Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Jacob Sembrano loves ingredients, and his background as a chef instilled in him a deep love of connecting ingredients and their stories with the dishes he presented to customers. Now, at the helm of the brewhouse at Chicago’s Cruz Blanca , he’s forged a similar identity for his beers—connecting through ingredients with stories, and making beers with unusual methods. Their customers may not realize...

As always, our annual Best in Beer issue includes different perspectives. Our subscribers and listeners—that’s you!—have spoken, and we’ve compiled your votes for the Reader’s Choice lists, including your Top 25 Beers . Plus, our Craft Beer & Brewing Best 20 Beers in 2023 are the culmination of a year of blind tasting by our review panel and then by our editors, achieving an internal consensus...

It’s been another year of great beers—and we’ve tasted thousands—but they can’t all be “the Best.” What sets certain beers apart, to not only light up our palates and our senses, but also our brains and our conversations? Winnowed down by a year of our review panel’s blind judging, and then selected by more blind judging among our editors and top writers, our Best 20 Beers in 2023 represent the hi...

In Geneva, Illinois, Art History Brewing doesn’t want to be everything to everyone, but they’re committed to brewing traditional styles well, while also making them relevant to today’s drinkers. That message has resonated in the broader Chicago beer world, winning them fans among some of the most influential bars and retailers in the city. For head brewer Greg Browne, it’s the logical outcome of a...

In this GABF Gold! edition of the podcast, the last of our 2023 focus on GABF gold medal winners, Jamie is joined by Rob Malad, director of brewing operations for Metazoa in Indianapolis, Indiana. Metazoa recently won gold for William Walrus, a Scottish-style ale and product of necessity, that employed brewing techniques to overcome ingredient challenges while staying true to the spirit of the sty...

In this GABF Gold! episode, we dive into the saison category. First up is Jason zumBrunnen, cofounder of Denver's Ratio Beerworks , recent gold medal winner for their King of Carrot Flowers carrot saison (and 2020 silver medal winner in American-Belgo style ale for their Dear You saison dry hopped with Citra, upon which King of Carrot Flowers is based). He dives into saison standards, like buildin...

e recorded this episode of the podcast live from Odell Brewing on Sloan’s Lake as part of our recent Brewery Workshop: New Brewery Accelerator event in Denver. The three panel guests—Jake Gardner, director of brewing operations at Westbound & Down ; Marni Wahlquist, head brewer at Odell Sloan’s Lake; and Sean Buchan, owner and head brewer at Cerebral —represent a compelling cross-section of IP...

In this special episode, two 2023 gold-medal-winning breweries discuss their methods and approaches to making wood-aged sour beer. First up is Kyle Vetter, founder of 1840 Brewing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, whose kriek-inspired "I Don't Want To Wait" won gold in the fruited wood- and barrel-aged sour beer category. He hits on the details behind how the beer was made, including: using oak as an ingre...

Over the course of his decade-and-a-half, bicoastal brewing career, Vasili Gletsos has brewed a wide range of beer styles on an equal wide range of brewing systems. But after launching Wunderkammer as a personal brand while serving as head brewer for Hill Farmstead, he ultimately decided to make it his focus, building out a simple brewery with an old dairy tank mash tun and a wood-fired copper ket...

Reverend Nat’s Cider has helped change peoples’ assumptions about craft cider in the Pacific Northwest, over their past 12 years of operation. The iconoclastic cider maker has adopted a flavor-forward, reverential-but-forward-looking approach to cider making that has ruffled some feathers and changed default narratives, but one thing it’s never been is boring or cautious. A few weeks ago, West ann...

When you live and work in Yakima Valley, hops become a way of life. They’re second nature, omnipresent, and a constant topic of conversation—after all, many of the patrons of craft breweries in the Yakima Valley are the same folks who grow, process, study, and sell them. As such, Varietal Beer’s focus on brewing with hops has picked up momentum as fans flock to their taproom—about 30 minutes south...

Based in Portland, Oregon, Sam Zermeño is the brewer behind Brujos—a nomadic brand that’s given him the opportunity to make some intensely flavored, highly regarded beers with friends and favorite brewers from around the country. Yet behind the acclaim and heavy-metal imagery is a mind of real technical know-how and experience. Previously an R&D brewer at Portland’s Great Notion, his accomplis...

Boulder’s Upslope has been brewing Craft Lager since long before lager brewing was “cool,” and today the small brewery has built a production methodology for the longtime core offering that optimizes both quality and production efficiency. In this episode, head brewer Alex Meyer discusses the way the brewery makes their signature lager with a litany of unconventional ingredients and processes, and...

Dave Chichura loves brewing, and loves to work. He's always lived simply, and maintained a lifestyle that allows him to move around. And move he has, from breweries in the Midwest as well as up and down the Rocky Mountains. Now, as Director of Brewing Operations at Ex Novo in Corrales, New Mexico, he's putting in practice all the lessons he's learned, building and managing the brewing team as they...

If Averie Swanson had her way, saison would outsell IPA among craft beer aficionados. The longtime saison brewer hopes to move beyond stereotypes and romanticized history and show (through beautifully designed and constructed beers) that saison provides a broad palette for brewers to explore flavor. With her Keeping Together brand, now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she hopes to write a new chapte...

Montana is known for its grain, and Mark Hastings of Überbrew and By All Means is in the thick of it. Wheat is the most-grown crop statewide while barley is third; despite their ubiquity, Hastings steered clear of Montana’s brewing grains for the first two decades of his brewing career. Primarily grown for the needs of macro brewers, these grains never quite nailed the flavor and technical perform...

This week’s podcast is different from most. A couple weeks ago, I drove down to Colorado Springs to catch up with Jess and Rich Fierro of Atrevida Beer . Jess was the winner of Season One of the Vice TV show Beerland , and they went on to open their small community-focused brewery in 2018. From the start, Atrevida proudly embraced the slogan “Diversity, it’s what’s on tap,” and over the past five...

The Northern hemisphere hop harvest is just weeks away, and that means one of our favorite times of the year—fresh hop beer season. To help add to the excitement, we invited three experts in the field of brewing with wet and fresh hops—Joe Mohrfeld of Pinthouse , Steve Luke of Cloudburst , and Zach Turner of Single Hill —to join in on a panel discussion on the subject. Over the course of the podca...

Utah’s beer laws are some of the most anomalous in the country—the state does everything it can to make life hard on brewers—but one byproduct of the laws restricting the sale of beers based on ABV is that Utah brewers have had the commercial incentive to hone their low gravity brewing techniques. Today, at Templin Family Brewing in the granary district of Salt Lake City, you’ll find a dozen or so...

When Winslow Sawyer and his partners launched San Diego’s Pure Project in the middle of the last decade, they weren’t focused on brewing particular styles. Instead, they began with the tenet of building a brewery focused on sustainability, using natural ingredients from small farmers wherever possible, and lowering their environmental impact while also giving back through the 1% for the Planet pro...

Ask most American brewers about their first experience with New Zealand hops, and nine out of ten will probably name one single beer—Alpine Beer’s Nelson. Alpine founder Pat McIlhenney was one of the early ones to import southern hemisphere hops, and it’s hard to speak about the hop now without acknowledging the importance of that singular beer. Son Shawn McIlhenney inherited his dad’s love of hop...

Justin Burdt loves hops, and has developed a unique and somewhat counter-intuitive approach to selecting them for Ghost Town’s award-winning West coast IPAs. His focus on tight and lean intensity relies on boosting expression through embracing some hop aroma notes that give other brewers fits, but it’s the push and pull that gives the IPAs such compelling dynamic range. In this episode, Burdt dive...

As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on West coast-style IPA, featuring Matt Brynildson of Firestone Walker, Ben Edmunds of Breakside, and Sean Lawson of Lawson’s Finest. Over the course of th...

As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on wine-beer hybrids, featuring two of the leading brewers in that space—Cory King of Side Project and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River—alongside inspiring...

As part of the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat, hosted by Russian River in late May 2023, Jamie moderated panel discussions before a live audience of attendees and featured brewers. This episode is a recording of one such panel on hazy IPA, featuring some of the most inspiring brewers in that space—Henry Nguyen of Monkish, JC Tetreault of Trillium, and Neil Fisher of Weldwerks. Ov...