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 consistently impressive beers. In this episode, founder Pete Faber, head brewer Grant Brower, and brewer Cody Guyer cover a list of topics, including: updating beer recipes over the past half decade to adapt ..read more

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 fully acquired and merged into Spanish brewer Mahou San Miguel in early 2023, he’s taken on an even larger role working with the brewing team at Avery. In this episode, Kosmicki discusses the beers im ..read more

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, Old Nation starting looking at new and evolving styles, while trying to understand (from a technical perspective) how they worked. The project ultimately led to the beer M-43, a hazy IPA that is now a m ..read more

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 (they generally have two or three different weissbiers on tap at any given moment) makes for a brewery experience far different from today’s norm. In this episode, founder David Ringler discusses the ..read more

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 approach to beer. Now, they’ve embraced progressive styles, from hazy IPA to pastry stout and fruited quick sour beer, and have recently ramped up lager production to feed a growing interest in the taproom. N ..read more

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’s has found ways to elevate the production process behind mead while also making rich, developed, and nuanced fruit meads. In this episode, Schramm and son-in-law James Naeger discuss how the Ferndale ..read more

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 been able to achieve it. They started small and still remain small relative to may breweries of similar volume, choosing to brew more batches more often into more fermenters so that they can keep the ..read more

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 this episode, Doug walks us through the current craft beer landscape, offering thoughts on everything from New Belgium’s reformulation of Fat Tire, their success with imperial IPA, the rise of retro lager ..read more

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 hop flavor despite the light malt bill lower starting and finishing gravities to reflect a more dry modern approach adjust liquor to grain ratios to boost attenuation using ALDC as well as new yeasts t ..read more

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 for West coast pils Raf Souvereyns of Bokke discussing the challenges that new blenders face, as well as his research on the toxicity off apricot and peach stones (both sources of the chemical that giv ..read more