Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

New Zealand’s climate, latitude, and singular terroir offers the right environment for hops of unique expression, but it’s their longstanding breeding program that has made possible so many of the signatures aromas and flavors we’ve grown to love. Ron Beatson of NZ Hops is the plant geneticist behind many of these beloved varieties, and on this episode recorded at the Craft Brewers Conference, he...

Matthias Trum is the sixth-generation brewer at Bamberg’s Heller-Trum Bräu—better known as Schlenkerla—and he is as obsessed with local history as he is with producing world-class smoked lagers via their old-fashioned methods. Bamberg has a long history of brewing, and Trum is a great student of that history—and his family has played an important role in it. In this episode, he immerses us in that...

The town of České Budějovice in South Bohemia may be better known to North Americans as Budweis, the German name that’s been appropriated by a couple of famous beers. The real Czech pale lager from here is known as Budvar—sold as Czechvar in the United States, for legal reasons. It’s an easygoing showcase of light, pure malt flavors and soft, balancing bitterness, nearer in profile to a Bavarian h...

Monday Night Brewing has grown from their Atlanta roots into taprooms and breweries in major southern US centers—Birmingham, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee are two, with Charlotte, North Carolina opening soon. The regional powerhouse has grown on the strength of quality beer, measured risk-taking, and a simultaneous embrace of both modern and classic styles. In this episode, brewmaster Peter Kil...

Finding space for personality and authenticity in hazy IPA and tart fruit beer these days can pose a challenge for brewers, but for Jared Welch, Cofounder and Production Director for Nashville, Tennessee’s Southern Grist, that’s no reason to stop pushing. It’s why their popular quick-soured fruit beers are now acidified with a locally-caught Lactobacillus strain, and why they’ve tweaked and increa...

When brewers think of Czech hops, they naturally think of Saaz, whose delicate and ethereal character is nearly synonmyous with lager itself. Yet while craft brewers around the world have developed an obsession with punchy New World hops and the character of specific varieties, they often know relatively litle about the hops from this region that’s been growing them for more than a millennium. In...

To celebrate this milestone—the 300th episode of the Craft Beer & Brewing Podcast—we reassembled three leading voices in West coast IPA to discuss questions spurred on by the original panel discussion, and this time they answered your audio questions, Direct Fire!-style. Kelsey McNair of North Park in San Diego, Evan Price of Green Cheek in Orange and Costa Mesa, and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian...

In the trendy Karlín neighborhood of central Prague, the brewpub called Dva Kohouti embodies the merger of the two key elements of Czech beer culture: the brewing and—no less important—the pouring and service. The side-pull taps attached directly to the serving tanks behind the bar are only part of the story. In this episode recorded at the brewery, head brewer Lukaš Tomsa explains the ideas behin...

Documents show a brewery at the Břevnov monastery in Prague as early as 993. There have been interruptions over the centuries, but the current Břevnov Monastery Brewery of St. Adalbert is the third incarnation, founded in 2011. This one has gained local and international fans for aromatic and highly drinkable pale lager, Benedict 12°, a well as for its other beers, including an imperial stout, a m...

Tucked into a corner of the sprawling grounds at Pilsner Urquell in Plzeň, Czechia—the birthplace of pilsner—a new chapter in that story is developing. Now in its third year, Pivovar Proud is Pilsner Urquell’s experimental playground—a beautifully equipped 30-hectoliter kit producing a range of both ales and lagers and other creations less easily categorized. Its head brewmaster Lenka Straková has...

The sandstone cellars of Plzeňský Prazdroj—better known to us as Pilsner Urquell —may be the ideal place to wallow in the history of the world’s most popular beer style with brewmaster emeritus Václav Berka. As the brewery’s 13th brewmaster in a line that stretches back to Josef Groll, there are few people better qualified to recount the story of pilsner, discuss the details of how it’s brewed at...

Barn Town popped up on our radar in 2022, with a number of beers across styles that scored well with our blind panel of judges, but the best of the bunch was Neon hazy IPA with an impressive score of 98 . In our upcoming IPA issue, they did it again with another 98 for hazy double IPA Stink, Stank, Stunk, so naturally we felt the need to ask some questions and understand how they’re making consist...

When Jeremy Kosmicki was promoted off the Founders packaging line to the brewhouse in the early 2000’s, he relished the opportunity to jump from homebrewing to their 30bbl brewhouse. Over the past two decades, he’s overseen the brewing program while the brewery experienced remarkable growth—launching pivotal brands like All Day IPA, scaling production by orders of magnitude—and since Founders was...

Travis Fritts didn’t set out to brew hazy IPA. In fact, the initial plan for Old Nation was far more conventional—brew traditional American craft beer styles like stout and pale ale, with some European standards like altbier and weizenbock, make the beers good, slap some cool branding on them, and wait for the sales to come. But it was 2015, and craft beer consumers had other ideas. To survive, Ol...

There’s more to German-style beer than just lager, and Cedar Springs Brewing Co. is out to preach the gospel of weissbier to anyone who will listen. Their Kusterer Original Weissbier has a couple GABF medals to its name, and their dedication to foundational brewing methods—step mashing, open fermentation—along with a knack for storytelling that’s necessitated by their focus on the weissbier family...

Edwin Collazo is a natural born salesperson. Yes, he’s a brewer and brewery owner, but the bridge in City Built Brewing ’s logo isn’t just a graphic element—connecting customers with beer they love is the entire point of this Grand Rapids, Michigan brewery. But the focus of the brewery has changed over the years, and COVID presented the crisis that precipitated the brewery rethinking their approac...

Jason Spaulding, cofounder of Brewery Vivant and Broad Leaf Brewery, has been around the block. He cofounded his first brewery, New Holland, in the mid-90’s, and after exiting that brewery and spending time away from the brewing industry, launched Brewery Vivant with his wife Kris about twelve years ago. Operating a brewery with a niche focus comes with benefits as well as challenges, but Vivant h...

Ken Schramm wants to prove it’s possible to make mead that’s every bit as fine as the finest wine, and over the past decade his eponymously named meadery has pioneered a number of new processes and approaches to help achieve that goal. From shortening the honey supply chain and eliminating intervention and heat degradation, to hand picking fruit for ripeness from their own estate orchard, Schramm’...

BKS Artisan Ales (Kansas City, Missouri) is the result of husband-and-wife team Brian and Mary Rooney’s attempt to bring taproom-based rapid innovation to brewing in their hometown, and their GABF silver medal in 2021 for Clouds hazy double IPA, GABF gold in 2022 for Rockhill & Locust dark mild, and great scores from the Craft Beer & Brewing blind judging panel have confirmed that they’ve...

You may be more familiar with Doug Veliky through his BeerAficionado social presence, but through his Beercrunchers.com blog and his work as chief financial officer, chief strategy officer, and now chief marketing officer for Chicago’s Revolution Brewing , he’s gained a reputation for smart, strategic, and data-driven takes on what’s happening and what will happen in craft beer’s near term. In thi...

This week’s podcast is a roundtable discussion with three leading voices in West Coast IPA—Kelsey McNair of North Park, Evan Price of Green Cheek, and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River. Over the course of two hours, these three discuss the ins and outs of brewing modern West Coast IPA today, including: simplifying malt bills to pilsner or two row pale building body with water chemistry to support ho...

Sean White, cofounder of Athens, Ohio’s Little Fish, is committed to mixed culture sour beer. It’s not the only thing that they brew, but it’s part of the soul of the brewery and a founding pillar that they’ve continued to develop (and improve) over the past eight years. Over those years, they’ve been recognized a number of times for the beers from this program—gold and bronze World Beer Cup medal...

Over the past decade of working professionally in beer, Inner Voice cofounders Rhett Caseman and Josh Johnson have brewed beers of every style, on systems of very different scales. But when they envisioned a brewery of their own, they knew they wanted to keep it small and taproom focused, with a balance between thoughtfully executed classic beer styles, and leading edge experimentation in hop-driv...

In this year-end episode, we look back at the past year of podcasts, and count down your favorites, with excerpts that include: Sapwood Cellars on dry hopping technique, lowering temperature for dry hopping, using an aggressive rousing regimen, and the masking effect of other dry hop flavors on thiols Sam Tierney of the Firestone Walker Propagator and Bob Kunz of Highland Park on selecting malt fo...

Halfway Crooks cofounders Joran Van Ginderachter and Shawn Bainbridge may love the wide world of craft beer, but with their Atlanta, Georgia brewery the goal was to create a space and beers that would let drinkers find a beer they like, and drink the same beer all night. If you arrive with the goal of maximizing check-ins to the widest number of beers, you’ll quickly find you’re in the wrong place...