Good Beer Hunting

There's a case to be made that some of the most essential members of our craft beer communities aren't brewers, or writers, or distributors. They're publicans who influence the industry by connecting people. Chris Cohen is one such person, though he wears many more hats than that of just beer bar founder. He does indeed run a popular bar in Old Devil Moon, which opened in 2016 in San Francisco's B...

For generations, a lot about the story of beer has been filtered through advertising or experiences geared toward men. This is rapidly changing, and for the better. In today's GBH Collective, we're talking with Gray Chapman about some of the ways beer lovers are finding new connections in settings that can enhance the camaraderie of something as simple as sharing a collection of beer. Gray recentl...

Our resident composer for the podcast and our commercial video work, Andrew Thiboldeaux, is writing original scores devoted to beers he finds fascinating. These are interpretations of the experience of drinking them. But they're also just great tunes.

It's fair to say that mixed fermentation is having a moment in the U.K. Natural wine is buzzing like craft beer once did, and its beer equivalent is starting to do the same. I mean, no one knows what to call it—mixed ferm, farmhouse, wild ale, sour beer, barrel-fermented beer, low intervention beer. They all mean subtlety different things that never quite cover all the bases. Each brewery seems to...

Welcome to another Fervent Few episode of the Good Beer Hunting podcast where myself, Jim Plachy, and GBH's strategic director, Michael Kiser, catch up. We'll talk about the topics and discussions that took place in our membership community in the last couple weeks. Our 500 or so subscribers are scattered all over the world. Sometimes we meet up with them when we're on the road, or they hang out w...

Today's episode is our annual Hangover Party podcast, and event we host in the wake of Upper & Downers, our coffee, beer, culinary, and cocktail festival. People come from all over the country to attend this insane mashup of cultures we put together with our friend and Uppers & Downers co-founder Stephen Morrissey, who's a world barista champion and works at the Specialty Coffee Association. And t...

Let's take a trip. Let's get away from our warehouse districts and downtowns where so many of our favorite bars and breweries are found. We're going to the farm. As discussions of place have become more common in beer and brewers and drinkers alike have taken up the effort of using "terroir" as a descriptive term, the place of agriculture has never been more front of mind in the U.S. beer industry...

Look around the beer industry, and you'll see lots of things going on that are decidedly...not beer. With the success of flavored malt beverages, hard seltzer, and even a resurgence of regional cider brands, brewers all over are finding new ways to attract drinkers and boost their bottom line with products outside of their wheelhouse. Not that there's anything wrong with that. These are businesses...

Like so many other areas of publishing, things have changed in recent years for beer-focused media. While the stories told from all corners of the world have gotten more in-depth and introduced new people and ideas, the number of platforms where enthusiasts can find this information has been shifting. It wasn't long ago that All About Beer, one of the most prominent beer publications in the countr...

There's no getting around the fact that making beer is a science. But it can truly become special when it mixes with creativity and art. In today's episode, we're in Raleigh, North Carolina, where GBH was part of a discussion to determine where those things can overlap. In February, I hosted a panel discussion at Brewery Bhavana's production facility organized by Triangle Wine Company, a local win...

[Photo by Matthew Curtis] Few breweries can represent the past, present, and future of American craft beer the way Stone Brewing can. And it's co-founder, today's guest, Greg Koch, has been known to speak authoritatively about the entire timeline of craft beer at times. And with good reason—he's seen and participated in most of it himself. For some, though, his voice can sometimes seem anachronist...

As many of you know, we're in the midst of Uppers & Downers week here in Chicago, celebrating more than five years of our coffee and beer culture collaboration between myself, Michael Kiser, and world barista champion Stephen Morrissey. This year's festival promises to be our best yet, with about 25 different coffee beer collaborations, a dozen different roasters pulling their best espresso shots...

I'm not sure how to introduce CAMRA. On the one hand, it's the biggest single-issue consumer interest group in the UK, the savior of British brewing that's as responsible for our amazing beer scene as any American influence. On the other hand, it's portrayed as an irrelevant lumbering beast that seems to stagger from controversy to controversy. The Campaign for Real Ale was founded in 1971 in resp...

Whether you read the words or hear the voices of the Good Beer Hunting editorial staff, there's one guy working behind the scenes who doesn't often get the byline, but offers plenty of insight and guidance to get those things from draft to publish-ready. In today's episode of the GBH Collective, we're chatting with the man behind the curtain, Austin L. Ray, editorial director for Good Beer Hunting...

When it comes to running a business, partnerships are key. In the beer industry, that often shows up in leadership where one person may handle the books or operational responsibilities, and another focuses on the liquid itself. In all cases, finding the balance between people and personalities is importance of yin and yang that can make breweries succeed. Lucky for me, I recently had the chance to...

What the hell is going in Maryland and Texas? You may have caught a bunch of coverage of these two states on GBH over the past year. Their state politicians are creating—depending on who you ask—all sorts of good, bad, and ugly situations for their respective craft beer industries. In Maryland, infighting about how beer is sold and regulated has led to the legislature's attempts to strip oversight...

In the past year, there's been plenty of talk in the industry about how cannabis is going to impact drinking trends. There's been close attention paid to states in the U.S. where marijuana has become legalized and its potential connection to declining alcohol consumption, which was on the downward slide anyway. But that's not why we're here today. In this episode of the GBH Collective, we are talk...

Pressure Drop may have been founded during the early days of London's brewing renaissance, but its trajectory has been very different to many of its compatriots.  While other UK breweries of the same age—the likes of Beavertown, Five Points, and Fourpure—expanded rapidly, putting together sales teams, attending trade shows and contract brewing overseas to hit demand, Pressure Drop's founders have...

What moves you? What is it that motivates your actions, beliefs, hopes, and dreams? There are all sorts of personal and professional ways to answer these questions, and sometimes we're lucky enough to have them intertwined. More than two decades ago, Eric Salazar helped to establish one of the most influential barrel programs in the world at New Belgium in Colorado. Its impact continues to resonat...

What's the right way to have sex with a dolphin? I'm sure you didn't expect that question to be posted on a beer-focused interview show, but here we are. It's a fun benefit—if you dare call it that—of chatting with this episode's guest. Matt Saincome doesn't write about beer. He doesn't actually drink it, either. But as founder and editor-in-chief of the satirical website The Hard Times, he does o...

Today's guest are an unlikely due of a documentary film maker and a master cicerone. Doug Tivola is the director of Brewmaster - a documentary that tries to weave together the varied and often dissociated threads in the beer world - like big and small, amateur and pro, nostalgic and new wave —and the results are at times flattering to the beer industry and at time a bit embarrassing to have reflec...

This episode is a two-parter devoted to the intersection of taprooms and retailers as they increasingly find themselves in competition with each other for the limited number of customers and dollars available in their markets for craft beer. There are a number of factors that have made taprooms a newly competitive aspect of the three-tier system—or what's left of it in some cases. Laws have been c...

This episode is a two-parter devoted to the intersection of taprooms and retailers as they increasingly find themselves in competition with each other for the limited number of customers and dollars available in their markets for craft beer. There are a number of factors that have made taprooms a newly competitive aspect of the three-tier system—or what's left of it in some cases. Laws have been c...

Welcome to another Fervent Few episode of the Good Beer Hunting podcast where myself, Jim Plachy, and GBH's strategic director, Michael Kiser, catch up. We'll talk about the topics and discussions that took place in our membership community in the last couple weeks. Our 500 or so subscribers are scattered all over the world. Sometimes we meet up with them when we're on the road, or they hang out w...

Moksa Brewing Company in Rocklin, California sold out the slots for their brewery club program in 2017. What's particularly notable about that? They hadn't yet served a single drop of beer. When drinkers discuss breweries like Moksa, there's a label to which fans often turn that fits snugly within the cultural zeitgeist of American craft beer: hype. That dubious h-word is not a term head brewer De...