucked away in an industrial corner of Brooklyn, New York’s Other Half Brewing has become known as a leader of the brewing new-school with intensely flavorful and creative beers that crowds turn out for on a weekly basis. But cofounder Sam Richardson takes a methodical approach to these genre-bending flavor explorations, employing a discipline learned from years of paying his dues at production br...

Thinking about most of their beers as a triangle, Jason Synan and Mike Renganeschi the brewers behind Hudson Valley Brewery, want to focus on acidity, hops, and botanicals. However, each characteristic doesn’t play the traditional role in their beers that one might expect, and that’s exactly how the brewers want it. Here they discuss their IPAs and how they blend down from an acidic beer base, goi...

Every two years beer lovers get excited for the release of Samuel Adams Utopias. As the 2019 edition gets closer to our glasses, Jennifer Glanville, the director of brewing operations for Boston Beer sits down to talk about what goes into making a beer so boozy it might as well be a spirit. Plus, scaling up recipes for a full production run isn't always easy. Hear what has worked for Sam Adams and...

Fonta Flora Brewery’s Todd Boera is known for creative yet grounded mixed culture botanical beers, and their new production brewery out on a farm 30 minutes from Morganton, North Carolina puts an even finer point on the connection between the brewery and the agriculture that supports it. In this conversation, he opens up about the way they think about and brew with offbeat ingredients, how they ap...

Mike Pallen paid his dues as a homebrewer and after helping some other breweries get off the ground all while working on his own recipes, he's busted out onto the national beer scene. The owner and head brewer of Mikerphone talks about collaborations, finding ways to use unconventional ingredients to maximize flavor, and why a healthy work and life balance is more important than ever before. This...