Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Montana is known for its grain, and Mark Hastings of Überbrew and By All Means is in the thick of it. Wheat is the most-grown crop statewide while barley is third; despite their ubiquity, Hastings steered clear of Montana’s brewing grains for the first two decades of his brewing career. Primarily grown for the needs of macro brewers, these grains never quite nailed the flavor and technical perform...

This week’s podcast is different from most. A couple weeks ago, I drove down to Colorado Springs to catch up with Jess and Rich Fierro of Atrevida Beer . Jess was the winner of Season One of the Vice TV show Beerland , and they went on to open their small community-focused brewery in 2018. From the start, Atrevida proudly embraced the slogan “Diversity, it’s what’s on tap,” and over the past five...

The Northern hemisphere hop harvest is just weeks away, and that means one of our favorite times of the year—fresh hop beer season. To help add to the excitement, we invited three experts in the field of brewing with wet and fresh hops—Joe Mohrfeld of Pinthouse , Steve Luke of Cloudburst , and Zach Turner of Single Hill —to join in on a panel discussion on the subject. Over the course of the podca...

Utah’s beer laws are some of the most anomalous in the country—the state does everything it can to make life hard on brewers—but one byproduct of the laws restricting the sale of beers based on ABV is that Utah brewers have had the commercial incentive to hone their low gravity brewing techniques. Today, at Templin Family Brewing in the granary district of Salt Lake City, you’ll find a dozen or so...

When Winslow Sawyer and his partners launched San Diego’s Pure Project in the middle of the last decade, they weren’t focused on brewing particular styles. Instead, they began with the tenet of building a brewery focused on sustainability, using natural ingredients from small farmers wherever possible, and lowering their environmental impact while also giving back through the 1% for the Planet pro...

Ask most American brewers about their first experience with New Zealand hops, and nine out of ten will probably name one single beer—Alpine Beer’s Nelson. Alpine founder Pat McIlhenney was one of the early ones to import southern hemisphere hops, and it’s hard to speak about the hop now without acknowledging the importance of that singular beer. Son Shawn McIlhenney inherited his dad’s love of hop...

Justin Burdt loves hops, and has developed a unique and somewhat counter-intuitive approach to selecting them for Ghost Town’s award-winning West coast IPAs. His focus on tight and lean intensity relies on boosting expression through embracing some hop aroma notes that give other brewers fits, but it’s the push and pull that gives the IPAs such compelling dynamic range. In this episode, Burdt dive...

As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on West coast-style IPA, featuring Matt Brynildson of Firestone Walker, Ben Edmunds of Breakside, and Sean Lawson of Lawson’s Finest. Over the course of th...

As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on wine-beer hybrids, featuring two of the leading brewers in that space—Cory King of Side Project and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River—alongside inspiring...

As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on hazy IPA, featuring some of the most inspiring brewers in that space—Henry Nguyen of Monkish, JC Tetreault of Trillium, and Neil Fisher of Weldwerks. Ov...

New Zealand’s climate, latitude, and singular terroir offers the right environment for hops of unique expression, but it’s their longstanding breeding program that has made possible so many of the signatures aromas and flavors we’ve grown to love. Ron Beatson of NZ Hops is the plant geneticist behind many of these beloved varieties, and on this episode recorded at the Craft Brewers Conference, he...

Matthias Trum is the sixth-generation brewer at Bamberg’s Heller-Trum Bräu—better known as Schlenkerla—and he is as obsessed with local history as he is with producing world-class smoked lagers via their old-fashioned methods. Bamberg has a long history of brewing, and Trum is a great student of that history—and his family has played an important role in it. In this episode, he immerses us in that...

The town of České Budějovice in South Bohemia may be better known to North Americans as Budweis, the German name that’s been appropriated by a couple of famous beers. The real Czech pale lager from here is known as Budvar—sold as Czechvar in the United States, for legal reasons. It’s an easygoing showcase of light, pure malt flavors and soft, balancing bitterness, nearer in profile to a Bavarian h...

Monday Night Brewing has grown from their Atlanta roots into taprooms and breweries in major southern US centers—Birmingham, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee are two, with Charlotte, North Carolina opening soon. The regional powerhouse has grown on the strength of quality beer, measured risk-taking, and a simultaneous embrace of both modern and classic styles. In this episode, brewmaster Peter Kil...

Finding space for personality and authenticity in hazy IPA and tart fruit beer these days can pose a challenge for brewers, but for Jared Welch, Cofounder and Production Director for Nashville, Tennessee’s Southern Grist, that’s no reason to stop pushing. It’s why their popular quick-soured fruit beers are now acidified with a locally-caught Lactobacillus strain, and why they’ve tweaked and increa...

When brewers think of Czech hops, they naturally think of Saaz, whose delicate and ethereal character is nearly synonmyous with lager itself. Yet while craft brewers around the world have developed an obsession with punchy New World hops and the character of specific varieties, they often know relatively litle about the hops from this region that’s been growing them for more than a millennium. In...

To celebrate this milestone—the 300th episode of the Craft Beer & Brewing Podcast—we reassembled three leading voices in West coast IPA to discuss questions spurred on by the original panel discussion, and this time they answered your audio questions, Direct Fire!-style. Kelsey McNair of North Park in San Diego, Evan Price of Green Cheek in Orange and Costa Mesa, and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian...

In the trendy Karlín neighborhood of central Prague, the brewpub called Dva Kohouti embodies the merger of the two key elements of Czech beer culture: the brewing and—no less important—the pouring and service. The side-pull taps attached directly to the serving tanks behind the bar are only part of the story. In this episode recorded at the brewery, head brewer Lukaš Tomsa explains the ideas behin...

Documents show a brewery at the Břevnov monastery in Prague as early as 993. There have been interruptions over the centuries, but the current Břevnov Monastery Brewery of St. Adalbert is the third incarnation, founded in 2011. This one has gained local and international fans for aromatic and highly drinkable pale lager, Benedict 12°, a well as for its other beers, including an imperial stout, a m...

Tucked into a corner of the sprawling grounds at Pilsner Urquell in Plzeň, Czechia—the birthplace of pilsner—a new chapter in that story is developing. Now in its third year, Pivovar Proud is Pilsner Urquell’s experimental playground—a beautifully equipped 30-hectoliter kit producing a range of both ales and lagers and other creations less easily categorized. Its head brewmaster Lenka Straková has...

The sandstone cellars of Plzeňský Prazdroj—better known to us as Pilsner Urquell —may be the ideal place to wallow in the history of the world’s most popular beer style with brewmaster emeritus Václav Berka. As the brewery’s 13th brewmaster in a line that stretches back to Josef Groll, there are few people better qualified to recount the story of pilsner, discuss the details of how it’s brewed at...

Barn Town popped up on our radar in 2022, with a number of beers across styles that scored well with our blind panel of judges, but the best of the bunch was Neon hazy IPA with an impressive score of 98 . In our upcoming IPA issue, they did it again with another 98 for hazy double IPA Stink, Stank, Stunk, so naturally we felt the need to ask some questions and understand how they’re making consist...

When Jeremy Kosmicki was promoted off the Founders packaging line to the brewhouse in the early 2000’s, he relished the opportunity to jump from homebrewing to their 30bbl brewhouse. Over the past two decades, he’s overseen the brewing program while the brewery experienced remarkable growth—launching pivotal brands like All Day IPA, scaling production by orders of magnitude—and since Founders was...

Travis Fritts didn’t set out to brew hazy IPA. In fact, the initial plan for Old Nation was far more conventional—brew traditional American craft beer styles like stout and pale ale, with some European standards like altbier and weizenbock, make the beers good, slap some cool branding on them, and wait for the sales to come. But it was 2015, and craft beer consumers had other ideas. To survive, Ol...

There’s more to German-style beer than just lager, and Cedar Springs Brewing Co. is out to preach the gospel of weissbier to anyone who will listen. Their Kusterer Original Weissbier has a couple GABF medals to its name, and their dedication to foundational brewing methods—step mashing, open fermentation—along with a knack for storytelling that’s necessitated by their focus on the weissbier family...