Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Edwin Collazo is a natural born salesperson. Yes, he’s a brewer and brewery owner, but the bridge in City Built Brewing ’s logo isn’t just a graphic element—connecting customers with beer they love is the entire point of this Grand Rapids, Michigan brewery. But the focus of the brewery has changed over the years, and COVID presented the crisis that precipitated the brewery rethinking their approac...

Jason Spaulding, cofounder of Brewery Vivant and Broad Leaf Brewery, has been around the block. He cofounded his first brewery, New Holland, in the mid-90’s, and after exiting that brewery and spending time away from the brewing industry, launched Brewery Vivant with his wife Kris about twelve years ago. Operating a brewery with a niche focus comes with benefits as well as challenges, but Vivant h...

Ken Schramm wants to prove it’s possible to make mead that’s every bit as fine as the finest wine, and over the past decade his eponymously named meadery has pioneered a number of new processes and approaches to help achieve that goal. From shortening the honey supply chain and eliminating intervention and heat degradation, to hand picking fruit for ripeness from their own estate orchard, Schramm’...

BKS Artisan Ales (Kansas City, Missouri) is the result of husband-and-wife team Brian and Mary Rooney’s attempt to bring taproom-based rapid innovation to brewing in their hometown, and their GABF silver medal in 2021 for Clouds hazy double IPA, GABF gold in 2022 for Rockhill & Locust dark mild, and great scores from the Craft Beer & Brewing blind judging panel have confirmed that they’ve...

You may be more familiar with Doug Veliky through his BeerAficionado social presence, but through his Beercrunchers.com blog and his work as chief financial officer, chief strategy officer, and now chief marketing officer for Chicago’s Revolution Brewing , he’s gained a reputation for smart, strategic, and data-driven takes on what’s happening and what will happen in craft beer’s near term. In thi...

This week’s podcast is a roundtable discussion with three leading voices in West Coast IPA—Kelsey McNair of North Park, Evan Price of Green Cheek, and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River. Over the course of two hours, these three discuss the ins and outs of brewing modern West Coast IPA today, including: simplifying malt bills to pilsner or two row pale building body with water chemistry to support ho...

Sean White, cofounder of Athens, Ohio’s Little Fish, is committed to mixed culture sour beer. It’s not the only thing that they brew, but it’s part of the soul of the brewery and a founding pillar that they’ve continued to develop (and improve) over the past eight years. Over those years, they’ve been recognized a number of times for the beers from this program—gold and bronze World Beer Cup medal...

Over the past decade of working professionally in beer, Inner Voice cofounders Rhett Caseman and Josh Johnson have brewed beers of every style, on systems of very different scales. But when they envisioned a brewery of their own, they knew they wanted to keep it small and taproom focused, with a balance between thoughtfully executed classic beer styles, and leading edge experimentation in hop-driv...

In this year-end episode, we look back at the past year of podcasts, and count down your favorites, with excerpts that include: Sapwood Cellars on dry hopping technique, lowering temperature for dry hopping, using an aggressive rousing regimen, and the masking effect of other dry hop flavors on thiols Sam Tierney of the Firestone Walker Propagator and Bob Kunz of Highland Park on selecting malt fo...

Halfway Crooks cofounders Joran Van Ginderachter and Shawn Bainbridge may love the wide world of craft beer, but with their Atlanta, Georgia brewery the goal was to create a space and beers that would let drinkers find a beer they like, and drink the same beer all night. If you arrive with the goal of maximizing check-ins to the widest number of beers, you’ll quickly find you’re in the wrong place...

Brian Purcell may have founded Atlanta’s Three Taverns nine years ago to focus on Belgian-style beers, but today it’s the spirit of that brewing tradition that informs their approach more than a purely stylistic expression. Creativity balanced with drinkability still drives their brewing decisions, whether that’s brewing an American-hopped modern pils expression in conjunction with the team from P...

Jon Shari of Little Cottage, just east of Atlanta, was an avoid homebrewer who built a reputation for his big dessert-focused imperial stouts, and built on that momentum to launch the small, taproom-focused brewery in 2021. But brewing for the taproom is still a small affair, with a very manual 3.5 bbl brewhouse that makes some difficult-to-brew beers even harder. In this episode, he discusses the...

2022 has been rough on craft beer. From the macroeconomic forces hitting the entire economy—rising rents, rampant inflation in raw materials and logistics costs, shortages, rising labor costs—to the industry-specific challenges like changing consumer interest in packaging formats, shifting beer styles, distributor focuses, changing draft beer landscape, and more, it's become increasingly difficult...

Green Flash’s 2018 bankruptcy rocked the beer world and threw the future of their iconic brands into doubt. Earlier this year, those brands were acquired by Sweetwater, and head brewer Ryan Joy was tasked with figuring out how to brew them on a different brewhouse, with vastly different water, and for an audience with a much different context for beer. In this episode, he discusses: matching the u...

It’s possible to make great lagers with a single-infusion mash and cylindroconical fermenters—just ask former sportswriter turned brewer Randy Booth. At the taproom-focused Twin Barns brewery, on the shores of vacation destination Lake Winnipesaukee, he’s used the quieter winter season for the time and tank space to hone their lager program. The result earlier this year was a blind-review panel sc...

If you’re going to make a kettle-acidified fruit beer, make it well. For Wiley Roots cofounder and head brewer Kyle Carbaugh, that means everything from using rustic unmalted wheat from a farmer friend to creating their own fruit pureés from fresh whole fruit. After all, you can’t drive novel, engaging fruit flavor that stands out if you do things the exact same way as every other brewer out there...

Brooklyn’s Wild East is a brewer’s brewery. It’s the kind of place that other local brewers go for a beer when they’re not working. The lagers are exceptional, characterful more than crispy, and their best-selling IPA is a West coast-style iteration—a stark contrast to the hazy and juicy IPAs that make up the bulk of the offerings from neighbors Other Half or Finback. Cofounder and head brewer Bre...

You’ve heard from us, and you’ve heard from our writers and critics, but in this episode of our Best in beer trilogy, you’ll hear from brewers behind two of our Best 20 Beers in 2022—Carey Fristoe of Black Spruce in Fairbanks, Alaska and John Garcia of King Harbor in Redondo Beach, California. Fristoe discusses the design and brewing of Aromadome hazy IPA, a mashup of east and west approaches with...

Our core writing team spends an inordinate amount of time every year talking to brewers, hop growers, maltsters, suppliers, distributors, publicans, and other leaders in the brewing industry. Our goal is to make sure we’re bringing you the very best in actionable insight in every story we write. In our critic’s lists every year, we share what gets us excited—brewers, beers, and anything that exemp...

It’s that time again: Our blind review panelists and editors at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ® have tasted through thousands of beers, winnowing them down to what we believe are the very best. That yearlong process culminates in our annual Best in Beer issue ( available now ), featuring your Readers’ Choice picks and our Best 20 Beers in 2022. In this special episode of the Craft Beer & B...

Joe Grimm of Grimm Artisanal Ales would like to dispel some myths about hazy IPA. “No matter what some brewers say, hazy IPA is one of the hardest styles to make, because it’s never good enough. I’m never happy with the beer.” That never-satisfied attitude has driven the husband-and-wife brewing duo to explore different methods of making compelling hazy beer, from top-cropping yeast to employing a...

What do you get when Michael Tonsmiere, aka The Mad Fermentationist, and author of the book American Sour Beers joins forces with Scott Janish, author of The New IPA, to start a brewery in a Maryland suburb somewhere between Baltimore and Washington DC? Pretty much what you’d expect—a brewery that tends to focus on creative expressions in the pale ale and IPA space, as well as progressive approach...

In this special GABF Gold edition of the podcast, Greg Winget of Wye Hill Brewing in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Alex Sarames of Deadwords Brewing in Orlando discuss their specific (and often unconventional) approaches to their respective gold medal–winning beers. Winget and Wye Hill won gold with Luminous Beings, a hazy pale ale that uses a variety of current techniques to maximize flavor expres...

Garrett Ward of Sideward Brewing in Orlando, Florida loves to tinker and experiment with new hop formats, and whether it’s hazy and juicy IPAs or their fruit-forward-but-structured American iterations (often now fermented with lager yeast), he’s constantly searching for ways to use these concentrated hop products to boost flavor and intensity. In this episode, he discusses: Using hazy IPA techniqu...

In this special episode of the podcast, we brought together segments with two brewers who both won gold medals at the recent Great American Beer Festival—Dustin Baker of Roadmap Brewing in San Antonio, Texas, and Adrian Garrett, head brewer of Precarious Beer Project in Williamsburg, Virginia. Baker of Roadmap discusses: adjusting the malt bill to build malt flavor in despite brewhouse limitations...