Good Beer Hunting

Like so many other breweries, the team at Aslin Beer Company is new to the industry, part of roughly 500 breweries that opened in 2015 and more than 3,000 that have appeared in the last five years.  Alongside many contemporaries, the rise of Aslin can be seen through the lens of what online beer enthusiast communities can do for a small business. In less than two years, Aslin has become a hot comm...

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.  This first episode is devoted to Victory Brewing Company's Prima Pils.

Today's episode is our annual hangover party podcast, an event we host here at the studio in the wake of Upper & Downers, our coffee beer festival. People have started traveling from all over the world—in some cases, as far away as Japan!—to attend this insane mashup of coffee and beer culture we put together with our friend Stephen Morrissey (a world barista champion and works at the Specialty Co...

I've got something a little new for you this time around. This is an episode devoted to the GBH Collective, thats the writers and photographers we have around the world who bring you the amazing stories and interviews you see on Good Beer Hunting.  As our network has grown, it's occurred to me that like you, so much of what I experience in beer world comes through the eyes and ears of these fantas...

Today's guest is one of those serendipitous run-ins I sometimes have with a fellow writer, in this case someone I've followed for some time, but never had the chance to meet in person. Pete Brown, who lives in London, has written numerous books over the years, including Three Sheets To The Wind: One Man's Quest For The Meaning Of Beer. And lately his writing has taken him into both the history and...

At Rate Beer Best, it became clear that this was the year the British breweries would assert themselves among the best in the world. Many of the best British breweries have followed in the footsteps of their American counterparts and are now evolving at a similar pace — but what really made this the year of the Brits was the shift in Rate Beer's own audience. According to Joe Tucker, founder of Ra...

In the tradition of American Wild Ales, a name like American Solera might sound fundamental—but it's a relative newcomer for brewer/founder Chase Healey. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, far from the hotspots and critical masses of drinkers for such delicacies, Healey has carved out a life and a living that's far different than the way he entered brewing. His first venture, Prairie Artisan Ales, in which he st...

Craft beer drinkers are finding better and better beers available in more places than ever before. And a big reason for that is large-format stores like Target, Costco, and, here in Chicago, Jewel-Osco. These big stores are looking for ways to connect with their customers on premium and locally-sourced products. The whole food and beverage industry is shifting local, not just craft beer.  But for...

This week's conversation is potentially one of the most enjoyable and insightful conversations I've had since I started working in beer. I spend a lot of my time chatting to brewers and bar owners, but never have I taken the time to pose questions to someone who works in the world of beer distribution. I've known Pete Brissenden from back when he worked for London's Meantime brewery, way before SA...

BJ Pichman is the head brewer at Forbidden Root brewpub, Chicago's "botanic beer" producer. As a homebrewer, he found a niche brewing pilot batches for recipe development consultants, and that eventually that got him a gig brewing the earliest batches of Forbidden Root's first trials for their namesake root beer-inspired concoction designed by Randy Mosher and Robert Finkel.  Eventually that conce...

This week's guest is an artist and commercial screenprinter here in Chicago. We've worked with him numerous times through GBH making posters and hosting workshop events. He's well-known but depending on how you discovered his work, you know him for very different reasons. Myself, I knew him as the guy who did the Dark Lord Day posters, and Apocalypse Cow from Three Floyds. For others, he's an arti...

I spent the break up in Michigan, with my wife's family in Grand Rapids like we do every year. But this year the city felt completely different. So many new things are opening, major new projects underway in beer and otherwise. We visited Sovengaard, Rick Muschiana's new nordic-inspired restaurant and beer garden. Rick used to work at Brewery Vivant, one of our favorites. And he took what he learn...

We're sitting down with Paul Vander-Heide of Vandermill Cider out of Michigan. I first met Paul back when he was a tiny little cider mill in Spring Lake, personally loading a few kegs into his van and driving them to Chicago. He's always been one step ahead of the cider wave that took off like a shot—and is currently hitting a bit of a plateau—in the U.S., depending on what kind of producer you ar...

Today's episode is a really interesting discussion with one of the most influential people in international beer—Robert Lobovsky of Pilsner Urquell.  I say "most influential" because he's the face and ambassador for one of the world's most famous beers, which has only gone on to embolden its reputation over the years as its shifted from a European gem to an international icon for the Pilsner style...

Today's guest hails from Wellington, New Zealand. Stu McKinlay—along his business partner, Sam Possenniskie—founded Yeastie Boys in 2008. Stu had also been running a homebrew supply company called Liberty Brewing, but eventually sold it and put all of his energy into brewing. Instead of building their own brewery, the Yeastie Boys decided to focus on their brand. After developing their recipes, th...

Back in April of 2014, I got an email from Jake Koeneman, Josh Hambright, and Chris Bly about a concept they were starting up in Indianapolis called Central State Brewing. They had their collective mind set on being a 100% Brett brewery, they had a plan in place, they wanted help with the branding side of things, and before long GBH was working alongside them to bring the concept to life. Now it's...

This week's episode is devoted to an entirely different collaboration. This one is between Thomas Larsen of Ska Brewing from Durango Colorado, and Stephan Mance from Half Acre right here in Chicago.  This collaboration, like most, is largely for fun and a trip to Chicago, which Ska founder Dave Thiboldeaux is fond of making. But there's a special reason that these two breweries are tied together a...

Today's guest is Michael Salvatore of Heritage Bicycles in Chicago. He's an entrepreneur with a sort of gutsy, intuitive, creative approach to creating things like bike shops, cafes, and other community-oriented places in the city that I've grown to love as a customer, and admire as a small business owner.  He's one of those people that you start chatting with over coffee and walk away with some n...

Today's guest has been working in Chicago beer for a long time now, but her journey is anything but typical, and it doesn't follow a straight line at all.  Yes, she's a home brewer who now has her own brewery. But here's how the dots actually connect.  She started as a homebrewer, and was certainly thinking about opening a brewery some day. But her next step was the role of a beer buyer for Banger...

We're only a couple of episodes in to exploring the UK's craft beer culture on this podcast, but already stories are beginning to emerge that I wouldn't have heard if we'd never started. Not long after speaking to Beavertown's Creative Director, Nick Dwyer, I was approached by his good friend, James Rylance of East London's Redchurch Brewery. Rylance started telling me about his new brewing projec...

Today we're going to talk about origin beers.  There's increasing discussion in niche beer circles about the accuracy of some of our beer vernacular. What constitutes farmhouse ales, for example? Most leading farmhouse beer producers don't operate a farm at all. Rather, they hold close to some of the prevailing traditions of those styles largely lost to history. And increasingly, farmhouse produce...

This week's episode features one of Chicagoland's newest production breweries—Miskatonic in Darien, Illinois.  My first memory of these guys was sitting at Owen & Engine, an English-inspired bar on Western Avenue that routinely puts together a great list. Scanning down through it, I noticed a name I'd didn't recognize, and next to it, a simple, refreshing style designator—"Mild." Now, I fully admi...

A while back, when we were shooting Grit & Grain in the Goose Island barrel warehouse, there were a series of barrels set aside for a special project lead by Innovation Manager, Mike Siegel. All I knew at the time was that it was a Brett Pale Ale of sorts. Other details were kept close.  Today, I got to taste the final results of that experimental beer. But more importantly, I got the back story o...

Longtime GBH readers may recall the article I wrote about Hill Farmstead back in January 2014. For GBH, and myself as a beer writer, it was a bit of a turning point. That article remains our most-read brewery profile ever. And now that it has two years running on it, I doubt that'll ever change. The reach it's created for GBH opened a lot of doors for me and the team, and it was shortly after that...

Today's guest is perhaps someone who could be described as the "hardest working person in London's beer industry." As well as heading up Marketing, Events & Comms for The Five Points Brewing Company in Hackney, East London, Doreen Joy Barber also co-runs the quarterly London Brewers Market, is an active member of all-female beer group, the Crafty Beer Girls and even finds the time to pull a few sh...