Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Living Waters in Nashville, Tennessee, is a full-service coffee house as well as brewery, and its affinity for strong, well-articulated flavor runs through all the beverages they produce and serve. Recently, the brewery’s Barrel-Aged Dyson Sphere (Construct IV) scored a 97 in Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® —garnering the highest score in the category—so, naturally, we wanted to know more. Tha...

Will Walter grew up in a military family, joining the Marines after college just as his father had. But the pull of brewing proved strong, and in 2022 he and two partners—also former military officers—opened Corn Coast in a small industrial park in Lincoln, Nebraska. That same year, they won a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their hazy imperial IPA, Citra Soaker—and they follo...

Bobby Kros hates interviews as much as he loves brewing beer, and while the cofounder of the La Vista, Nebraska, brewery may occasionally search for words to describe what he’s doing, the beers he makes are perfectible capable of speaking for themselves. And speak they have, winning Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® Best in Beer trophies in 2021, 2024, and 2025, in three wildly divergent styles....

Dan Brouillette has always worked in creative fields—he was a professional photographer before launching Lumen in the waning days of the pandemic—but he’s always been particularly attracted to the technical aspects of creation. Like every IPA-focused brewer, he’s on a neverending search for the most expressive, layered, and interesting hops. But he’s also found that the information upon which many...

Beer collaborations are a particularly effective way for brewers to share and learn, but what if you could take that experience and share it with a wider audience? That's the idea behind this episode, recorded shortly after the brew day wrapped on a forthcoming collab brewed by Kelly McKnight at the pilot brewery of New Belgium in Fort Collins, Colorado, along with Ashleigh Carter of Denver’s Bier...

In this episode, produced in partnership with RahrBSG , we’re taking a close look at process aids in the brewhouse and cellar, from anti-foaming agents and finings to enzymes and more. Whether you’re trying to keep more foam in your beer (rather than lose it while brewing and cellaring), fill tanks with more beer and less headspace (by limiting foam height within tanks), or clarify beer while redu...

Last week, we hosted a series of three webinars focused on different aspects of nonalcoholic brewing. In this episode of the podcast, we share an excerpt from the first session—focused on formulation—featuring Notch founder Chris Lohring, Halfway Crooks cofounder Shawn Cooper, and Abstrax Hops technical sales manager Craig Thomas. Through the course of the conversation, the trio discuss malt choic...

Generally speaking, there’s some correlation between brewery scale and lager quality—and while there are plenty of exceptions to that rule, there’s no denying that honing lagers into the best versions of themselves requires repetition, time, and access to the best ingredients. Over the past few years, however, an ever-increasing number of very small breweries have found success in major competitio...

Through his decades of work in the brewing industry, many spent in R&D and quality at Sierra Nevada , Tom Nielsen has played a critical role in getting craft beer a seat at the broader brewing table. While industry advocacy groups were once dominated by macro brewers pursuing their own narrow goals, Nielsen (and a cohort of craft contemporaries) helped change the bigger conversation, connect i...

Fritz Family founder Cory Buenning brewed from the mid-90’s through the mid 20-teens for Wyoming craft beer pioneers Snake River, but the itch to do his own thing was strong, and after returning to Colorado after a few years in Kentucky, he leased the old Bootstrap brewery in Niwot, installed a new brewhouse and cellar, and got to work making the beers he wanted to make—a variety of primarily lage...

For Jaron Anderson of Helper Beer, listening to the beer itself, rather than following prescribed rules, is the only way to improve it. He’s well-versed in the theory, but not a slavish adherent to dogma—what matters is the beer itself and how it tastes, so any technique or ingredient that gets you there is worth considering. In 2025, he won GABF gold in the competitive German-style pils category,...

Doug Veliky, now of beverage consulting firm BrightBev , author of the BeerCrunchers newsletter and blog, and the personality behind the Beer Aficionado social media account, has a knack for explaining complex beverage-business goings-on without jargon. Over the years of running first finance and then marketing for Chicago craft brewery Revolution, he developed a keen sense of brand building and m...

De Dochter van de Korenaar is unusual even for Belgium—a country full of brewers who don’t particularly enjoy being hemmed in by style definitions. Founder Ronald Mengerink has a passion for aging beer in barrels, but the expressions take a more vinous, wine-like approach than those more commonly found in North America. And his riff on port-like beer, Tout va Bien, is one that can’t be made commer...

Gert Christiaens loved the beers of Oud Beersel so much that he couldn’t abide the brewery closing in 2003. So, he bought the brewery, learned to brew, and for the past 20 years has focused on preserving the legacy of traditional oude gueuze and kriek. But that mission to preserve doesn’t mean sealing beers in a time capsule. Instead, it involves finding new ways to make these classic styles relev...

In this special year-end episode, we look at the ten most-downloaded episodes of the podcast, share stories behind the conversations, recount personal favorites, and more, with clips from the top ten that illustrate salient points. It’s a look back at the episodes you found most valuable and shared most often, and a crucial big-picture view of brewing today. From biotransformation to decoction str...

Dimitri Staelens spent 15 years directing quality across a range of breweries owned by Duvel Moortgat in Europe and North America. Along the way, he built a deep understanding of ingredients and process across a diverse range of styles and recipes. In 2020, however, he chose to scale down, launching Adept —a small brewery in Winksele, Belgium, attached to a restaurant and meeting space not far fro...

From the corner of the family farm in rural Columbus, Indiana, surrounded by corn fields, 450 North has built a worldwide reputation for intensely flavored fruit beers and supersaturated smoothie sours. Stephen Boardman—now sales director as well as recipe creator and ingredient-sourcing whiz—joins the podcast to share the brewery’s unique perspective on these unapologetically assertive fruit beer...

When President Trump signed the bill to reopen the government on November 12, he also enacted a law that will—unless changed within a year—effectively ban hemp-derived THC beverages and other products nationwide. Virtually overnight, the government had moved to close the book on a broadly popular industry worth an estimated $30 billion—even as adults in many states can, for now, still legally shop...

This week’s episode comes from a live panel discussion on West coast pils recorded a few weeks ago at the Craft Beer & Brewing Brewers Retreat in Asheville, North Carolina, and features Khristopher Johnson of Green Bench, Bob Kunz of Highland Park, and Evan Price of Green Cheek. Over the course of the conversation, these three brewers cover a range of topics, including: the impact of lager yea...

Lager yeast is the focus of this spotlight episode, brought to you interuption-free by Fermentis, the experts in fermentation for more than 160 years. Brewers everywhere depend on Fermentis for yeast that’s consistent, controllable, and high quality—whether you’re brewing an ester-forward Belgian-style beer, your favorite IPA, or a clean lager. In this week’s episode, we focus on brewing with 34/7...

At Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® , we obviously spend a lot of time thinking about beer—talking to brewers and others in the industry, digging into the details of process, and writing about what we learn. Best of all, though, we get to drink beer—and, like it or not, the taste of every drop flashes through these weird brains that have spent an unhealthy amount of time focused on the liquid a...

It’s one of the most anticipated episodes of the year—our annual peek behind the scenes of the Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ™ Best in Beer issue, as editorial director Jamie Bogner and executive editor Joe Stange share perspectives on the beers we’ve named as our best 20 of 2025 —plus, they reveal the results of the annual Readers’ Choice poll. Throughout the year, we taste thousands of beers...

Sheesh! The Establishment (Calgary, Alberta) has built a reputation over the past few years for taking an unconventional, experimental approach to mixed-culture brewing—as well as many other styles—and they’ve brought home numerous awards to prove it. The 2025 World Beer Cup gold medal for Belgian-Style Sour Ale may be the biggest of them all, despite the unabashedly modern approach to the mixed-c...

We recorded this week’s episode live on stage at the Alberta Craft Brewing Convention in Red Deer, Alberta, in early October. The thematic through line is farm-to-glass brewing—something that’s not that hard to do there, since a significant amount of the malt used by North American brewers is grown in the province. Major maltsters such as Canada Malting and Rahr have plants in the province, and so...

Seattle’s Fast Fashion has built a reputation for modern, forward-looking IPAs and hop-focused lagers, and the characterful brewery and taproom in SoDo expresses the eclectic interests and aesthetic taste of founder Matt Storm. It’s a funhouse of sorts—a bit like drinking in a thrift store full of budget mid-century furniture, stocked with kitsch that spans the past six decades. It’s busy and not...