Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Breweries making barrel-aged beer tend to lean heavily on romance. From name-checking the origins of their barrels to weaving stories of long, laborious boils and careful searches for the perfect ingredients, there’s no story today’s brewers can’t embellish. But for Shaun Berns and Phase Three Brewing in Lake Zurich, Illinois, it’s the quality of the end-product—and not the romanticized mysteries...

Jeremy Grinkey worked in wine for the better part of a decade before joining The Bruery in Orange County, California. That winemaking background still informs the way the director of brewing operations and the Bruery itself make beer. From their club-focused sales approach—with special access for their best customers—to the focus on blending and the use of wine grapes as an ingredient, the influen...

Julian Shrago is not afraid to ruffle feathers. The outspoken brewmaster for Beachwood Brewing (Long Beach, California) has cultivated an intense persona, but that passion and focus is evidenced in the beers they brew and the awards they’ve racked up over the past ten years, including 19 GABF medals and 9 World Beer Cup medals. In this episode, he discusses: Beachwood’s flavor-first creative proce...

Firestone Walker doesn’t rest on its laurels. Innovation and new product development are constants within the creative boundaries of flavor that define the brewery. Underpinning all of that is an expectation of quality—i.e., it’s Firestone Walker, so it has to be great. Sam Tierney, who heads up Firestone Walker’s Propagator brewery in Los Angeles, has carved out space in this high-performance org...

For Brandon Capps of New Image Brewing (Arvada, Colorado), the question of how to push more hop intensity in beer flavor and aroma, despite the inherently inefficient process of extracting those vital hop compounds in the weak alcohol solution of beer, pushed him down the rabbit hole of brewing with extracted terpenes. And the deeper he gets, the more excited he becomes about its prospect for redu...

For cofounders Michael Messenie and Tim Lee, the idea behind Dutchess Ales in Wassaic, New York, was to recreate the kinds of cask-conditioned ale they loved when living in Britain. If you’ve enjoyed a proper pint of cask ale in New York City in recent years, there’s a good chance it came from Dutchess. Today, the brewery is branching out, brewing beer for distribution at a host brewery on Long Is...

Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman has been working on “innovation” beers since the brewery’s first days in the early ’80s. Beers we all know and love, such as Celebration and Bigfoot, were once “innovation” beers. That culture of trying new things while brewing traditionally inspired beers that speak to audiences today is written into the very DNA of the company. It’s no surprise that they contin...

Kettle sours get a bad rap in some brewing circles, but Urban South’s Alex Flores would love to change your mind. Recalibrating and considering these beers as their own thing—rather than some faster approximation of other sour traditions—and you just might see the in a new light. They’ve definitely grown on the fans of Urban South, who’ve fallen hard for the tart beers. The brewery has nurtured a...

From their small outpost in McMinnville, in Oregon wine country, Heater Allen has flown the lager flag for its 14 years of their existence—long before it was “cool.” The father-daughter duo of Rick and Lisa Allen have embraced lager with dogged determination, convincing drinkers of its place in the craft canon, and doing so while growing slowly and organically. In this episode of the podcast, Lisa...

Hanabi Lager Company’s Nick Gislason has always been a builder, and that same DIY sensibility drives his lager-focused brewery project today. For the past decade, he’s been head winemaker for Screaming Eagle, a small estate winery that makes some of the most coveted wines in California. But before wine, he was a brewer, and Hanabi is his way to stay connected with this parallel passion. Crossover...

For Kevin Ashford, brewmaster of Figueroa Mountain Brewing in Buellton, California, every beer can always be improved. After winning two medals for their Danish Red Lager, Ashford and team made the difficult decisions to simplify the malt bill, dry it out a touch, and add a decoction step—significant moves for a beer that had a following and had wowed judges. But for Ashford, truly great beers are...

East Brother Beer in Richmond, California, makes its living by nailing classic styles, including an oatmeal stout in the core range. Naturally they also brew IPA—Gold or Red, take your pick—but their top two sellers are Bo Pils and Red Lager. Their seasonal lager series includes a maibock, Baltic porter, pre-Prohibition lager, and festbier—no wonder head brewer Paul Liszewski’s customized Californ...

Can we spend an entire hourlong episode talking about one beer? You bet we can. In this week’s episode, Alesmith Director of Brewing Operations Ryan Crisp takes us for a few hot laps around the track as we discuss their iconic Speedway Stout. From building a malt base to complement coffee additions, to validating and substituting ingredients and maximizing hop and coffee additions, Crisp walks us...

Five years ago, Chicago’s Maplewood Brewing brewed 1,000 barrels of beer per year and were small upstarts in a crowded Chicago beer market. This year, they’re on track to brew over 16,000 barrels of beer—a rapid growth trajectory made possible by their twin focus on quality and ingenuity. While they’ve embraced current styles like hazy IPA and all manor of flavor-addled imperial stouts, they’ve pl...

“I’m anti-consistency,” says head brewer Phil Pesheck. “If you’re pro-consistency, you’re anti-advancement. I want to continuously improve the beer, batch after batch.” Improve they have, and Seattle’s Burke-Gilman Brewing pulled off quite a feat in 2020 with a win at the Alpha King Challenge and a gold medal in the juicy/hazy IPA category at the Great American Beer Festival. It was a bold stateme...

We first met Good Society cofounder Phil Camarano in 2018 at our Brewery Workshop: New Brewery Accelerator event in San Diego as he and partner Nick Berger found a location for their brewery and started the hard work to get it open. That launch finally happened in February of 2020—just weeks before COVID restrictions forced breweries into entirely new and unexpected ways of doing business. It was...

Ten years ago, if you asked any beer drinker what they thought of gluten-free beer, they’d wrinkle their nose and express severe displeasure at the thought of choking down one of the lackluster sorghum-based beers on the market at the time. Times have changed. A relatively quiet gluten-free revolution is underway, as a new generation of gluten-free maltsters has emerged alongside upstart brewers w...

Amber Watts and Ron Extract didn't land in Washington's Skagit Valley by chance. Their brewery, Garden Path Fermentation, was a concept in search of a home, but the farming community between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia provided exactly what they were looking for—locally grown and malted barley, a variety of fruits and berries, and a perfect climate for the kind of unstructured, non-tem...

Steve Luke loves hops, and over a decade and a half working in the industry he’s learned quite a bit about brewing with them. Cloudburst is, effectively, his second act—a brewery built for the love of brewing after a career spent at larger breweries like Allagash, Captain Lawrence, and Elysian. Today, Luke blends the discipline and production precision he learned from larger-scale production with...

Mari and Will Kemper love lagers, but the locals haven’t always loved their lagers back. When they returned to the Pacific Northwest and opened the doors to Chuckanut Brewery in 2009, craft fans at the time wondered why they didn’t just make IPAs like everyone else. But they had a focus and determination to brew the finest quality craft lagers they could (despite their small size), and 24 GABF med...

Matt Katase and partner Asa Foster of Brew Gentlemen (Braddock, Pennsylvania) started writing the business plan for their brewery a decade ago, before they were of legal drinking age. They weren’t homebrewers when the idea gripped them, but they became homebrewers as they pursued the idea, creating batches and iterating recipes from the garage of their fraternity house at Pittsburgh science and en...

Cacao nibs in dunkel? American hops in helles? Oats in schwarzbier? For Ryan Wibby, cofounder of the eponymously named brewery in Longmont, Colorado, lager dogma is just the starting point for a flavor-forward approach to brewing that’s inspired by tradition but doesn’t copy it. In this episode, Wibby walks us through the brewery’s award-winning approach to amber and dark lagers, such as their Moo...

“I always figured if the professional killed the spirit to do it at home, then I would never do it professionally, but luckily that didn’t happen.” Annie Johnson loves homebrewing. The award-winning homebrewer has worked professionally in brewing, but despite turning her passion into a career, she's never given up that sense of creative fulfillment and excitement that comes with each new batch. Th...

That old axiom “be careful what you wish for” is true when it comes to award-winning beers and the recognition they attract. Winning a top medal for IPA at the Great American Beer Festival is the dream of many brewers—but such recognition often means making more and more IPA at the expense of other styles. Feeding the demand for a hot beer isn’t easy for a small brewery, and smaller projects and e...

Portland, Oregon’s Von Ebert has built a reputation for quality beer in a city full of great beer. From GABF medals to a Craft Beer & Brewing Beer of the Year in 2020, peers and critics have been paying close attention. In this episode of the podcast, head brewer Sam Pecoraro talks about a few different styles they focus on, from lagers to IPAs. Along the way, he touches on: Ingredient selecti...