Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Before he took the leap and started his own, BreWskey cofounder Derrick Robertson was a process engineer who helped design breweries. That background was invaluable when building out a brewhouse and cellar in a building that’s a historic landmark in Vieux-Montréal. With multiple spaces and sprawling patios, BreWskey is popular among travelers who drink plenty of pale lager in warmer months—with ma...

This small brewery in Dunham, Quebec, just north of the Vermont border, features a pub, guesthouse, and extensive beer garden that make it the perfect stop-through or weekend destination for those heading south from Montreal or north from the States. But Brasserie Dunham is much more than a waypoint. Over the past 13 years, the brewery has built a reputation for world-class saisons, finding expres...

Few breweries in the 21st century have been as influential as Hill Farmstead on American craft beer. This rural Vermont brewery, built on the family property just outside Greensboro Bend, captured the beer world’s imagination upon opening in 2010, and enthusiasts have flocked there from all corners of the world ever since. Their IPAs helped to change the trajectory of the style, and their saisons—...

At the turn of the 21st century, it wasn’t uncommon for a hop grower focusing on alpha varieties to replant a field every 25 to 50 years. While the plants in the field inevitably contracted viruses, the impact of those viruses on alpha-acid development and overall yield was manageable. In today’s environment, however—with new varieties bred to be high-performance, high-aroma, well-oiled machines—t...

Over the past two years, five beers that Lapel, Indiana’s Pax Verum sent to Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine for review have scored 95 or above. That naturally piqued our interest, so when we planned our Craft Brewers Conference itinerary we made sure to visit the hip outpost an hour north of Indianapolis. Head brewer and co-owner Colt Carpenter cut his teeth working in a homebrew shop before mak...

Parrotdog has been a craft-brewing mainstay in New Zealand for nearly 15 years, and with national distribution and a production brewery and taproom steps from the beach and Wellington’s airport, they reach a broad audience of consumers across a range of styles. While their core line features everything from a classic C-malt IPA to pils with “vivid passion fruit and white-wine notes,” they also con...

In Wellington, New Zealand, the Fork & Brewer has to live up to a reputation, and head brewer Brayden Rawlinson is up for the challenge. Under the leadership of previous head brewer Kelly Ryan (now with Freestyle Hops), the downtown brewpub garnered numerous awards, and the expectations placed on his successor were huge. Yet Rawlinson brings his own style and swagger to the role, alongside a d...

While hop-forward lager may be a relatively new phenomenon in the States, New Zealand brewers have been brewing their own version of pilsner for decades using homegrown hops. Yet threading the needle in a precise style with hops that can have strong notes, such as mineral and diesel, is no small feat. In this episode, Paweł Lewandowski, the award-winning head brewer at Mount in Mount Maunganui, on...

New Zealand is pretty far from everything, so competing on price for commodity bittering hops was never a great strategy for the country’s small number of hops growers. Things were pretty grim in the early 2000s, when fifth-generation farmer Brent McGlashen joined his dad working on the family farm, Mac Hops , just outside the town of Motueka on the north end of South island. But then something my...

Two straight weeks of nothing but doctors on the Craft Beer & Brewing podcast? This week’s episode is another scientific barnburner with the head of R&D for Wellington’s Garage Project. Dr. Peter Bircham has been working in laboratory settings with yeast for many years, but for the past few he’s taken on an additional role beyond the academic, working on everything from building better Gar...

Dr. Ron Beatson is the retired hop breeder who built a storied career at Plant & Food Research developing some of the most popular New Zealand hop varieties today, and Dr. Tom Shellhammer is the Oregon State University professor whose research into hop oils, hop terroir, hop-growing techniques, and more have made an indelible impact on the Pacific Northwest hop industry. Shellhammer is current...

Homogeneity is the name of the game in certain circles of brewing—whether it’s massive brewers who standardize their hop lots by blending before pelletizing, or it’s hop companies that blend lots to iron out highs and lows in a particular crop year. On the other end of that spectrum is Pete Gillespie and his team at Garage Project and Hāpi Research , disrupting the collective quest for like-minded...

Earlier this week, our Industry All-Access subscribers received in their email inbox this week’s subscriber-exclusive article that Kate reported, parsing the latest industry economic data but reading beyond the surface for a deeper look at what’s really going on. We’ve all read the hyperbolic clickbait articles out there about craft beer’s demise, and for the first time in almost twenty years, we...

From their tiny outpost in the ski town of Park City, Offset Bier has turned Utah’s challenges—such as a ban on serving draft beer higher than 5 percent ABV—into opportunities. Last year was a breakout one for the budding brewery—we named their session IPA Dopo one of our Best 20 Beers in 2024 , while another session IPA, Divi, won gold medal at Great American Beer Festival. Necessity is truly the...

Strong brewing communities produce clusters of great breweries, and the Colorado brewing world, centered in Denver, is no different. Friendly competition drives innovation, exploration, and refinement as well as knowledgeable consumers with higher and higher expectations, and in this episode, we brought together three friends (each medal-winning brewers) for a conversation on their approach to Wes...

In our latest issue, Louisville’s Atrium Brewing scored a category-leading 98 for their barrel-aged stout Denny-Lou, Blend 1, and that was as good a reason as any to check in with cofounder Mark Rubenstein and head brewer Spencer Guy for some background on brewing stouts. Their proximity to some of the best distillers in the Western hemisphere informs their approach to both aging and blending, and...

For this 400th episode of the podcast, Neil Fisher of Weldwerks takes over the host chair and puts Jamie Bogner in the hot seat for a ranging conversation about business, passion, creativity, discipline, openness, and why the current prevailing narrative about the “end of craft beer” in no way describes the reality for many brewers today. It’s a departure from the normal technical conversations th...

“If you’re a brewer and you’re not making things that you really want to make, or things you want to experiment with and learn more about, then what are you brewing for,” asks James Herrholz, Chief Creative Officer for Corporate Ladder Brewing in Palmetto, Florida. While some may feel “forced” to brew crowd-pleasing adjunct-laden stouts, Herrholz signed on for the challenge, and approaches the sty...

Over the past few years, Denver's River North Brewery has collected accolades from top beer competitions around the world—four GABF medals, four World Beer Cup medals, four European Beer Star medals just to name a few—and beers like Father Time and Anniversary 11 have earned top scores from our blind panel. They most recently earned midsize brewery of the year honors at the inaugural Colorado Brew...

“If you like beer," says Greg Casey, "There’s no better time in the history of mankind to be living in the United States, right now.” And if anyone is qualified to make such a statement, it's Casey. After decades leading yeast and quality programs for some of the biggest brewers in the Western hemisphere, Casey retired to work on his passion project—telling the story of American brewing from the 1...

At its height, Pompano Beach’s Odd Breed in Pompano Beach was one of the best-regarded breweries in Florida, winning four GABF medals over a span of three years, and shipping mixed-culture beers to fans around the world. However, real-estate market forces ultimately worked against the niche brewery, and founder and brewer Matt Manthe closed up shop in the summer of 2024. That’s no reason not to ta...

Mark it down: Baltic Porter Day this year is January 18, always the third Saturday of this month. This year’s will be the 10th edition of a commemoration that began in 2016 in Poland, where rich, hefty, cool-fermented porters reign supreme. Marcin Chmielarz has worn many hats in the industry—bar manager, brewer, video blogger—but one of his most notable achievements is helping to draw Poland’s att...

The city of Grodzisk Wielkopolski was once a major center of brewing in 19th century Poland, but political unrest, world wars, communism, and then misguided capitalism all played parts in closing the previous chapter of the city’s brewing history in the early 90’s. But the rise of craft beer also led to a resurgence in interest for obscure styles like the smoked wheat beer that made the city famou...

This final episode of 2024 is our chance to look back at the conversations that resonated most with you, the listeners. Here, we count down the ten most-dowloaded episodes of the past year, with excerpts from each. The countdown includes: Thomas Vandelanotte of Timmermans , Waterloo , and Bourgogne des Flandres on the science of lambic Matt Cole of Fat Heads on American-style IPA Robert Fulwiler o...

It’s easy for New World brewers to lump Czech beer into the “historical” category, but—while many prominent brewers there focus intently on the lagers we all love—a growing contingent are also tackling evolving styles such as hazy IPA, fruited sour, pastry stout, and more—and they’re often doing it in their own ways. In Louny, a historic town about 40 miles northwest of Prague, Pivovar Zichovec is...