Good Beer Hunting

Depending on who you are and your connection to alcohol and storytelling, this interview can be different things to different people. It's about a book, which is about bourbon (sort of), but also family and marketing and trying to find things that feel real. If you're a beer enthusiast, you may connect with stories of people geeking out on bourbon and the niche communities that exist. If you work...

As someone who was born in the '80s and thus is not a digital native, I've enjoyed making Internet friends since my parents first got a computer when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. I've spent countless hours in dial-up chat rooms, writing bad poetry on LiveJournal, carefully crafting my away messages on AOL Instant Messenger, and eventually networking on Twitter and Facebook, connecting with p...

The word "community" is often overused in our industry. There's our local community, the communities we've created around ourselves on our favorite social media platforms, or the craft beer community as a whole. But, these days, the more I hear the word, the less meaning I find in it. Are we actually  choosing  to connect, or do we simply happen to be in the same place at the same time? Lucy Do fo...

In this episode, I'm chatting with Will Hawkes, a London-based journalist who's been writing about beer since 2010. Over the past decade, Will has regularly contributed to publications like  The Washington Post  and  The Daily Telegraph , but it was only last year when he wrote his first piece for Good Beer Hunting. Part of our Mother of Invention series, made in partnership with Guinness,   " On...

Have we said "pivot" enough lately? What about "omnichannel," or "innovation"? These words were all thrown around with abandon in 2020, as COVID-19 changed the way we interacted with and bought beer, and dramatically impacted how our favorite breweries did business. In this conversation, we're talking with Kelly Moritz about how Minnesota's Indeed Brewing Company has done some version of all these...

As a person who makes audio, I'm fascinated by the work that goes on behind the scenes. How does an interviewer ask questions? How do two people find a flow, establish trust, and ultimately uncover special moments and stories that might otherwise never get shared? For me, doing audio work means leaning into my deeply curious side, and that's what's reflected in my interview with Natalya Watson. Na...

This is Beth Demmon, and you're listening to the Good Beer Hunting podcast. At the end of every year, it's common for publications to put together roundups of notable people who've made their mark: who you should read, who you should listen to, who you should follow on social media, and so on. And every year, while those mentioned absolutely merit recognition for their work, some people also deser...

Over the past year, Good Beer Hunting has maintained an ongoing, weekly newsletter and expert community under our Sightlines Premium banner. As an extension of our newsy Sightlines coverage—anchored by Kate Bernot and myself, Bryan Roth—the goal of Sightlines Premium is to combine objective data and real-world anecdotes to help industry pros from across beer and beverage alcohol make informed deci...

What does it mean to be an outlier? Who are the people in beer taking small steps and hoping to make big changes?  We're excited and thrilled to announce the relaunch of the AltBrau Podcast, now part of the Good Beer Hunting network of shows. AltBrau is a show that explores the outliers in the world of beer. Join host and GBH contributor Tim Decker, a homebrewer and wild ale collaborator, as he ta...

Some of my favorite stories start small. Usually with a question, perhaps something you ponder passively before it takes you down a rabbit hole full of wild twists and turns, unexpected stories and delights. David Neimanis had just such an inkling. He's a food and beverage writer, and wanted to know more about the surprising comeback of amaro, or bitter Italian liqueur, which, for decades, had fal...

You've probably read some version of this article or headline over the past several months: "Here's a lesson we learned during the 1918 flu that we can apply to the current coronavirus pandemic!" It makes sense that we want to look to history for answers to present-day problems—"history repeats itself" is an old chestnut for a reason. But for some, the inclination to look backwards extends well be...

News flash: 2020 has been a tough one. And yet despite the intense challenges, this year has seen several positive developments, even—and maybe especially—in the world of beer. For example, a couple of truly great books on brewing came out in 2020. The beer world has, slowly but surely, continued to address issues of equity, fairness, and representation. And, on a more personal note, quality Lager...

COVID-19 has changed a lot in our lives, including when and how we choose to consume alcohol. But there continue to be misconceptions about our beer-buying habits this year—and the beer styles that we've been gravitating to. Low-alcohol beer has been a hot topic recently, but does the narrative around those products—one of crescendoing interest and growth—translate to reality? Over the last couple...

In this series of the GBH podcast, we ask members of our team to enter the realm of audio storytelling. Most of us are familiar with the phrase, "A picture is worth a thousand words," right? But now, we're challenging our contributors to actually write down those words, and to create pictures of the world around them as told in their own voices. With that in mind, you're about to hear different st...

Welcome to the Sightlines podcast. I'm Jonny Garrett. On July 21, barely three weeks after the U.K.'s hospitality industry and pubs came out of lockdown, the government announced it would be raising the amount of alcohol tax paid by small breweries. The backlash was immediate and furious, but it wasn't only against the government. The anger was also aimed at a group of larger breweries that had ca...

This week's guest is a long-time industry friend of mine from back when he and I worked tougher to help launch Stony Creek Brewery in Branford, Connecticut. He had just left his sales gig at Blue Point Brewing, and I was only a couple of years into launching Good Beer Hunting's studio and strategy practice. With his energy and insight, we became fast friends. Jamal Robinson is the sales director f...

We hear it all the time: Craft beer is a "community" where folks can come together to socialize, grab a beer, and let loose. But what happens when that "community" isn't as inclusive as it sounds—and when you're stuck watching the industry you love tout its openness while you encounter barrier after barrier to entry? Holly Regan is a longtime writer, and in their first story for Good Beer Hunting—...

Julia Herz has been a notable figure in craft beer for nearly two decades. Much of that time was spent as the face of the Craft Beer Program at the Brewers Association. Her diminutive stature contrasts with her comparatively monumental influence in the industry: in that role, she was a familiar face at beer festivals and conferences like the Craft Brewers Conference and BeerNow Conference; she hel...

Who are you without work? If you went to a party and introduced yourself to someone new, what would you talk about if you couldn't ask them about their job? Work is a tricky subject. We find so much validation in—and center so much of our identities around—the jobs we hold, but what happens when those jobs go away? Good Beer Hunting staff writer Beth Demmon explored this question and more in her l...

I'm not making a radical statement here, as we enter the final weeks of 2020, when I say it's been  hard . Both for individuals and as a collective society. January always offers hopeful promises of new experiences and excitement, but by February of this year, things had already gone downhill thanks to COVID-19's ill-fated arrival. That was before Americans had also rightfully turned their attenti...

Our  Beer and a Shot  series, made in partnership with Miller High Life, asks our contributors to get to know a city. Each piece brings together a bartender and a spirit to tell the story of a particular locale—and uses the relationship between the two to characterize residents' unique drinking styles and preferences. As a result, the reader gets to see into the heart of a place through an intimat...

I've known one of today's guests for a good few years. Susanna Forbes and I first met as drinks journalists at countless events around London. Back then, she was known as one of the hardest-working journalists out there, with plenty of awards and respect as evidence. So I had no idea that all along she had been planning to give up journalism for good. In this episode you'll hear the full story of...

It's hard to tell a story about yourself. And yet, I find I'm most moved by personal narratives—articles that provide a sneak peek into the life of the author. That's one of the things I loved about Samer Khudairi's first long-form piece for Good Beer Hunting. It's called, "(Un)Holy Water — The Middle Eastern Voices Shaping the Global Beer Narrative," and was published on November 12, 2020. I saw...

Today's conversation is another one of those times when I feel profoundly grateful that I get to close the loop with someone that takes me back ten years or more—to when a seed got planted, or a relationship got established, and a decade later we're able to look back and connect the dots on a story that would have been impossible to imagine playing out the way it did. It's a reminder for me that I...

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I'm Claire Bullen, editor-in-chief here at Good Beer Hunting. I spent the early days of this year's lockdown subscribing to a flurry of new and thrilling food-and drink newsletters, from Jonathan Nunn's  Vittles  and Dave Inf...