Taplines

After 60 episodes of award-winning modern beer history, this is the final episode of Taplines. To send off the show, we're turning the Taplines Time Machine forward instead of backwards to speculate on how the American beer industry's past might inform its future with the inimitable historian and author of 'Ambitious Brew' Maureen Ogle. Maureen was our first guest, so it only makes sense that she'...

Journalist Charlie Warzel joins the show today for a wide-ranging, cross-discipline episode to discuss how the GamerGate style of extremely online grievance politics has become the dominant format for conservative backlash today, why it works so well, and why companies like Anheuser-Busch InBev — with all the resources in the world and a decade to learn how to brace against bad-faith attacks — kee...

George Esquivel is the co-founder of Four Corners Brewing Company in Dallas, Texas. He joins Taplines today to talk about selling his brewery to Constellation, spending five years within the belly of Big Beer's Big Golden Beast, then retaking control to go independent again in 2023. It's a rare perspective that only a few brewers across the country have, and Esquivel graces us with rare candor whe...

Kimberly Clements, co-founder and managing partner of Pints LLC, joins Taplines today to talk about Anheuser-Busch's introduction of a little beer called Michelob Ultra, which August Busch III personally tapped her family's Arizona distributorship to help test out in 2002 in advance of a national release. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

Joe Thompson, the founder and president of Independent Beverage Group, is a five-decade drinks business veteran, and one of the most prolific brokers of middle-tier mergers and acquisitions in the United States. He joins Taplines today to talk about how Coors’ “silver” network and Miller’s “blue” network became Molson Coors’ “blue/silver” network — an esoteric saga he knows well, given he was invo...

Steve Luke, founder and head brewer of Seattle’s Cloudburst Brewing, joins Taplines today for a freewheeling conversation about an iconic moment — arguably, the iconic moment — of the 2018 Great American Beer Festival, which he single-handedly engineered both literally and figuratively with the help of a DIY t-shirt that read “F*CK AB-INBEV” across the front. There’s a backstory there, more so tha...

This week on Taplines, we're going cross-category with our pond-crossing pal from Cocktail College: VinePair's managing editor, Tim McKirdy. Tune in for a genre-breaking conversation about how the hard seltzer boom gave way to a bust that cleared the board for Twisted Tea’s decades-in-the-making moment in the sun — and paved the runway that vodka-based interloper and VinePair Next Wave 2024 Rising...

We’re putting our normal Taplines format on the shelf today for a very special reunion episode of sorts with journalists Kate Bernot of Sightlines, and Jess Infante of Brewbound, to talk about two turning points in the national suds saga. Some of you listening may know the three of us as the Beer Byliners, the name of a Twitter Space (man, remember those?!) that we hosted in the early days of the...

Today on Taplines, meet Annie Johnson. She’s a longtime homebrewer, the self-avowed Queen of Beer, and an old source of mine from way back. Annie has been brewing her own beer since the mid-’90s, and winning first-place ribbons for ‘em nearly as long. The woman has enough these days to make a damn cape out of ‘em — and she did. We talked about that, and so much more. Don't forget to like, review,...

Like any good parable, the "David and Goliath" self-mythology of the American craft brewing industry in the '80s and '90s was illuminating, compelling — and maybe a bit reductive, too. In Episodes 33 and 34, we examined this us-versus-them dynamic from the perspective of one of the “thems,” Keith Villa, who created the Blue Moon Brewing Company from within the Coors colossus in 1995. Today, we’re...

Today, we’re joined by the one and only Bianca Bruno, an editor of the venerable trade publication Beer Business Daily, who was there, live and in-person, to cover the landmark trademark trial between San Diego’s Stone Brewing Company and macrobrewer Molson Coors over an allegedly infringing Keystone Light rebrand. The federal jury trial yielded a shocking verdict, and what it revealed about the s...

After trading hands several times and closing its Rhode Island facility to contract brew, the Narragansett brand was eventually scooped up by a group of investors in 2005. With hands-on experience marketing beverage alcohol from creating Hendrick's Gin and Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, Quaker City Mercantile founder and 'Gansett investor Steven Grasse set about rebranding the flagship legacy lager and...

Our guest this episode is Jeff Musial, a bev-alc industry veteran who was working in research and development for new products at Anheuser-Busch in the mid-Aughts. This was a heady moment for the St. Louis giant; Bud Light volumes would peak in 2008, the same year the Brazilian-led Belgian outfit InBev would complete its hostile takeover of the firm. But before any of that, Jeff and his team would...

In 2018, Gold Dot Beer’s Kevin Davey was working as the brewmaster of Portland Oregon’s Wayfinder Beer when he hit upon the idea of brewing an India Pale Ale with lager yeast. Hazy IPAs had yet to consolidate their grasp as the dominant substyle of the traditional West Coast variety, and this was the age of tinkering; in fact, Davey says his experimental brew was an answer of sorts to Kim Sturdeva...

Towards the end of the Teens, Kim Sturdavant was brewing at Social Kitchen & Brewery in San Francisco when he developed a new kind of India Pale Ale. He christened his crisp, dry varietal Hop Champagne, and christened the promising new substyle "Brut IPA," a nod to the sparkling wine that this new beer resembled. Brewers in the Bay Area loved it, and drinkers seemed to, too, so Sturdavant had...

Pastry stouts — sweet, saccharine, indulgent beers built on flavors more common to a bakery than a brewery — emerged towards the end of last decade as a coveted, if occasionally maligned, pseudo-style of craft beer. Many trace their rise to a southern California brewer named Derek Gallanosa (currently: GOAL. Brewing, previously Moksa Brewing and Abnormal Beer Co.), who joins Taplines today to...

In the early months of the pandemic, Marcus Baskerville was working as the head brewer at Weathered Souls Brewing Company, the brewery he co-founded in San Antonio, when a police officer five states away murdered George Floyd. Marcus, who would go on to become a founding member of the National Black Brewers Association, had an idea to galvanize the industry and raise money for police brutality ref...

In 1999, Vinny Warren was working at Chicago ad firm DDB and on the hunt for a hit idea for a Super Bowl spot for his client, Budweiser. The King of Beers was still selling better than Bud Light at that point, but just barely, and August Busch IV had been handed the reigns to rejuvenate the flagging flagship with a fresh new creative vision. As it turned out, Warren had just the thing. The short c...

Joining Taplines today is Ryan Burk, the former head cider maker of Angry Orchard Hard Cider. These days, he’s making cider under his own label in upstate New York, working as a co-founder of the beverage innovation firm Feel Goods Company, and serving the Cider Institute of North America as a founding board member. But midway through last decade, Ryan was working at Michigan’s Virtue Cider when B...

Nothing exists in a vacuum, Taplines listener, and beer certainly doesn’t. When Stuart Bewley and his cofounder dreamed up the idea for California Cooler, single-serve fermented-fruit-based ready-to-drink in the mid-70s, they couldn't have known that it would inspire knockoffs from heavyweights in the wine industry (e.g., E. & J. Gallo’s Bartles and Jaymes) and the beer industry, too (Miller’s...

In the mid-2010s, J Jackson-Beckham, PhD was an academic with a homebrewing habit, blogging incisively about what she called “the unbearable whiteness of brewing.” Her deep expertise and singular voice eventually caught the eye of the Brewers Association, which tapped her to serve as the trade group’s first-ever “Diversity Ambassador” in 2018. Today, "Dr. J" joins Taplines to reflect on that momen...

Joining Taplines today is Seth Gross, a former Goose Island Brewing Co. brewer who was at the meeting where Goose Island then-brewmaster Greg Hall and the late, legendary master distiller Booker Noe, of the Beam bourbon dynasty, first came up with the idea to barrel age a beer, how they did it… and what happened once rank-and-file drinkers got their hands on the final product. Some three decades l...

Today on Taplines, we’re joined by none other than Wolfgang Puck for a candid, clear-eyed look at how his Eureka brewpub — “one of the loudest salvos in elevating the role of craft beer in dining,” as Tom Acitelli put it in his 2013 book, the Audacity of Hops — met such a quick and unceremonious demise in early '90s Los Angeles… and what Chef learned from its collapse. Here’s a hint: when the kitc...

In the mid-’70s, as the Light Beer Wars were starting to heat up, a family-run brewery in central New York called F.X. Matt — one of the nation’s oldest, and still running to this very day — came up with a wild new packaging format for its beers. It was bold. It was bizarre. It was… balls? That's right. Big, translucent plastic spheres full of 5.16 gallons of Matt’s Premium Lager. Part keg party,...

Joining Taplines today is Jacinta Howard, a veteran culture and music writer and editor in Atlanta, to talk about a very specific, very special, and very star-studded "sponsored content" series that hit the airwaves back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, long before "sponsored content" was even a thing. St. Ides malt liquor first arrived on store shelves in 1987, but it wasn’t until the brand’s par...