Radio Brews News

This week we catch up with Chris Sheehan, head brewer for Lion's Malt Shovel Brewery. We teed up the interview in the wake of the furore over the placing of a number of the James Squire beers in the GABS Hottest 100 Aussie Craft Beers, including 150 Lashes at number 5. Here's your chance to hear what Chris has to say about the beers and his approach to brewing and see if it influences your view. D...

This week's episode is a reply of our live countdown of the GABS Hottest 100 Aussie Craft Beers of 2015, recorded on Australia Day 2016. The recording quality isn't great as we picked up some refrigeration compressor noise as we recorded at Brisbane's Green Beacon Brewery, but the conversation was excellent. Matt is joined by Australian Brews News editor James Atkinson and we cross to Pete Mitcham...

Welcome back to Radio Brews News for 2016. We kick off the year with one of our favourite guests, Professor Charlie Bamforth, Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences at UC Davis. Charlie is one of the foremost experts on brewing science, and a passionate advocate for beer. All beer. Our chats are always wonderful. In this chat we discuss what 'craft' and 'traditional' mean...

This week we catch up with Tom Delmont, the face of Fixation Brewing Co, Stone & Wood's specialty IPA brand. Tom has long been a fixture on the Melbourne beer scene, leaving a career as an etymologist to become Mountain Goat's first Road Goat. he is a passionate advocate for more hops and IPAs. Don't forget to send us your feedback, or leave a voice mail by calling (07) 3040 1508, that we'll play...

This week Matt and Pete head to Melbourne's Temple Brewing to catch up with happenings there. We sit down with new owner Nick Pang, head brewer Glenn Harrison, and national sales manager Mark Waghorne and chat about all things Temple, including how Nick came to own the brewery, how Mark came to Temple from Mountain Goat and how Glenn came to brew a cracking pilsner, amongst other things. Don't for...

This week we catch up with Steve Jeffares of Local Taphouse, GABS and the annual Hottest 100 craft beer poll. Voting opens for the much debated, always interesting Hottest 100 craft beer countdown on December 14 and we wanted to chat with Steve about what's in store this year, both for the polling and for the countdown. Steve also surprises us with the announcement, since made public, that GABS is...

This week we catch up with Chris Herring from Mount Tamborine's Beard & Brau brewery. We chat about the brewery and its origins and then about their new beer that promises to be gluten reduced despite being made with malted barley. The beer is possible due to the use of a brewing enzyme, Brewers Clarex. The enzyme has been used for some time to reduce chill haze in beer and has tended to be used b...

This week our planned guest, Aine O'Hora from Ireland's Boyne Brewhouse, was forced to cancel at  the last minute so Pete and Matt this week's episode sees Matt and Pete discussing the news of the day: CUB's increasing focus on heritage brands, Rob Ruminski's article arguing craft brewers need to complain less and market better and also whether Lion's beautiful truths campaign glosses over some in...

After their unplanned hiatus, Pete and Matt are back, this week chatting with the guys behind beer-powered fundraiser Brewmanity and also the team at Sydney's Batch Brewing. Retired footballer David Neitz and teamed up with Melbourne beer identity Barney Matthews to create Brewmanity and see what would happen if you imagined that a portion of every beer we ever drank contributed to doing some good...

This week we catch up with Ben Kooyman, one of the founders of Endeavour Vintage Beer Co. As usual, it's a wide ranging chat talking about the origins of the brewery and musings about labelling, vintage beer, retailing and plenty of other things going on in the beer world at the moment. We also talk about their beers too. Don't forget to send us your feedback, or leave a voice mail by calling (07)...

This week we catch up once again with influential beer historian Martyn Cornell from the blog Zythophile. We last caught up with Martyn back in 2011 when he had set a cat amongst the pigeons correcting some errors in the Oxford Companion to Beer. Martyn has a new book out, Strange Tales of Ale, which gives the true account of a wide variety of beer stories, such as the Great Porter Explosion at th...

This week we take a look at the latest crowd-funding campaign, this time to pay for a new venues taps and also speak with brewer Scott Hargrave about his soon-to-open Gold Coast brewery. Adelaide bar-in-development NOLA has taken to crowd-funding site Pozible to raise funds to pay for the taps in their venue. In their words: "We want to give people the opportunity to help us stick it up the big gu...

This week we catch up with Denita Wawn, Chief Executive Officer of the Brewers Association and also Mazen Hajjar, co-founder of Melbourne's Hawkers Beer. Our chat with Denita is very wide ranging and discusses the role of the Brewers Association, which represents the large breweries of Australia and New Zealand in their legislative and regulatory affairs. We end up looking at the association's rol...

This week we catch up with Denita Wawn, Chief Executive Officer of the Brewers Association and also Mazen Hajar, co-founder of Melbourne's Hawkers Beer. Our chat with Denita is very wide ranging and discusses the role of the Brewers Association, which represents the large breweries of Australia and New Zealand in their legislative and regulatory affairs. We end up looking at the association's role...

This week we catch up with Owen 'OJ' Johnston from Hop Products Australia and David Golding from Red Hill Brewery. Owen talks us through the Australian and international hop trends following the release of the annual Barth Report. The report has been published annually, with few exceptions, since 1877 and provides a fascinating insight into the annual hop production and trends. David joins us to t...

Two more great chats again this week for your weekend listening pleasure. This week we chat with Bobby Henry, brewer at contract-brewing-soon-to-be-brewery-owning Quiet Deeds and Doug and Gabi Michael from boutique maltster, Gladfield Malt. Bobby has a very frank chat about the evolution of the Quiet Deeds brand and their plans to open their own brewery, while Doug & Gabi discuss their transition...

This week is a study in contrasts as we catch up with Michael, Jack and Red from South Australia's Pirate Life Brewing, makers of unashamedly hoppy beers. We also catch up with Anthony Clem, Quality Brewer at Brisbane's XXXX Brewery to find out all about the new Pale Ale being released today under the XXXX Gold label. Don't forget to send us your feedback, or leave a voicemail by calling (07) 3040...

This week we catch up with Ben Kraus from Beechworth's Bridge Road Brewers, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Ben is always passionate and forthright, especially on the subject of provenance, and shares his thoughts on the changes he has seen in the small brewing industry over the decade since he started brewing is his dad's shed until the present, where he now employs 25 staff. This week...

In a bumper, but Prof-less, episode Matt catches up with Toohey's Brewery Director Mark Toomey to learn all about the new Toohey's Darling Pale Ale. Sections of social media have delighted in sneering at the media release describing the beer as 'unchallenging' but we learn from Mark that the beer is all malt, uses a blend of Galaxy, Willamette and Amarillo hops and the Tooheys ale yeast. It may be...

This week Matt and Pete actually catch up over a beer - well actually a morning cup of coffee - and chat with publican Josh Collins from Black Bunny Kitchen on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. Black Bunny Kitchen has established itself as a beacon for beer adventurers in a part of Australia that has proved a hard nut to crack for craft beer. We find out what Josh has been doing and get some insights i...

This week we meet BentSpoke's Richard Watkins to celebrate his brewery's first birthday and hear his thoughts on the small brewing industry gained over twenty years. We then catch up with brewing educator and consultant Vincent Costanzo from Costanzo Brewing Consultants to learn about some of the issues affecting beer quality that anyone thinking of becoming a brewer should be considering. If you...

A cracking show this week in which we caught up with Brooklyn Brewery co-founder, Steve Hindy, and talk about the strength of craft and the challenges it faces. The interview follows some of the themes Steve discussed in hisopening keynote at the recent CBIA Craft Brewers Conference. We also meet consumer psychologist and regular panellist on the Gruen Series, Adam Ferrier. Amongst many thank, Ada...

We're in the throes of Good Beer Week in Melbourne, but in the interests of keeping it regular we managed to catch up with Australian International Beer Awards chief judge Warren Pawsey, who ends the discussion about what Session IPAs really are.  We chat to newly crowned Beer Writer of the Year, Luke Robertson, and we hear from Co-chief GABS man Steve Jeffares how the first session of GABS went a...

This week, a year on from the ACCC’s Byron Bay intervention, we speak with the Chair of the ACCC, Rod Simms, about the ACCC’s role and function and the steps they are taking to ensure that what you see on the label is a true reflection of what’s behind the beer. Apologies for the audio quality with this interview. It was a great chat down a terrible phone line. But first, we speak with Tim Wills f...

This week we chat with Jamie Cook who, while these days better known as a founder of Stone & Wood Brewery, has many years of experience working for Australia's two largest brewing companies as well as as a marketing consultant. Jamie is one of our favourite industry watchers and while the conversation inevitably comes back to Stone & Wood's approach to business, the conversation looks at issues of...