Good Beer Hunting

“If you can see, you can be it.” I believe this adage is a great example of the value of diversity in all aspects of life. Seeing someone who looks like you in spaces where most don’t is an unspoken invitation that you belong there too. When I started dipping my toe into Atlanta’s craft beer scene, Jen Price was the first Black woman that I encountered. I was immediately intrigued by her and might have stalked her Atlanta Beer Boutique profile on Instagram before I even had my own beer account. Over the years, I have had the pleasure of following Jen’s journey (and writing about it). In 2020, she came so close to opening the Atlanta Beer Boutique, a concept she had worked on for years but ultimately had to put on pause after the pandemic pushed everyone into their homes. Along with a place to buy and drink beer, the Atlanta Beer Boutique would also allow Jen and others to host educational workshops.

But as you’ll hear in this episode, Jen turned her lemons into lemonade with her newest venture, Crafted for Action, an organization focused on providing real solutions for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the beer community. That’s primarily done through its signature event, CraftBeerCon, a hybrid conference combining a diverse array of participants, engaging panel discussions, and interactive workshops. With CraftBeerCon now in its third year, I thought it was the perfect time to share Jen’s journey with you in her own words. 

You’ll hear her describe how she transitioned from building the boutique to creating one of the most diverse beer conferences in the United States, welcoming a host of BIPOC and women panelists and attendees. We dive into the different aspects of the conference and what participants can expect this year. As Atlanta natives, we couldn’t end our conversation without talking about a city that we love so much and what it is that makes it special in general and how it relates to beer.

Bongs, beer, and boogeymen—on this episode of The Gist, we kick things off with cannabis. Then, Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot shares her insights from the 2024 Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas. We’re also joined by special guest Paige Latham Didora, who chats with us about non-competes and the FTC’s recent ban on them. What does it mean for the beer industry? Keep listening to find out.

This is a special episode hosted in collaboration with the American Cider Association—a great way to bring you an episode with audio from an event dedicated to cider in the culinary space. While you will hear my voice now, this conversation is led by Leah Scafe of Stockpot Collective in Portland, Oregon. Leah worked with the Cider Association to host the roundtable discussion called “Orchard to Table” during the organization’s annual CiderCon event in January 2024.

With Stockpot Collective, Leah produces unique food and beverage events, and leads conversations that are specific to the needs and interests of food and beverage producers, which is what we’ll enjoy in this recording of Orchard to Table, a celebration of Pacific Northwest cider and Portland’s culinary community. Along with Leah, we’ll hear from three Oregon-based, James Beard-nominated chefs and sommeliers on why they love pairing, cooking with, and celebrating cider:

• Brent Braun of Portland’s OK Omens, a co-owner of that James Beard-nominated restaurant, a Food & Wine Magazine Sommelier of the Year, and co-founder of Post Familiar Wine.

• Katy Millard of Portland’s Coquine, a chef and co-founder of the award-winning Coquine, a multi-year James Beard Award nominee and finalist, and StarChef Rising Star Award recipient.

• Nate Ready of Hood River’s Hiyu Wine Farm, a James Beard Award semi-finalist, former Master Sommelier, farm owner, and alone with making wine at Hiyu, is cider maker for his Floreal line of brands.

Magic takes time, patience, and intention. So does brewing. The two concepts intertwine fantastically and theatrically in Jeff Alworth’s Signifier for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Long Live the Sorcery — Brujos Brewing in Portland, Oregon.” In the piece, he delves into the magical world of Brujos, a business that officially opened in March 2024, but has been percolating for a decade under the creative vision of owner and brewer Sam Zermeño.

What started as a brand and hobby picked up steam on social media around 10 years ago, when Zermeño was still a homebrewer in Southern California with a penchant for making malty beers and an appreciation for what he calls “witchy shit” and the occult. Once he got some professional brewing experience under his belt—or, wizard robes, which seems more likely—and moved to the Pacific Northwest, things began to settle into place. It wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t magic, but it was definitely a journey that deserves its own story. When Alworth decided to write about it, he says it was that slippery concept of “authenticity” that drew him to write about Zermeño’s vision and the Brujos dream finally realized.

In this conversation, Alworth and I talk about how and why this story feels a lot different than much of the cynical, business-oriented beer writing that’s pervasive in media today. He talks about how, despite being in a city proudly full of weirdos, Brujos takes it to a whole new level, and how it still just works. We talk about the dichotomy of the sacred and profane, the beauty of ritual, and magical realism that serves as a foundation for the brewery. As I say later in the episode, it’s a nice story about good people doing cool things.

Hillary Barile isn’t sure what she’d call herself first: a farmer or a maltster. In reality, she’s both, working as a fifth generation farmer at Rabbit Hill Farms & Malthouse in Shiloh, New Jersey. There, she and members of her family produce barley and other crops, as well as run a small-scale malthouse that supplies ingredients for breweries and distilleries. And, as president of the Craft Maltsters Guild Board of Directors, she works to educate and grow the craft malt community across North America and beyond. 

So why, and how, did she make the jump from farming pottoes to investing in the agriculture and future of craft malt? It started with homebrewing, of course, with aspirations of opening a brewery to diversify and solidify her farm’s finances. But, as she explains in this episode, the business plan never got that far. As for what’s next, she says the breweries prioritizing local craft malt can tell unique stories that still reach the hearts of drinkers, giving them a small, but sufficient shield against difficult economic forces. We also discuss the many definitions of the word “sustainable,” and the efforts she’s making to ensure generations to come will still have the opportunity to nurture the land her family has cultivated. 

It’s time for the Brewers Association’s annual report for 2023. Who came out on top? Who’s new to the list and how did they get there? What on Earth is going on with draft sales, and what new data is still to come from the upcoming Craft Brewers Conference? All this and more is next, on this episode of the Gist.

You’ve heard the joke—four scientists walk into a bar, and hilarity ensues. But have you heard the one about a few NASA employees opening a brewery? It’s not a setup. It’s how True Anomaly Brewing Company in Houston, Texas actually started, when four friends and homebrewers decided to trade in the final frontier for a shot at making their own beer. 

Michael Duckworth is co-founder and CEO of True Anomaly, which was recently named Brewery of the Year at the Texas Craft Brewers Cup for the second year in a row. Now in their sixth year, True Anomaly specializes in making wild and sour beers, but in a lager-focused state like Texas, they brew plenty of clean beers as well. They’ve been recognized for both with medal wins in competitions like the World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival. And now, they’re preparing to open a much larger second location later this year, which you’ll hear about, and plan to up their output from around 1,200 barrels to around 2,000 by the end of 2024.

All this begs the question: how did a bunch of NASA nerds pull this off? Well, according to Michael, the four founders took a methodical, scientific approach to the business plan and applied an artistic sensibility to making the beers themselves. Wild beer can be unpredictable, but it’s that freedom from expectation he says makes each day a fun and unique surprise. In this episode, he also talks about the potential he sees in the Houston craft beverage scene, why they implemented inclusivity as part of their operations from day one, and why you might see an astronaut or two hanging around the brewery on the weekends.

What happens when a respected name in wine and spirits tries to make a move into the beer world? Does their experience translate into a new category, or do they have to build a reputation from the ground up? Does the beer industry welcome interlopers, or view them with skepticism and confusion? And if they’re asking to judge your beer at a new competition, does anyone show up?

These are all questions I asked myself when I was invited to judge at The Tasting Alliance’s second ever beer competition in December 2023. I, like some others in and around beer, had never heard of the group, or only knew them for their wine and spirits competitions that take place in San Francisco, New York, and Singapore. 

In this episode, I talk to Maddee McDowell, vice president of The Tasting Alliance and the person who handles the logistical organization of their beer competition. You’ll hear about what it was like for me to participate in judging, but also what The Tasting Alliance hopes sets them apart from other competitions. Maddee shares what the biggest category of entries was (it’s shockingly not IPAs), some of the differences between running wine and spirits competitions versus beer, and how they’re trying to build relationships in the beer community to gain a wider diversity of palates at the judging table. We also talk about how the competition changed from year one to two, and how many entries she, somewhat optimistically, hopes to receive in year three. 

The competition doesn’t end once medals are announced, McDowell assures us. And at the very least, The Tasting Alliance’s experience is another way for us to better understand competitions and what it takes to make them happen.

It’s a consumer’s world—we’re just living in it. Maybe that’s just how it seems nowadays, based on the number of new products on shelves and who’s putting them there. In this episode of The Gist, lead Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot and Beth Demmon (that’s me) take a look at what products Tilray has released since going on a brewery-buying bonanza last August. We also talk about what sort of vibes Kate saw at the recent Illinois Craft Brewers Convention, and finally, what’s the latest buzz on BuzzBallz after Sazerac announced their plans to acquire the one-in-a-million brand success story. All this and more is coming right up, right here on The Gist. 

So often, when you listen to these episodes, you hear conversations with people far along in their experience with beer, wine, spirits, or other alcoholic beverages. We’ve had our share of brewers and owners who have been in the game for a decade or more. And in this conversation, we’re invited to hear from Natalie Thurman, an up-and-coming brewer discovering what it means to go pro, create recipes, and learn all the time.

Natalie was a homebrewer before she was brought on as a vocational brewer at Pittsburgh’s Trace Brewing. Over a six-month period from summer 2023 through the end of that year, Natalie worked alongside and learned from a variety of staff at Trace, picking up tips, tricks, and an education that will guide her in brewing for years to come. It’s all new—Natalie is a clinical research professional and registered nurse who’s spent more than 10 years working in healthcare—but as you’ll hear in this chat, there’s a lightness and excitement at work in her life through beer.

While we talk about her beginnings in homebrewing and building an interest in beer, I invite you to really hear the way Natalie talks about finding herself through her homebrewing and her work at Trace. Spending time at a brewery and meeting industry peers has seemed to unlock something special for her, and it’s an opportunity you’ll hear she’s not taking for granted. This is a chance to hear what it sounds like to start something new and why it’s so meaningful. It’s an opportunity to hear about how the joy of homebrewing becomes the joy of professional brewing and all that’s to come for Natalie and those in her orbit.

Fluffernutter and Oreo Marshmallow pastry stouts. Kettle sours brewed with "obscene amounts" of fruit. A cream cheese rangoon gose. Depending on your level of curiosity and adventurousness, these beers may sound exciting or challenging, but they also have two things in common: They’ve been made by Colorado’s WeldWerks Brewing and they’re fun beers made with serious intent.

In this episode, we get into some of the technical ideas, philosophies, and search for dialed-in joy with Skip Schwartz, WeldWerks’ head brewer and Neil Fisher, founder and owner of the company. What makes brewing and beer fun these days? There are lots of answers, and as you’ll hear both explain, it could be from the never-ending tweaks to make a beer as perfect as possible or finding ways to connect with new drinkers who would otherwise turn away from a beer.

Some of the more wild beers created by WeldWerks have gotten attention over the years, but it’s their flagship hazy IPA, Juicy Bits, that put this brewery on the map and has allowed WeldWerks to expand into 26 different markets this year. The runaway success of Juicy Bits has helped the business gain notoriety beyond Colorado, build out its brewhouse, and set a goal of modest growth as many companies in craft beer are focused on just staying flat with their production.

So, maybe you’ve tried some of WeldWerks’ outlandish beers at their taproom or during a major industry event like the Great American Beer Festival, or maybe you’ve had their signature IPA and one of its variants. Allow Skip and Neil to give you some background on what it means to connect with drinkers today and learn how their approach to beer is setting them up for 2024 and beyond.

Some people nerd out about beer in general. Others go wild for water profiles, hop varieties, or yeast strains, but in Don Tse’s experience, not enough people are paying attention to malted barley. It’s something he’s been passionate about for a decade, and a topic he finally gets to explore in-depth in his first piece for Good Beer Hunting.

In that Critical Drinking op-ed, titled “Fight the Power — How Craft Malt Is Central to Taking On Beer’s Industrial Complex,” Don explains how the barley of today shouldn’t be the barley of yesterday. Typical crops are bred to resist disease and blight every few years. But in North America, barley that’s now widely planted  has been around for three decades and is the main source of what’s used for malt in beer recipes. Why? Well, it takes time, money, and a lot of buy-in to change a monoculture crop like barley. That change is finally coming, thanks to investments from researchers at Cornell University, breweries like Allagash, and other forward-thinking farmers ready to make malt craft again. 

In our conversation, you’ll hear Don talk about why it took so long for him to pursue this passion project, why as a Canadian he’s focused on American farmers, why he’s so stoked on things like protein levels and output, and what sort of potential and future he sees in the North American barley industry. He doesn’t expect people to be as nuts about the subject as he is. But he hopes that we’ll all start to care, at least a little, to keep moving craft beer and our shared agricultural future looking bright.

The story of homebrewing and craft beer is intertwined. Ask many craft brewery owners how they got their start, and you’ll probably hear about their homebrewing days—how it sparked their love of beer and eventually led them to turn their hobby into a career. However, homebrewing is only one part of going pro, and there are many more skills needed to open and run a brewery.

Ryan Lavery, owner of Widowmaker Brewing, got his start brewing beer in his garage. A series of serendipitous moments, including a Craigslist ad, eventually led him to open his own brewery in Braintree, Massachusetts in 2017, and another location in Allston-Brighton, a neighborhood in Boston in 2023. Both locations reflect Ryan’s love for music with his second location being described as a place with “intergalactic, spacey, stoner rock” vibes. In this conversation, Ryan shares how he didn’t really know anything about opening a brewery and how those first decisions—like how they set up the brewhouse—still affect him and his team today. You'll hear Ryan discuss the distinction between the opening of his first taproom and the second one, as well as how the brewery discovered its identity and how that knowledge influenced the design of both locations, starting with the second. We also spend a little time talking about the special places he’s visited in Atlanta while on business for the brewery, including a previous podcast guest, Todd DiMatteo, and his brewing company, Good Word Brewing.

Modelo Especial continues to absolutely dominate as a lager, but is it so successful that we can call it the new domestic lager of choice? On this episode of The Gist, I’m joined as always by Lead Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot, along with special guest, freelance writer, and Good Beer Hunting contributor Jerard Fagerberg to talk about how Constellation Brands has grown Modelo to a 200 million case brand and what that means for the domestic beer category at large. Plus, we look at the latest c-store numbers—specifically, how cider is performing—and why combining “low” and “no” alcohol options into one group doesn’t really make much sense. I’m Beth Demmon, and you’re listening to The Gist. 

Next up in our series of interviews from the 2023 Foeder for Thought festival, Kate Bernot is talking to Matt Manthe from Odd Breed Brewing in Pompano Beach, Florida.

Most of the locations of the brewers we speak to at Foeder for Thought come from far and wide, and usually from places with more mild climates than Florida has to offer. So Matt and Odd Breed adapt their process and expectations to that reality, working with yeast strains and styles that provide the nuanced results they’re looking for. He also talks about what it takes to help grow the audience for these beers in Florida, which is a younger scene that markets like California or the Northeast.

One of the methods Matt enjoys most is fresh hopping his wild ales for a somewhat hybrid style of IPA and wild and sour beer that is delighting his fans.

In this episode of the 2023 Foeder for Thought festival, I’m talking to Aaron Kleidon of catch Brewing in Ave, Illinois, one of the country’s most obscure and isolated brewers, that also happens to be one of the most welcoming and casual visits among the class of brewers you might consider a destination brewery.

Tucked away in far southern Illinois, Scratch has made a name for itself with foraged ingredients, ancient methods of brewing, such as hot stone and campfire heating, as well as a culinary program at the brewpub that delivers a similarly-minded approach to cooking.

We talk a lot more these days about the connection between agriculture and brewing, but in this conversation with Aaron, you’ll hear something more akin to a naturalist or a conservationist obsessed with his land and the surrounding forests, and how he makes world class beers from those unlikely resources.

In this episode of the 2023 Foeder for Thought festival, Kate Bernot is talking to Trevor Rogers from de Grade Brewing, a geographical outlier like many of these producers, based in Tilamook, Oregon. de Garde was part of the avant garde in American wild ales, founded in 2012 with his partner Linsey, considered by many to be one of, if not THE first producer of these styles of beer in the US.

Part of the legend of de Garde comes from its methods of collecting wild yeast along multiple locations in the Pacific Northwest coastal region, and that influenced a generation of wild ale producers across the US who were looking for the courage to try these traditional Belgian methods in untested areas of the country.

After taking a short break for a St. Pete-style rain to pass through, the crowd at Foeder for Thought gathered in the courtyard at Green Bench again, dried off some seats and got a beer to listen to our second chat featuring Brandon Boldt from Primitive Beer in Colorado.

A well-respected and novel producer of wild ales, Primitive is perhaps more widely known for their packaging style, putting uncarbonated wild ales into a bag and box serving package. These still beers provide a profoundly different drinking experience—without the carbonation, the flavors and textures move over the palate entirely differently than a beer in a thick glass bottle with those highly pressurized tiny bubbles.

Since me and Brandon spoke at Foeder last year, they closed up shop in Longmont Colorado and starting making a big move to a new location—in an annex at New Image Brewing in Wheat Ridge Colorado.

We’re kicking off our 2023 Foeder for Thought episodes with Zach Adams of Fox Farm in Salem, Connecticut. Like many craft brewers, Zach was a home brewer, but unlike most home brewers, he competed at the top of the game in the Boston Beer Longshot challenge and won.

Riding that boost of confidence, he and his partner bought a 1960s dairy barn and renovated it to create a humble but beautiful destination for what would quickly become one of the ties premier beer destinations.

That confidence turns to some measure of humility however when we talk about his venture into wild and spontaneous brewing where he feels they’ll still finding their way and making a name.

Unless you’ve been listening to older episode of the GBH Podcast, you may not have heard my voice in awhile. I’ve been working on some new projects this past year or so that I’m excited about, but if there’s one thing that pulls me out of semi-retirement each year, it’s the Foeder for Thought festival in St Petersburgh Florida every March with Green Bench Brewing Company, and here we are again on the cusp of that annual gathering of wild and spontaneous beer producers gathering.

This year its on Friday March 8th, and in the run-up to that event where I get to sit down and chat with a few leading producers in the category about their trajectory and the future the envision. I’m releasing last year’s talks as a way to sort of get people excited again and remind them of some of the aspects of Foeder for Thought that make it so special.

First of all, it’s a small event but there’s some serious work and care put in that makes it fantastic. Khris Johnson and his team at Green Bench pull out all the stops for this thing. They get Web’s City Cellar, their companion bar, primed and ready to welcome fans of wild and spontaneous beer to what I consider one of the best beer bars in the country. And I’m certainly not alone in the opinion—this year the James Beard Awards nominated them for the Outstanding Bar category. That’s big time stuff.

It’s going to be a fantastic time - and I hope to see you there.

Now, let’s talk about 2023’s lineup of guests that you’ll hear in these episodes, hosted by myself and Good Beer Hunting’s Kate Bernot.

We’re talking to folks from de Garde Brewing in Oregon, Fox Farm Brewery in Connecticut, Off Breed Wild Ales in Pompano Beach Florida, Primitive Beer in Colorado, and Scratch Brewing in far Southern Illinois.

As per usual, it was an inspired lineup of beers and the producers behind them. All connected through their love of wild and spontaneous beer making, but also unique in their own rights—serving unique audiences and geographies, adapting to the realities of climate change and a shifting market, and finding their own way even as they hold the ancient traditions of these beers in a kind of reverent state.

This episode is one of a three-part series recorded as part of the Rare & Vintage Beer Tasting, an annual event held in Durham, North Carolina that brings brewers and beer lovers together from all over the country. Along with a beer festival, Rare & Vintage also hosts beer industry professional development conversations each January. The combo acts as a fundraising and awareness effort for the Michael James Jackson Foundation, which funds education and career advancement for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the brewing and distilling industries.

For this year’s event, I moderated three discussions, and in this episode, you’ll hear me in conversation with three panelists talking about measurements, bias, and how these things impact the making of beer and how we bring people together for beer. Joining me are:

• Nicole Steinhilber, laboratory operations manager for Charleston, South Carolina’s Edmund’s Oast Brewing.

• April Dove, founder of Tha CommUNITY, a collaborative beer initiative that partners with breweries to offer a blueprint on how to attract Black drinkers to taprooms.

• Jen Currier, cellarmaster at Wicked Weed Brewing and head winemaker at its spin-off winery, Vidl Cellars.

The experience between all three of these industry pros gave us fodder to get nerdy about lab work, ingredients, and more, but it also allowed us to look at big picture challenges facing beer today, most notably how to better welcome new drinkers into the fold. After you listen to this episode, make sure to check out the other two, which includes a panel discussion about bias in sensory and a keynote conversation with my Good Beer Hunting colleague and friend, Jamaal Lemon.

This episode is one of a three-part series recorded as part of the Rare & Vintage Beer Tasting, an annual event held in Durham, North Carolina that brings brewers and beer lovers together from all over the country. Along with a beer festival, Rare & Vintage also hosts beer industry professional development conversations each January. The combo acts as a fundraising and awareness effort for the Michael James Jackson Foundation, which funds education and career advancement for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the brewing and distilling industries.

For this year’s event, I moderated three discussions, and in this episode, you’ll hear me in conversation with three panelists talking about how language and culture have built the lexicon for beer and what we can do to change and enhance it all. It’s a spiritual connection to a James Beard Award-winning story Good Beer Hunting published in 2022, in which Mark Dredge explored how flavor wheels and tasting tools should evolve to speak to a global collection of beer drinkers. To build on the ideas you may have read about in that story and share new ones, joining me were:

• Breeze Galindo, director of operations for the Michael James Jackson Foundation and founder of MiLuna Brewing.

• Lindsay Barr, co-founder of DraughtLab Sensory Software.

• Rafael D’Armas, brewer at Brookyln’s Kings County Brewers Collective, also known as KCBC.

As you listen to the back-and-forth between these three, you get to hear practical, scientific, and philosophical approaches to how we can all think differently about the way we describe and talk about beer. The importance of this, as you’ll hear, is a necessary step to acknowledge how diverse beer is becoming—even if it’s been slow—but how much the language we use is going to matter next year and long after that. After you listen to this episode, make sure to check out the other two from Rare & Vintage, which includes a panel discussion about bias in measurement, brewing, and more, and a keynote conversation with my Good Beer Hunting colleague and friend, Jamaal Lemon.

This episode is one of a three-part series recorded as part of the Rare & Vintage Beer Tasting, an annual event held in Durham, North Carolina that brings brewers and beer lovers together from all over the country. Along with a beer festival, Rare & Vintage also hosts beer industry professional development conversations each January. The combo acts as a fundraising and awareness effort for the Michael James Jackson Foundation, which funds education and career advancement for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the brewing and distilling industries.

For this year’s event, I moderated three discussions, and in this episode, you’ll hear me in conversation with my Good Beer Hunting colleague, Jamaal Lemon. Jamaal has written some of the most celebrated work published at GBH, which includes a 2023 James Beard Award for his story, Come Hell or High Water — Oysters, Brewing, and How the Come Yahs & Bin Yahs Could End Sea Level Rise in Charleston. He’s been a contributor to Good Beer Hunting since 2020 and also writes the blog, Bootlegger’s Baby for us, which focuses on Jamaal’s ruminations on fatherhood and family.

During our talk at Rare & Vintage, Jamaal was welcomed as a keynote speaker, so we engaged in a discussion that would inspire conversations between brewers for the whole weekend. We talked about big ideas, storytelling, innovation in beer, and more. You’ll hear us talk about where Jamaal gets his ideas, why he cares about stories of the water, and much more. After you listen to this episode, make sure to check out the other two, which include panel discussions about bias in beer sensory and science with some of the smartest minds in beer as well as a discussion of how to build inclusive language for how we talk about beer.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times—beverage companies are going to have to expand their offerings not just to grow, but to survive at all. In this episode of The Gist, lead Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot joins me, Beth Demmon, to take a big look at 2023 and what the numbers mean for 2024, why diversification is the word of the year, and what a brewery buying into CBD could signal to the rest of the industry. This is the Gist.

In my time in and around the beer industry, I’ve heard too many people underestimate the Cicerone Certification Program, a worldwide standard for recognizing people who are experts in  beer sales and service.

While I haven’t taken it myself, I understand the rigorous studying that’s required to pass the written and tasting exam to become a Certified Cicerone, just the second level of a four-part process to become a Master Cicerone. And even those who take the test seriously aren’t guaranteed to pass it the first time. But don’t take my word for it, let’s hear from an expert.

In this episode, Jen Blair, who recently became a Master Cicerone—the highest level of certification and a title just 28 people in the world hold today—shares details from her almost decade-long journey to reach this pinnacle. If you’re interested in becoming a Cicerone, this episode is for you. But even if you’re not planning to take these tests, you’ll learn so much about what it means to explore beer, its history, and all the sensory experiences it can provide. There’s a personal side to it all, too, and you’ll hear from Jen about the importance of learning from your mistakes, honoring deadlines, and creating realistic schedules.  As a straight-A student, Jen thought she knew how to study for the Cicerone tests, but realized that to pass even the first level exam she had to go beyond memorization and fully master the material. Throughout the episode, Jen shares some of the shifts in mindset she had to make to cross the Master Cicerone finish line, including relearning how to learn and strengthening her weak areas instead of ignoring them, like memorizing commercial styles despite disagreeing with the requirement. Listen in until the end to hear about the inspiration behind her newsletter, get tips on palate training and health, as well as what Jen is focused on now that she’s completed her Cicerone journey.

In this episode, we’re talking about process. And it’s not just in context of the brewing of beer, but everything that leads up to it, what happens during, and how a brewer can get better after. Helping us get into the detail of it all is Julia Astrid Davis, the head brewer and zygurmatrix at Burke-Gilman Brewing Company in Seattle.

And if you're going to talk to a brewer about all these intimate aspects of their job, Julia is a great example of someone you should listen to. Over the course of her career she's brewed at companies small and large, from Denmark to Chicago and now Seattle. Her stops include Goose Island, Lagunitas, and Empirical Brewery, all in the Windy City, and has now been at Burke-Gilman for three years. That’s a who’s who list of barrel-aging and hop-forward breweries and in this conversation you’ll hear how Julia’s time at each place has helped build an understanding and appreciation for the process of brewing, experimentation, and constant improvement to dial-in recipes and drinking experiences.

We’ll also talk about inspiration, collaboration, and why it’s important for a brewer to always think about how to get better. Through it all, is the idea of process.

It’s only February, but beverage companies are already setting the stage for the rest of 2024 with new products, big investments, and… TV ads? Today, Kate Bernot and me, Beth Demmon, recap the best and most blah Super Bowl commercials, discuss the potential of high and low ABV products, and you’ll hear from Drinkways Editor Emma Janzen about the economic outlook for spirits this year. This is the Gist. 

When it comes to careers, longevity is hard to come by. Most surveys and job-focused websites will tell you Americans find a new job roughly every three-to-five years. The average American worker changes some aspect of their career—if not their entire professional focus—multiple times over their life. So, when you find someone who’s really committed to the people they work with and those they work for, you know something must be going right.

Such is the case for Jess Griego, now the chief operations officer and co-owner of New Mexico’s Bosque Brewing, which has nine different locations in the state. A decade ago, Jess started with the brewery as a server and has worked up through a variety of jobs, also becoming an equity partner in 2019. But her roots aren’t just with the company, they’re interwoven in New Mexico itself as a native, college graduate, proud resident, and a co-lead for the state chapter of the Pink Boots Society. Jess has also taken her longtime focus on local to a national stage, where she’s a newly elected pub brewery representative to the Brewers Association’s board of directors.

For as much as beer industry pros tout “local” as core to what they do, that often means locally-produced products. In this conversation, we get about as local as we can get as Jess reflects back on her years with Boseque, what inspires her as a leader, and what it takes to oversee a rapidly expanding brewery today. Growth is hard to come by for beer these days, but Jess and Bosque offer a unique example of what happens when you play the long game, in your career and in your business plan.

Sometimes when dreams get put on hold for too long, they can fade away and become nostalgia for what never was. But in the case of Sarah Real, her dream of starting a brewery was never far from her mind, and when she was finally able to open Hot Plate Brewing Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts earlier this year with her husband and co-founder Mike Dell'Aquila, it had been many years in the making.

As one of the few Latina-owned brewpubs amongst the nearly 10,000 total breweries in the United States, the pair is acutely aware of what representation means and what responsibilities they feel come along with it. According to a 2021 survey by the Brewers Association, just 2.2% of brewery owners across the country identify as “Hispanic, Latina -o, or of Spanish Origin.” In this episode, Mike talks about how they try to offer multiple access points for consumers through the beers they make and how Hot Plate cultivates a safe, welcoming community for anyone who may not feel represented or seen in the current craft beer industry. A storyteller by trade, Mike crafts the narratives and Sarah brews the beer in a unique partnership that seems to suit them both. 

However, Sarah and Mike both admit that while it was, at times, a struggle to start the brewery, now that it’s open, they’re ready to welcome everyone through the front door. They talk about their backgrounds, their passions, and the future they’re already building together—the dream finally realized.

American craft beer is old enough to have “good old days,” which means it's no stranger to retirements or its best and brightest moving on to new careers. In October 2023, Theresa McCulla announced she’d conclude seven years of work with the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution, wrapping up an effort that saw her collect artifacts, design exhibits, interview nearly 100 icons of American brewing, award-winning stories, and more.

Theresa’s departure leaves a distinct void—her job was literally to trace the history of beer's ups and downs through all kinds of change–global pandemics, industry trends, demands on behalf of the marginalized, climate change, and of course the beginnings, middles, and occasional ends of important breweries and people who made American craft beer what it is. Without her and the American Brewing History Initiative, our risk of forgetting will be that much greater.

So, before she could move on to her new position as curator at candy giant Mars, Incorporated, I sat down with her for one last interview. A symbolic exit interview.

It’s a new week with new news, but you already knew that. In this week's episode of The Gist, Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot talks with me, Beth Demmon, about Drizly’s billion-dollar bust, cider’s rising star, and… beads? BEES! Hat tip to Arrested Development for that one. This is the Gist. 

People who work in beer arrive from all kinds of professional backgrounds and even different career trajectories. But once they’re in beer, it’s less common to find examples of those who will be true chameleons, working across businesses that make, move, or sell beer, or even for companies that just handle the raw ingredients that go into making it. That’s what makes this conversation particularly special.

Shanleigh Thomson has been a food scientist, brewer, and sales rep for distributors and companies that provide malt and hops. She's worked as a consultant and analyst. She's also a beer fan, which means that this wide range of roles and expertise gives her a unique vantage point for how she does her job, shares well-informed points of view, and applies a variety of education that ranges from advanced degrees in food science to business and brewing. She splits her time between Canada and the U.S., which means the scope of her understanding and work offers us a good perspective, too, all of which she’s combined in the last two years to run her own consultancy business, Shan.Ferments.

In this episode, we’ll talk about all this and how we can learn from what Shanleigh has picked up over the years. But in addition to hearing how her professional life has brought this together, there’s also time in our chat to reflect on the personal impact a changing industry has left on her. Beer in Canada is facing many of the same challenges as the U.S., as prices and competition increase and a camaraderie that was easy to find 10 years ago is harder to come by. For someone who’s spent a career focused on so many different aspects of the business of beer, what happens when the shine wears off? And what’s at stake for us should we lose professionals with an array of ideas and expertise like Shanleigh? Let’s find out.

Football and beer tend to go together without much thought. But in places like Pope County, Arkansas, alcohol is noticeably absent from tailgate coolers, plastic Solo cups, and concession stands. That’s because the area, which is home to Arkansas Tech University, is also one of the state’s 29 dry counties, where access to alcohol is restricted thanks to political influence, conservative mindsets, and tradition left from the time of Prohibition. 

In his first piece for Good Beer Hunting titled “No Blitz — How Arkansas Tech University Fans Tailgate in a Dry County,” freelance writer Brian Sorenson portrays a small, but proud slice of the American South, where sports like football dominate much of the culture. That culture, he says, lags behind the more liberal coastal areas of the United States, but that doesn’t mean it’s less worthy of attention. In our conversation, he describes his hope for readers and listeners to set aside their notions of what they think Arkansas is like, and to instead experience it through fresh eyes and open minds. 

You’ll hear about his background in beer, football, writing, and the state of Arkansas, where he grew up used to rowdy sports fans fueled by alcohol. For this story, he was fascinated by the idea of separating the two, and shares some of the surprises he came across while writing the piece. It’s an insider’s look at seemingly contradictory ideologies, and it’s likely you’ll walk away with a new framework from which to view a different, but beautiful, way of life.

When I tell people that I’m really into beer, a quarter of the time someone mentions cider despite the two being vastly different. These interactions have always left me feeling helpless because I lacked the knowledge to educate them about the differences, and I certainly couldn’t guide them to a beer style that would be similar to cider. The extent of my cider knowledge was extremely limited—until I read fellow GBH contributor and podcast host Beth Demmon's book “The Beer Lover's Guide to Cider.”

In fact, she addresses this common mixup in the first line of her book “Cider is not beer.” Cider is more like wine than beer because it’s created from fruit whereas beer is a combination of malt, hops, and yeast. Despite their differences, Beth is able to draw a connection between beer and cider to show us how vast the world of cider really is, encouraging us to look beyond what we might find in our local grocery store. Much like many of us had to do in the early days of craft beer when shelves were stocked with domestic Lager and other mass-produced beers.   

In our conversation, we talk about Beth’s inspiration for the book, which includes a trip to CiderCon, an annual conference organized by the American Cider Association. Beth also shares how she approached writing the book and how she was able to lean on her community for help. But what I love most about our conversation is how she draws parallels between those initial days of craft beer and the current state of cider here in the United States. For those of us who have explored all corners of craft beer, cider offers a new landscape of flavors, producers, and techniques to dive into, so let’s jump right in.

It’s a new year and things are already shaking up in the beer world, first with Asahi’s entry into brewing in the United States, plus Coca-Cola subsidiary Red Tree’s big plans for 2024. Looking outside of beer, Kate and I preview what Sightlines has planned for CiderCon, the annual cider industry conference kicking off January 16, 2024 in Portland, Oregon. Keep listening for all that and more, right here on The Gist.

When scouting locations to open a new brewery, quite a few things are left to chance. What’s available to lease, in the right price range, in the right area, at the right time? Data sometimes comes into play, but then again, sometimes, it’s just vibes. 

Julie Wartell, a continuing lecturer at the University of California, San Diego and co-editor of the academic text titled “Craft Breweries and Cities: Perspectives from the Field,” believes that statistics and scientific measurements should play a larger role in these types of decisions, as well as affecting many more perceptions and beliefs about craft beer’s influence on its surroundings. How does the presence of alcohol impact things like public safety, gentrification, or the economics of a community, and what’s the difference between breweries, bars, and other alcohol-centric establishments? Why are there so many resources for technical brewing, but almost none about the social science of the beer industry itself? These are the questions that led to the text, which she hopes more breweries, business owners, residents, beer enthusiasts, and government employees will use to examine the reasoning behind the decisions they make, and perhaps even improve the way we think about craft beer as a cultural force. 

In this episode, Julie and I talk about what breweries contribute to cities, and how she uses maps and data to draw scientific conclusions that may not always correlate with public opinion. She shares her professional background as a crime analyst, as well as her personal passion for beer, and how she’s managed to find overlaps between the two through her work and research. Even as someone who writes about, analyzes, and enjoys beer, I found myself realizing that I, too, have some impressions of beer at large that are much more emotionally-charged than data-driven. It’s humbling, if not fascinating to see things from her point of view, and there’s plenty to learn from someone who’s been doing this for 30 years.

In the world of cider, Nikki West says the nerdier you are, the cooler you are. That’s probably the scientist in her talking, but she’s not wrong. As an agriculturally-based product, cider is inextricably tied to the earth, which is one reason why West decided to move from an academic career in geosciences to launching Ciders From Mars in Staunton, Virginia. It wasn’t a huge leap, scientifically speaking, but it was definitely one that changed the trajectory of their life.

In our conversation, West and I discuss the pros and cons of a formal education in fermentation, and how the Cider Institute of North America helped her transform a garage operation into a tasting room in the Shenandoah Valley, the heart of Virginia apple country. We also talk about the seismic shift it took to jump from geology to ciderology, and the overlaps between the two endeavors, as well as why they decided to plant an orchard in order to (eventually) use apple varieties not readily found elsewhere. As someone with Celiac disease, West says cider is an ideal alternative to beer, as well as less filling, without the stuffy culture or high ABV of wine—basically, nature’s most perfect drink, and one she hopes more people discover in the years to come. 

It may be called Good Beer Hunting, but in this episode, we’re Good Cider Hunting.

From the moment I stepped into Good Word Brewing in Duluth, I was impressed. The space is a take on old-world style with warm wood and plush booths—it's comfortable, cozy, and looks like it’s been there for decades even though it's fairly new. It's a place where you can settle in for a long while, and you'll want to because the food and beer are so exceptional that lingering is a pleasure.

Todd DiMatteo, the owner of Good Word, has been at the helm since its opening in 2017. We first met in 2019 when I was working on a story highlighting the city of Duluth, and over the years, I continue to be impressed by his dedication to quality, community, and hospitality. It shows up in every aspect of the business, but especially his Lagers, which are clean and crisp and have enough flavor to keep your palate engaged without overdoing it. 

With their sixth anniversary approaching, I thought it would be a good time to catch up with Todd and reflect on everything he's been able to accomplish over the years. You'll hear him share some of his stumbles along the way and how he keeps himself engaged as a brewer. We also talk about why so many of the beers on his menu are decocted, how he balances his beer descriptions for beer geeks and novices, and his approach to beer events.

2023 is drawing to a close, so it’s time to take a look back at the year to see what happened, what’s happening, and what might happen in the coming months. This is the Gist with Kate Bernot and me, Beth Demmon, where we examine the biggest stories happening in beer and beyond so you know everything you need to know. It’s time for The Gist.

In Korean folklore, dokkaebi are tricksy creatures who love to eat, drink, and challenge humans to wrestling matches. They tend to create mischief, but generally not mayhem, and can bring you luck—if you remain on their good side. This same sense of playfulness is evident at Dokkaebier in Oakland, California, an Asian-inspired craft brewery that encapsulates not just the name, but the spirit of dokkaebi in every beer they make.

In her first story for Good Beer Hunting, Maloy Luakian describes how her own Pan-Asian identity informed her experience at Dokkaebier, and how she was able to feel a sense of nostalgia through familiar flavors presented in an unfamiliar medium. Her story, titled “Supernatural Creatures And Blended Cultures — Dokkaebier’s Story Of Shapeshifting,” describes the brewery’s history, goals, and cultural influence as one of the only Asian-owned breweries in the United States, as well as founder Youngwon Lee’s background as a third-culture kid, with roots in South Korea, Guam, and the United States. 

In this conversation, she defines what third culture is and what it means to her, how the idea of authenticity in food and drink can keep tradition alive as well as inspire innovation, and how the beer cultures in Asia and the U.S. are influencing one another in fresh and exciting ways. It’s clearly a very personal story, and she admits that she wasn’t sure where it was going to end up. We’re lucky to have it on Good Beer Hunting, and it’s a pleasure to talk about it right now.

How many times have you heard some version of the phrase “beer brings people together?” We get it: eating and drinking with others is an ancient and deeply human way to connect with our communities, and beer plays a huge role in that. It’s such a foundational idea that gets thrown around so much that honestly, I’ve sort of forgotten it means anything.

But after talking with Trevor Nearburg, owner and brewer at Beerburg Brewing in Austin, Texas, it’s the first time in a long time that the concept has actually made sense to me in a new and relatable way. You see, Trevor’s not just a brewer. He’s a forager, herbalist, vegan, and dare I say aspiring poet, discussing concepts like ethical and intentional living as universal responsibilities that each and every one of us owes to the land upon which we exist. It’s the process of gathering, tasting, creating, and sharing with one another that brings us together, and it’s that foundation that drives him rather than the beer itself.

Of course, beer still plays a huge role at Beerberg, and his rotating portfolio of both classic and esoteric styles redefine not just what beer is, but how it’s made and where it comes from. In this episode, Trevor shares his journey of intentional living and brewing, and how he uses the world around him to inform what he makes and how it changes with the seasons, weather, and other climate events across the sometimes harsh Central Texas landscape. I laugh a lot in this conversation—how could I not, when he’s openly lamenting about the acorn harvest this year or waxing nostalgic about a particularly great yield of mugwort? I hope you laugh too, and learn something new about what it means to make beer in the same way Trevor aspires to exist in nature: without ego or judgment. 

By definition, the realization that you’ve experienced a close brush with death can’t come until after you’ve survived, but sometimes you might realize you’re already standing on thin ice, left to wonder how you’re going to stay alive.

We hope these moments in life are few, if at all, but when they do occur, reliving them with the safety and clarity of hindsight can teach us lessons about ourselves that we may otherwise never know.  

In his piece “Melting Away — Ice Fishing on LSD While Your World Dissolves,” a story published as part of Good Beer Hunting’s Olly Olly series in collaboration with Oskar Blues, writer and photographer Mark LaFaro describes his venture onto a frozen lake in Minnesota and what brought him there in the first place—the end of a partnership for him and the dawning of a new era for his friend Finney, who recently became a new parent. Beginnings and ends like these can feel similarly rudderless and isolating, something Mark and Finney found out during what ended up being a more treacherous outing than they originally anticipated. In this conversation with Mark, he told me he’d do it all again, maybe with a bit less LSD and definitely with some more safety precautions. He also talks about how despite the fact that fishing is closely tied to drinking, how the two alcohol-free friends managed to still open their horizons and hearts to one another during a terrifying, but somewhat necessary catharsis for them both. The two friends danced on the edge of life and came back to tell the tale, and we’re fortunate to hear all about it.

Last year, while attending the Georgia Brewers Conference, I heard a DEI presentation from Isaiah Smith, the CEO of Our Culture Brewing Co, Fenwick Broyard, vice president of culture at Creature Comforts Brewing Co., and Tracy Bardugon, then a taproom manager at Fire Maker Brewing who now works at  Elsewhere Brewing.

You might think once you’ve heard one DEI talk, you’ve heard them all, but I found this one to stand out because it detailed the importance of creating an inclusive environment before injecting diversity into it. Instead of focusing on bringing in diversity first, make sure your brewery is inclusive and ready to accept more diverse employees. The trio also detailed during the talk about the value of collaborating beyond the brewhouse—connecting different departments within a brewery with each other to share knowledge and best practices. Since then, I haven’t looked at brewery collaborations the same. 

What’s so valuable about this idea is that breweries in planning like Our Culture can benefit from years of experience from a brewery like Creature Comforts, one of the biggest craft breweries in Georgia. I was excited to learn how their ideas became action—in May 2023 Creature Comforts created a brewing residency program where the Our Culture team was partnered with a counterpart at Creature Comforts.

I recently had a chance to join both breweries in Athens where they shared their experience of creating this partnership and how it was beneficial to both parties. First, you’ll hear from Jossette Footman-Smith, co-owner and head of operations and community engagement at Our Culture Brewing, and Issac Smith, co-owner and head of brewing operations, as they share how Our Culture got their start. 

Then, you’ll hear from Isaiah Smith and Creature Comforts’ Fenwick Broyard about the residency program, and what they learned along the way. We also dive into the story behind their collaboration beer, “Seeds Take Up the Soil,” a sweet potato Ale that is a great representation of the beers Our Culture is planning to bring to market, focused on highlighting flavors of the African diaspora.

It’s a new week and that means new drama, news, and more on this episode of The Gist, with Kate Bernot and me, Beth Demmon. We bring you the latest beer world news with all the context—and the tea—you need to know on what’s happening right now. This is the Gist.

Look around beer today and it’s easy to find lots … beyond it. Breweries are making hard seltzer, canned cocktails, wine, or opening up restaurant extensions. Whether it's over the counter at a taproom or in a store, the challenges to sell beer have never been more unique and plentiful as people can now choose to drink just about whatever they want in a variety of formats, flavors, and experiences.

Which is part of the reason why the growth of New York City’s Grimm Artisanal Ales shouldn’t come as a surprise. The company was started a decade ago focused on beer, but the curiosity of its founders, Lauren and Joe Grimm, has helped it expand beyond it. Just over a year ago they launched Physica Wines, a wine-making spinoff focused on low-tech, spontaneous fermentations with regionally-sourced grapes and other fruit. Then more recently, it was Lala’s, a New Haven-style pizzeria. All three businesses and their products share a similar passion and purpose and represent what Lauren and Joe see as natural extensions of their past decade of work.

If you’re a beer fan, you may know Grimm as a once-nomadic brewery making beers beloved by enthusiasts, whether IPAs for Wild Ales. But in this conversation, we’ll get into what drives Lauren and Joe’s interest in doing more beyond beer and how they go from experimenting with food and beverage at home to serving their creations for customers.

When we talk about what they appreciate about beer, it’s not uncommon to hear them mention the people; the “community.” And in a very tangible way, there are few examples for how this appears than at a beer festival. All over the country, almost all year-round, you can find examples of packed event halls, convention centers, and even parking lots where enthusiasts and novices alike mill about, sampling different beers. But more recently - and certainly partially because of the COVID pandemic - these festivals have hit a rough patch. For some of the most prominent beer fests, interest isn’t as high as it used to be and ticket sales are just a little tougher.

In Canada, the annual Windsor Craft Beer Festival was canceled due to lagging sales while it easily sold out during its heydays of the mid-2010s. Similarly, The Oregon Brewers Festival was canceled this year after organizers shared that higher costs, lower attendance, and extreme weather were making it harder to stay a successful event. Last year, the Great American Beer Festival cut its ticket numbers by 20,000 across multiple sessions after years of more challenging sales. 

So what is the state of these special events? Let’s dive into it with Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot…

If you follow me on Instagram, you know my love for beer is only rivaled by my love for cooking. Cooking is not only a therapeutic experience but a creative outlet . When I'm not in the kitchen, I'm probably watching cooking shows. Without a doubt, MasterChef is my favorite, and I've been hooked since its first season.

I was delighted this year when two people from the beer industry impressed the judges enough to earn white aprons and compete for the title of MasterChef. I was beyond ecstatic when Grant Gillon, a sales rep from Kinship Brewing Co, made it to the finals and eventually won the competition. He rose above his competition by showcasing his Italian heritage and his passion for beer.  

Grant and I share a love for cooking and beer, and we both believe that craft beer has a place in the world of fine dining. In this episode, we delve into  what meal or menu prep looks like when beer is involved. You'll hear Grant share two of the most significant lessons he learned from cooking in the MasterChef kitchen. He also provides tips for learning how to cook with beer and offers advice on getting your kids involved in the kitchen. But the common thread in our conversation? His love for Iowa.

Communities can be built through mutual joy just as easily as through shared struggle, and in the rugged landscape of the American frontier, it can also be built through necessity of survival. Along the banks of the Salmon River, the small town of Stanley, Idaho, embodies these ideals of wonder and respect for nature, but residents’ way of life is changing, in sometimes unexpected and unwelcome ways.

In her piece titled “Dancing In The Dust — Idaho’s River Runners Navigate a Changing American West,” a story published as part of our Olly Olly series in collaboration with Oskar Blues, freelance writer and environmental advocate Claire Barber takes us on a journey down the river and through the town, capturing the heart and spirit inextricably tied to the rushing waters that literally keep the region alive. 

In this episode, Claire describes when she first heard about Stanley and what drew her there to document the spirits of adventure, as well as isolation, in the nearly off-the-grid utopia. She also talks about the changes she witnessed first-hand and what gave her hope in spite of the challenges Stanley faces. People come and go, but the river will always remain, and her ride down the rapids provides a glimpse both into the past and towards the future. Let’s take a ride with her, right now. 

There are many movements throughout the craft beer industry shining a light on the importance of diversity and seeking ways to create more inclusive environments.

One of these movements is Tha CommUNITY, a multi-brew initiative led by April Dove. Since its launch in 2021, April has brewed 11 beers with breweries in and around Charleston, South Carolina, while providing breweries with a blueprint on how to attract Black drinkers to their taprooms.

In this episode, April shares the unlikely story of how Tha CommUNITY got its start. We discuss the challenges of bringing Black people into the craft beer scene. While it's challenging to create a checklist of things to guarantee an inclusive, diverse taproom, April shares her approach to planning releases for her beers, which includes creating a familiar atmosphere for people who haven't set foot in a taproom before. We'll also explore her takeaways from beer school and how the Brewer's Association mentorship program is helping her take Tha CommUNITY to the next level.

From a declaration of maturity to mergers and acquisitions, cannabis, craft share, and beyond, it’s been a big week in beer. Let’s get the heart of what’s going on right now on The Gist, with Kate Bernot and me, Beth Demmon. 

For a while now, it has been my mission to cover the stories of Black women in the craft beer industry doing incredible things. Many of us started as casual drinkers and transitioned into the craft beer scene with the aim of bringing more diversity into it.

So, when Vivian Ward came to my attention, I knew I had to talk to her about The ExBeerience, her initiative focused on creating opportunities for beer lovers of all experience levels to learn about and enjoy beer through tastings, guided brewery tours, and more.

Listen in to hear Vivian talk about how The ExBeerience got its start and how her inaugural ExBeerience bottle share almost didn't happen. We discuss how diversity is the future of the craft beer industry and why it's essential for its growth. Vivian also emphasizes the importance of breweries creating inclusive spaces but also reaching out to the diverse communities they aim to attract. Let’s hear how Vivian is working to diversify taprooms in St. Louis.

There’s a masochistic element to drinking Malört, the bitter liqueur beloved by Chicagoans and reviled by others. But beneath its herbaceous and citrusy intensity, it represents much more than a challenge to your palate. To drink Malört is a rite of passage—entrance to a secret club you have to earn your way into through a tongue buckling finish and nearly a century of history. 

In his piece for Good Beer Hunting, Chicago-based freelance writer and culture journalist Josh Terry unpacks the storied spirit as only a Chicagoan could. That piece, titled “Stormy, Husky, Brawling — Chicago's Divisive Spirit Jeppson’s Malört Is For Everyone Now,” explores the core of Malört’s history, after its invention during the 1930s, but before its hipster revival in the 2010s. In this episode, we’ll talk about what it was like to dive into the endlessly debated, but deeply meaningful spirit, one that he says isn’t as bad as everyone thinks. He describes the first time he tried Malört and the rules he has about drinking it now—rule one: never drink it alone—and what he wished he could have expanded on in the piece.

We also discuss Josh Noel’s forthcoming book about Malört, how photographs and social media helped create hype in the digital age, and why this bitter spirit is more popular than ever. I’m not sure Malört is for everyone, but it definitely holds a special place for lots of people. Let’s hear from one of them—right now.

My guest needs little introduction. Averie Swanson is well-known in the craft beer industry for her work at Jester King Brewery—a brewery in Austin, Texas renowned for their farmhouse ales. She’s also one of 19 Master Cicerones in the world, and the founder and beer maker behind Keeping Together.

Averie is here to talk about one of the most romantic beer styles in craft beer—Saisons. Though IPAs have long reigned in the American craft beer scene, many of us share a deep love for this rustic farmhouse ale, its origins, and the beer’s ability to express a vast range of nuanced flavors.

In our conversation, you'll hear Averie share her Saison philosophy. She also touches on the history of Saisons and how that history connects to some of the style's characteristics. Averie talks about why she prefers stainless steel over oak, and we discuss the idea of keeping the “farm” in farmhouse ales. We also share our favorite food and beer pairing experiences, and finally, Averie gives us an update on what we can expect from Keeping Together in the next year.

Ready to hear about why the Federal Trade Commission is not happy with Total Wine, what’s selling and what’s stalling at convenience stores right now, and whether we’re headed for an NA beer bubble? Keep listening—it’s time for The Gist with Kate Bernot and me, Beth Demmon.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an avid drinker or someone who’s never had a drop—there’s a good chance you’ve seen or heard about the growth of non-alcoholic beer, wine, or spirits in the last year or two. Businesses like Athletic Brewing Company have reached pop culture status, appearing in TV shows and movies, showing up in magazines like GQ, and probably debuting at social events near you, at parties or weekend cookouts with friends. In this episode, we’ve got another player entering the game: non-alcoholic cider.

With Good Beer Hunting contributor Beth Demmon, we’re going to explore what that means and why non-alc cider is happening now. There’s a good chance we haven’t yet reached an apex of non-alcoholic options from alcoholic beverage makers, so maybe the appearance of hard cider-gone-soft shouldn’t be a surprise. But then again, isn’t that … juice?

Let’s get a sense of what we’re talking about and why it matters…

In this conversation, we’re talking about hospitality. It’s a bit of an audio-based extension from what Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot has covered on GoodBeerHunting.com, telling the story of a widening gap that breweries are navigating between those who go wide—trying to find success by flinging beer as far as they want and need to for sales—and those who stay narrow by focusing on their neighborhood, city, and what can sell locally. A theme that runs through it all—whether a company decides to go wide or narrow—is the kind of connection they seek with consumers. What matters to a business? What matters to a customer? And how does it all come together?

To explore these questions, we’re talking with Rosa and John Paradiso, co-owners of Durham, North Carolina’s The Daily Beer Bar, which serves coffee, some food, and has a curated and special tap list of rotating beers. As you’ll hear, the creation of this space had long been a dream for John, and how he and Rosa talk about it will be rooted in themes of hospitality and why this is so important for a small, privately-owned business in today’s drinking landscape. In Durham like so many other fast-growing American cities, people can choose to drink just about whatever they want in plenty of different locations or atmospheres, so why choose The Daily Beer Bar? Why pick a place that’s meant to kind of, sort of, feel like a home?

The answers you hear aren’t likely unique to just Rosa and John, but to many other small business owners across the country. So, together, let’s get a better understanding of how and why hospitality matters in 2023 and the way one beer bar is thinking about it.

The practices of writing and editing, while similar, each require very specific skill sets that nudge against one another, but remain deeply individual in practice. The greatest writers rely on talented editors to shape their voice, and the best editors are those who can spy potential within a story and help tease it out as part of a collaborative effort. The results are mostly enjoyed by readers and listeners, but the creators themselves have to enjoy the process of putting something into the world that did not exist before. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Emma Janzen has known for a long time that her path pointed towards editing, by way of writing for many years. Now, she has the chance as the new drinkways editor for Good Beer Hunting. Her role, in her words, is to develop, assign, and edit stories that are not about beer, which may strike some listeners as odd. After all, it’s called Good Beer Hunting. But those who know, know that we’ve always been much more than “just beer.” Emma is going to help nurture that spark of curiosity and—hopefully—fan the flames of discovery through storytelling and exploration. 

In this conversation, Emma reveals what initially drew her to Good Beer Hunting and why what she witnessed as a reader cultivated her desire to be an official part of the team. You’ll hear about the stories she’s worked on, the ideas she has, and the discussions she hopes take root in future features. We also talk about what it’s like to be a freelancer at this particular moment in time and how the pandemic’s isolation helped her realize the importance of in-person connection, for both personal and professional growth. It’s not our first conversation on the podcast, and I don’t think it’ll be our last.  

Before it became a worldwide beer campaign, the phrase 'Black Is Beautiful' was a positive affirmation in my childhood. I had previously written about it on GoodBeerHunting.com in the essay, Colorism, Black Pride, and the Black Is Beautiful Initiative. Then, in June 2020, the saying also became the name of an international collab beer as an initiative created by Weathered Souls Brewing’ Marcus Baskerville, raising more than $5 million across 1,601 partner breweries that sent proceeds to organizations that support equality and inclusion.

Now, the initiative enters into a new phase, supporting the National Black Brewers Association's work in developing and growing Black brewers nationwide. Thanks to documentary filmmaker Marco Ortega, we get a glimpse into what this initiative meant for so many people and how Baskerville is evolving it beyond the project's initial goals.

I had a chance to sit on a panel for the film with Ortega, and I knew I had to share his inspiration and passion for the film with you. In this episode, you'll hear how much admiration Ortega has for the way Baskerville is driven to help his community. We go behind the scenes to explore what it takes to make a film and along the way, Ortega provides advice for aspiring filmmakers. He also shares the emotional rollercoaster he considers a part of his creative process and talks about the unlikely celebrity who encouraged him to pursue his dreams.

The latest beer news, product developments, and what constitutes a “five-alarm fire” for distributors—at least, according to distributors.

It’s all here in The Gist, a new Good Beer Hunting podcast with Kate Bernot and Beth Demmon, where you’ll get a breakdown of why the latest happenings in beer matter and the context around it all.

This bite-sized show gives listeners quick, quippy, and expert insight into the big stories happening in the U.S. beer scene and beyond. Join Beth and Kate every other week for colorful commentary and delightful debate from two of your favorite and familiar GBH voices.For our first episode, Beth and Kate unpack:

• Distributors’ fears about beer’s decline (and if those fears are a tad sensationalistic—hint, they are, according to Beth)

• Why inviting new consumers from overlooked communities is no longer a moral imperative (it’s a financial one too),

• How Gen Z is redefining the entire drinks category through Clip Art-esque products. Will it work? Who knows!

Becoming a journalist today seems more treacherous than in any other time in history. With notions like “alternative facts” on the rise, media companies slashing budgets and jobs, and more divisiveness among readers than ever before, who on earth would sign up to work in media?

Ren LaForme would, for one, and he has no regrets about it. In fact, he’s added a new position to his CV as the new North American beer editor for Good Beer Hunting. He’s been on this podcast before to talk about his role as the managing editor at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school, research organization, and fact-checking site based in St. Petersburg, Florida. But in this episode, you’ll hear from him as part of the Good Beer Hunting team, what his experience has been like so far, and why he decided to assume more responsibility in an already challenging media landscape. 

He also shares plenty of wisdom from his time working in media, with tips and advice for aspiring journalists, as well as a few words of caution. But despite a sometimes bleak outlook, Ren believes there will always be a very human need to communicate with one another, regardless of what shareholders value or trolls believe. Let’s hear from Ren, right now.

Every successful small business owner has to raise the bar if they’re going to compete. And for many, that means raising money, too. In this special episode, we’re talking about a series of articles that has appeared on Good Beer Hunting called “Compound Interest.” The stories written by Jerard Fagerberg are profiles devoted to founders who aligned their growth, fundraising, and community—and who keep their numbers up as they keep craft beer flowing. The stories are told in collaboration with SMBX, a marketplace for issuing and buying small business bonds.

In this episode we bring you a collection of GBH writers, including Jerard, Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot, and publisher Michael Kiser. We’ll talk about the origins of this series, why these stories matter, and the unique people and ideas Jerard has come across as he’s reported for Compound Interest over the past year.

Take a look behind the curtain to learn more about GBH storytelling and finding stories that resonate from business leader to readers and listeners like you. 

For years now, practically any industry has dealt with the threat of burnout. It was a problem before the COVID pandemic, became a bigger issue during 2020 and 2021, and has lingered since, as people try to find work-life balance that helps them find time to feel relaxed, recharged, or just happy. The challenges related to burnout are particularly harsh in hospitality, where staff at your favorite bar, restaurant, or brewery have to deal with high-pressure situations, unruly guests, long hours, and more. If you’re one of the millions of people who’ve watched the TV show, “The Bear,” and the chaos-inducing stories of restaurant staff, you’re also familiar with what can lead to burnout and its consequences.

In this episode of our podcast, Good Beer Hunting reporter and community editor Stephanie Grant takes us along for a series of conversations to better understand how burnout impacts people who work in beer. The causes are common—it’s those intense work environments and sometimes low pay—and we hope that hearing stories from those who’ve faced burnout and who are trying to combat it gives you a deeper understanding of how burnout impacts people.

You may have experienced burnout yourself at some point. You probably know someone who has. So, let’s learn a little bit more about what this issue is, why it needs to be addressed, and how we can better understand it.

What does it take to throw a party for ten thousand of your closest friends? A party that brings famous music acts from all over the country to your stage? A party with unlimited beer. And more than that, a party that brings in serious cash for a good cause.

With enough planning, funding, and support from your community, you might pull it off. But to throw a party like that eight times in a row, you need more. You need the right historical moment.

From 1972-1979, students at the University of Montana at Missoula threw the biggest kegger the Treasure State had ever seen. Known colloquially as the Aber Day Kegger, it was an outdoor concert bash fueled by up to a thousand beer kegs…and an unofficial substance or two. It drew in young music fans from all over Montana, the Pacific Northwest, and as far away as Los Angeles. The kegger helped more than one music group on their way to stardom. And most importantly, the organizers raised tens of thousands for the university library and local causes.

They also irritated a large swathe of Missoulians who looked at the kegger and saw only youthful impropriety, drunk driving, and a stain on a good university's reputation. Ultimately, the party couldn't last forever.

But the rise and fall of the Aber Day Kegger was decided in more places than Missoula's proverbial town square. Its fate was the product of a surging youth drinking culture, shifting minimum drinking age laws, predatory beer marketing practices, some old-fashioned greed, and–for a moment there–a national boycott movement. Shifts in these winds made the kegger possible, and they unmade it just as readily.

This is a special edition of the podcast where we let you peer behind the curtain. Our guest, baseball writer and beer enthusiast Eno Sarris, is the subject of a profile you can read on Good Beer Hunting. As part of the reporting for that story, I recorded one of our interviews to share with you—it’s a way for you to hear from Eno more of what makes him the person he is today, as well as gain a better understanding for some of the ideas and themes you read about in the piece itself.

Eno is one of the leading journalists covering baseball today, currently for The Athletic. His skill set is unique in the way he uses statistical analysis to tell stories about players and the sport, and it’s the same kind of thinking that put him in a unique position with beer. During the 2010s, he was a lead writer for a website, BeerGraphs, a beer-focused spin-off of FanGraphs, a renowned baseball publication. But along with his bonafides and expertise in baseball and beer, he’s also a charming and interesting person. In this conversation you’ll hear about his upbringing in Jamaica, Germany, and the U.S., and how baseball was central to the way he connected with others. You’ll also get a sense of how and why beer became part of his passion and career.

We recorded this chat during the summer in the midst of the baseball season, so some of the references to All-Star players will be time-stamped to that moment. But the ideas and stories Eno shares are evergreen, and will help you appreciate him and his work even more.

There’s a certain magic to baseball, filled with myths, heroes, and the power to make people feel that anything is possible. It’s no wonder it’s called America’s greatest pastime, or why players like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Mickey Mantle are household names, familiar even to those who don’t closely follow the sport. But sometimes it’s those off the field who are the myth makers, the legend builders, and the magicians keeping our hearts aligned to the game, which is, of course, much more than just a game. 

For his first feature in several years, Bryan Roth, Good Beer Hunting’s managing editor, news editor and podcast co-host, pens a sprawling account of Eno Sarris, the iconic writer and baseball analyst known for his sharp statistical study as well as his unflagging optimism and convivial attitude, punctuated often with a smile and a laugh. Bryan spoke to around a dozen sources for the piece, each clamoring to sing Sarris’ praises as both a gifted analyst and profoundly pleasant human being. 

With so many people eager to chime in with so many nice things to say, I wondered—do people love the person, or the personality? Turns out, they are one and the same, and it’s that very lack of pretension that has endeared Sarris to the hearts of readers and listeners around the world. (Plus, he drinks beer. What’s not to like?) 

In this episode, we’ll talk about both baseball and beer, how Sarris has unequivocally changed both for the better, and how our personal connections to the sport and the beverage continue to inform, surprise, and delight. Whether you’re a baseball fan or not, this is a story about hope and how positivity maybe can change the world.

Flavor is much more than what something tastes like. It’s aroma, mouthfeel, and flavors all mixed together to create a sensory experience that has the power to transport us through time and space. It’s unique to each person, yet universal in scope; shared on some level by every human who ever existed. 

In this episode, my guest is Mandy Naglich, a previous Good Beer Hunting contributor and author of “How To Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life.” She’s an Advanced Cicerone, a Certified Taster—yes, that’s a real thing—and drinks educator who helps people dig into flavor to discover just how far our senses can go. Mandy says that anyone can be a capital-T “Taster”, explains what “supertasters” really are, and describes how familiarity with things like wine, beer, cider, or even sake can expand our notions of flavor through practice and group discussion. 

You’ll hear what drove her to dial into the world of flavor, when and why her book came to be, and the differences between craft beer, cider, and chocolate as they relate to existing guidelines and critical analysis. She won’t teach you how to taste like her—simply, how to taste like you. With her guidance, we can all appreciate our senses a little bit more. So let’s hear from her.

If you’re an avid watcher of Netflix, you may have caught this episode’s guest on the hit series, Drink Masters, a reality-style competition based in the world of cocktails. LP O’Brien was the inaugural winner of the show, which she joined after years of a successful career in bartending, cocktail creation, and a host of hospitality roles. Her career was objectively already impressive before Netflix came calling, and being named as the “Master” of the show’s title simply added more excitement around her insight, expertise, and passion toward beverages.

In this conversation, you’ll hear LP talk some about how the show impacted her and what she's been up to since, but mostly, you’ll hear us share stories about … stories. And also what it means to say “yes,” “no,” and the power of taking control of your own schedule. Part of this is necessary for LP these days, as she runs a consulting company, LP Drinks, and has partnered with the creation of other businesses, from one focused on wellness and health among hospitality pros to a canned cocktail brand. When we connected, LP had just wrapped a multi-day pop-up event in New York City as part of her company, Bodega Culture, which celebrates the distinctive features and emotional significance these stores hold for people.

It’s hard to define someone as a “rising star” when they’re already held in high regard, but LP is one of the beverage world’s experts you’re sure to see and hear more from in the future. However high her star may be already, there’s still momentum upward, and you’ll get to know her better in this conversation.

Beer is a treasure trove for anyone who wants to be a lifelong learner. From a historical perspective alone, there are thousands of years of brewing to discover and explore. If you ever get bored of that, you can switch to incredible discoveries around yeast and hop varieties. There’s a wealth of knowledge to be had for anyone, and it can be particularly useful by breweries as a way to educate customers and strengthen those relationships in the process.

But how can breweries pass on that information in a fun and compelling way? Beer education consultant LaTreace Harris, also known as The Beery Godmother, believes that in order to stand out, breweries need deliberate and well-crafted beer education programs.

What those programs look like will be as unique as each brewery, but as you'll hear in our conversation, LaTreace walks us through the key components of what she thinks are best practices. We also talk about her series, Beer Fact Fridays, where every week she shares a snippet of beer knowledge on Instagram, and LaTreace shares about her own process for continuing beer education and what she's currently studying.

The American South means a lot of things, to a lot of people. But one thing is for certain—there’s no place like it in the world. 

For his first feature in Good Beer Hunting, freelance journalist Owen Racer wrote about this place, its people, and how beer fits into it all. During a year as a resident of New Orleans, Owen tapped into the food and drink scene, researching its illustrious history, shared traumas, and steps towards the future, often through the unexpected lens of beer. In our conversation, he discusses why Lager is so specifically tied to both the culture and the climate of the Gulf Coast, what misconceptions beer still faces in the area, and the hurdles that have held the beverage back, until now.

In this episode, Owen and I talk about his process and emotional connection of reporting as an outsider and temporary resident of an area beloved by many and misunderstood by even more. You’ll hear about the surprises he faced, the Southern hospitality he felt, and, of course, the beers he drank. Let’s hear about his year on the Gulf, and how it changed him for years to come.

This episode is a special one for us. It brings together voices of people who were in Nashville for the 2023 Craft Brewers Conference as a spiritual sequel to a 2018 episode we called "Strong Feelings." Our goal then and now is simple: To capture the feelings of a particular moment in the beer industry and encourage people to share ideas, inspiration, and what they think matters—or maybe needs to change.

To help with creating this episode, I was joined by Kate Bernot at a bottle share party hosted by the National Black Brewers Association. We partnered with two board members from the association to chat with attendees and gather their thoughts and feelings: Jon Renthrope, CEO and brewmaster of New Orleans' Cajun Fire Brewing and Alisa Bowens-Mercado, owner of New Haven, Connecticut's Rhythm Brewing. Over the course of the night, each of us took turns with the microphone, engaging with people and their strong feelings about topics that ranged from how to attract new customers to craft beer, discussing the people who represent the future of craft beer, who they admire, and more.

Consider this as a beer version of speed dating. Each person picked a card at random that had a topic to talk about—which you'll hear—and then shared their response. What came of it all offers us a unique moment in time with perspectives that tell the story of craft beer in spring 2023. Along with the responses, you'll also hear the voice of Kate Bernot, who will share excerpts from a Sightlines story about the National Black Brewers Association. Combined, the live voices from the NB2A’s party and Kate’s reporting will give you a sense of place and importance of the organization and what it can achieve.

First, we’ll turn it over to some of the people from the bottle share. This is Strong Feelings, made in collaboration with Jon Renthrope, Alisa Bowens-Mercado, and the National Black Brewers Association.

It’s not breaking news to say there aren’t many women owners across beverage alcohol, or to say there are even fewer Black women in ownership positions. That’s why when a company helmed by an African-American woman does launch, it’s essential to explore who they are, what they’re doing, and how we can understand their endeavors to help move industry cultures forward. 

Monique Gray is the founder of Momentum Cider, a fledgling cider brand out of Long Beach, California, and the recipient of the inaugural Creator Launchpad Grant from Beer Kulture and Women of the Bevolution. Both organizations aim to provide resources through mentorship, scholarships, grants, opportunities for collaborations, and much more in order to improve equity and accessibility in beer and beyond. 

Monique is relatively new to cider, but she’s unabashedly passionate about its history, traditions, and place on contemporary shelves and menus. As a lifelong entrepreneur, she decided to transition from a career in wellness into cider after falling in love with the beverage and discovering a passion to share it with others. She sees herself as a pioneer in the space, with a goal to open the first Black woman-owned cidery in California. 

In this episode, you’ll hear how (and when) she plans to accomplish that goal, using the resources and connections from the grant, as well as other local organizations and partnerships like an upcoming collaboration with Benny Boy Brewing. You’ll hear Monique describe what it was like to receive the grant and why she takes the responsibility of this opportunity very seriously. A guiding principle of her career has been the ability to ask “Why not?” when trying something new, and so far, it’s paid off. Let’s hear how, right now.

At what point do creative pursuits become exercises in futility? When does the lack of success become failure, and when does it serve as a reminder in the value of pursuing a breakthrough? How can we look to the Earth as a guide towards unpredictability—and what does beer have to do with any of this?

In his piece titled “From the Pores of Earth—The Impractical Alchemy of Stone Fermentation,” a story published as part of our Mother of Invention series in collaboration with Guinness, writer Jerard Fagerberg explores the short-lived trend of stone fermentation. He speaks with several brewers who participate in the obscure and wildly labor intensive practice to find out not only how, but why they pursue an ancient method in contemporary times. In our conversation, you’ll hear even more about when and why he pursued this story—not just to shine a light on a relatively odd way of brewing, but his journey through the story and whether or not his curiosity was ultimately satisfied through the process. 

Humans don’t tend to spend a lot of time exploring minerality as a flavor. But those who do remain very passionate about it, and at the very least, it’s a sensation worth being aware of. The Earth gives us a lot to be thankful for, and I, for one, am grateful for the chance to understand her, even just a little bit more. Let’s hear from Jerard, right now. 

It's easy to get lost in the world of craft beer. I liken it to falling in love with someone. For years, craft beer was the only thing I could think of, but eventually I came up for air and realized there’s a world of wine and spirits out there. But instead of diving into the history or stories behind my favorite bottles, I find myself fascinated by the influencers, tastemakers, and educators in the beverage space.

One of those people is Cha McCoy, a sommelier, public speaker, and beverage programmer. Cha first crossed my radar in 2021 via email for a social media campaign she was working on for Cherry Bombe Magazine where she served as the publication's first beverage director and editor. To my surprise, I ran into Cha a year later at the Charleston Wine + Food Festival, where she served as the event’s beverage director. Since then, I have followed her career and the incredible moves she’s made with interest and adoration. 

Along with consulting for a list of prestigious clients like the James Beard Foundation, Cha last year opened The Communion, a wine and spirit shop in Syracuse, NY. The brick-and-mortar location feeds into her mission to make wine more accessible by connecting local vineyards with people who are often excluded from the conversation. Before opening the shop, Cha traveled the world hosting wine dinners, and that’s only a small portion of Cha’s accomplishments. 

In our conversation, I wanted to understand what makes Cha the powerhouse she is. You'll hear how she's driven by her love of teaching others, and how moving to Italy and experiencing the “la dolce vita” or “the sweet life” gave her the space to figure out what she loved. She also talks about how an engineering degree still applies to her career in wine. While the wine world is different from craft beer, you'll notice some similarities between the two as you listen to our conversation.

Once upon a time, supporting independent makers in food and drink was paramount for conscientious consumers. To these shoppers, a common goal was to avoid anything with a whiff of global corporate ownership. But today, the goal posts have shifted in a slightly different direction, with customers often focusing on aspects like seasonality, sustainability, and staying as close as possible to the source. 

This emphasis on hyper localism isn’t quite as one-dimensional as it seems, or so says writer and academic Dr. Anna Sulan Masing. In a story for Good Beer Hunting titled, “People, Place, and Produce — How Agriculture, Secondary Ingredients, and Trade Routes Define Spirits’ Identities,” Masing looks at the tangible and historical influences on spirits and explains how certain ideas of what a spirit is today can often leave out where it actually comes from. She encourages readers to look to our past to understand our future, and how time, space, and travel all inform the products we consume, regardless of how local we think they are. 

In this episode, we discuss the power and danger of wielding the idea of “authenticity,” and what the term even means in the first place. You’ll hear how it took years for her to piece together the threads of an idea to report this story, as well as the challenges—and surprises—she faced throughout her research. We’ll talk about how history and heritage informs innovation and how those ideas of authenticity can be an ever-evolving concept, shifting from one person to the next. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a beverage historian, none of us can escape the local or global systems that nourish us. So let’s explore them, head on, and as a collective group.

We’ve all heard the stories of homebrewers following their passion into professional brewing. There’s an engineer or a lawyer who homebrewed for years and after lots of encouragement, decided it was time to give it a go. But how many Wall Street investment bankers turn down lucrative salaries to open a brewery? There’s at least one in San Diego, and it’s Doug Constantiner from Societe Brewing Company.

Doug is one of those people that is accomplished and humble, always ready with a smile, a pint, and a listening ear. Being a part of the San Diego craft beer community is to be a part of a world-class industry, and sometimes egos or ambition can sour the experience. That’s not what you’ll hear today. Instead, Doug describes the steps he and the other leaders at Societe take to keep their mission simple: treat others how you’d like to be treated, and focus on the beer.

Of course, it’s never just beer. We also talk about how he tries to lead by quiet example by building bridges and open lines of communication that he believes may be a key to improving the world. Later on, we’ll discuss the split Societe faced when co-founder Travis Smith left the company in 2019, and how that difficult separation changed the future of the brewery just before the pandemic changed the world’s entire way of life. There have been ups and downs, highs and lows, but some things remain the same: Doug’s commitment to quality in beer, joy in life, acceptance of people, and love of family. Let’s hear from the banker turned brewer, right now.

People in the beer industry often tout the aspiration of using the drink as a way to “build community.” What they typically mean is that interacting over a beer is meant to be some kind of equalizer, allowing humans to connect in a better way. In this episode we meet someone who has taken this idea to heart, acting as one of the most prominent community builders in the Arizona beer scene for several years.

Ayla Kapahi is the director of brewing operations for Tuscon’s Borderlands Brewing, but is so much more. She’s started professional development organizations, including co-founding the Southern Arizona chapter of the Pink Boots Society, which focuses on developing talent and skills among women and non-binary individuals. Ayla also helped launch Las Hermanas, an annual collaboration beer made with female brewers from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. On the brewing side of things, she’s focused on using ingredients and flavor experiences unique to the Southwest as a way to give Borderlands beer a truer sense of home.

All these effomjmjrts are part of an ongoing desire to connect people. And as you’ll hear from Ayla, while she’s had a hard time defining what success means for her career so far, it’s these examples that help her stop and realize the impact she’s able to have, relationships she’s created, and how much more she can do in the future. We all work to find the “why” in our lives—what drives us and inspires us—and you’re about to learn how finding a career in beer helped Ayla find hers, and is encouraging others to do the same.

We’ve all set professional goals at one point or another, even if it’s just thinking back to the time as a kid you wanted to be an astronaut or athlete or president of the United States. For us adults, some of that imaginative whimsy fades once we actually start our working lives, but the desire to find something special isn’t ever fully lost. In this episode, we’re going to talk hopes and dreams, and how for one brewer, a drive to learn also meant opportunities to excel.

Dashawn Agbonze is head brewer at Florida’s Mastry’s Brewing and despite more than a decade of experience in the industry, never received formal education to pair with years of training. That’s changing as a recipient of the Sir Geoff Palmer Scholarship Award for Brewing from the Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing & Distilling, which has him back in the classroom to enhance his brewing knowledge as he continues to hone his craft.

Throughout our conversation, Dashawn will describe what led him to this moment, which started in a dishpit at a brewpub and took him across the country in search of new experiences that would get him brewing and also some awards along the way. With discipline from time in the Navy, Dashawn is focused on fine tuning his skills and—above all—keep learning. This is a chance for you to hear the personal history of what it takes to chase a dream and find it, but never settle with the knowledge you have.

When it comes to alcohol in Tennessee, whiskey is king. But craft beer is slowly starting to become part of the state’s identity, and in Chattanooga, the brewing scene is finally coming into its own. In his first piece for Good Beer Hunting, writer Drew Pitt, a Chattanooga transplant by way of Los Angeles, explores the history, legacy, and challenges beer has faced in the city and gives us a glimpse towards the future. 

Drew’s piece, titled “Rebirth and Reinvention — As Chattanooga Grows and Changes, Local Beer Follows Along,” started as an idea for our Gas Station Week series, but eventually transformed into an insider’s look at a new and exciting brewing scene in southern Tennessee. We talk about how Tennessee isn’t exactly positioning itself as a welcoming state for people, especially the queer community, but why he believes Chattanooga can act as a beacon of acceptance, using beer as a conduit for connection. Bars and breweries have often been historically safe spaces for people oppressed by intolerance, and Drew hopes his home continues to innovate and include everyone who crosses into the state. 

I have a confession. I have a vested interest in getting people excited about cider through beer. I even wrote a book about it called “The Beer Lover’s Guide to Cider,” which comes out in September and aims to translate existing beer knowledge and appreciation as a way to inspire readers to explore a new-to-you beverage in cider. Luckily, I’m not the only one with this mission, and today, you’ll hear from two others who are also on this journey. 

Benny Farber and Chelsey Rosetter opened Benny Boy Brewing in 2022 as Los Angeles’ first brewery-slash-cider house, tank bar, and beer garden in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood. Their goal was—and still is—bringing people in with promises of craft beer, but having them leave with eyes opened to the wonders of cider. As a longtime homebrewer and cider maker, Benny knew that by uniting the two beverages in one space, he’d be able to introduce guests to the drinks that have inspired him and allow him to pass that passion along to others. Using Old World methods and a New World vibe, they’ve done well for themselves over their first year, but continue to have their sights set on building a bigger, better world for both cider and beer. 

In this episode, I talk with Benny and Chelsey about how two Midwest kids ended up in the City of Angels as partners in life and business. They walk me through a day in the life for each of them and what they do when they feel stretched too thin, which, as entrepreneurs with lofty goals, can happen a lot. You’ll hear about what it was like to raise money to launch their business—including how long it took—and what they think people with big dreams should know about building a legacy, including the difference between confidence and cockiness, and the importance of finding trusted supporters to guide you in the right direction.

The past year has been a hard one for most beer categories. With the exception of imports—particularly those from Mexico—volume growth hasn’t been easy to come by. That’s led companies to release new brands and packaging formats, but there are only so many ways a brewery can find new avenues to sell more beer. So, in recent months, you may have noticed another tactic: rebates.

Offering money back isn’t new in beer. The largest companies have provided rebates when shoppers buy large packs of Bud Light, Miller Lite, or Coors Light for years, but some craft breweries are exploring this space as a means to boost sales that have otherwise slumped.

Which begs the question: How does all this work? Along with Kate Bernot, Good Beer Hunting’s Sightlines reporter, we’re going to explore what’s going on in beer and why rebates can be an attractive option for breweries. As you’ll come to learn, it’s not just about selling more beer, but also finding a way to get your personal information, which can be priceless.

Like most of my beer friends, I first met Chantel Columna on Instagram. Our online conversations eventually led to an in-person meeting when a work trip brought Chantel to Atlanta in 2021. We enjoyed beers while diving into a conversation about the beer industry and life at large.

Last year, my husband and I traveled to Denver. I knew I couldn’t leave the city without visiting Novel Strand Brewing Company, the brewery Chantel, along with her husband, Tamir Danon, and Ayana Coker, opened in 2018. Again, this meetup led to a deep conversation about culture and life. 

With a great selection of beers and a focus on Tamir’s Israeli and Chantel’s Dominican culture, it's no surprise to me that last year, Hop Culture named the brewery the best in the country for those very same things and more. Novel Strand doesn’t shy away from injecting their culture into thei r brewery. I was reminded of this passion when I ran into them at this year’s Craft Brewers Conference, and we continued our easy flowing conversation over incredible Lagers. 

After sharing great talks with Chantel, it was hard for me to keep her compassionate and endearing energy from you. In this episode, we’ll talk about the business of beer with a key focus on her work as general manager for Novel Strand. How does she approach this role? What’s a North Star that guides her in work and life?

We also share our experiences with entrepreneurship and what we've both learned along the way.

Family recipes, passed down through generations, are one of life’s greatest blessings. In my house, it’s a salsa recipe, started in earnest by my mother, fiddled with endlessly by me, and one that I plan to pass down to my son. For Good Beer Hunting community editor and cooking enthusiast Stephanie Grant, it’s her grandmother’s recipe for red rice, an evolved version of the West African staple jollof, and one that she had to seek out in order to nurture a connection to her Gullah-Geechee identity.

In a story for Good Beer Hunting titled “Hidden Heritage — A Search for Culture, Heirlooms, and My Grandma’s Red Rice Recipe,” Stephanie describes the culinary treasures of past generations and how they shaped her love and longing to understand the people who came before her. In this episode, you’ll hear her talk about how she’s been writing this story since childhood, and what it’s meant to her to see Black Southern culture be honored in kitchens and cookbooks as a long overdue legacy. 

You’ll also hear how her search for red rice began, how it ended, and where it’s going, as she continues to put her own touch on food and history, which is something she says all generations are born to do in order to keep traditions alive and accessible. Food is a link to our past, present, and future, and it’s something we can all look to as a common tie even in divisive times. 

For many of us, beer is a passion. It’s something that tastes great, brings us together with loved ones, and provides small details we can fret over in an endless quest to best understand everything that goes into the beverage. It can also be a lifeline.

In this episode, you’ll learn why a job in beer became so pivotal for Tony Rahí Jaquez Moreno, who came to the U.S. at 19 to study at the University of Nevada, but turned away from a career in mechanical engineering to immerse himself in malt, hops, water, and yeast. Known as “Tony J” to friends as well as fans of his hip hop, he’s now a multi-hyphenate brewer, marketer, taproom manager, and more for North Carolina’s Outsider Brewing. He’s also a recipient of the Sir Geoff Palmer Scholarship Award for Brewing from the Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing & Distilling.

As we learn from Tony about what drew him to beer, you’ll better understand his love of art and science, how he approaches brewing, and how a truly unique set of equipment at Outsider helps him communicate with drinkers. You’ll want to pay close attention to how we describe this patented setup, which lowers barriers for casual beer drinkers and enhances a taproom experience for enthusiasts. In both cases, it allows Tony to connect with customers to literally show them a brew day in process and share why they should care more about what ends up in their glass.

The phrase “sober curious” is picking up steam in beverage alcohol circles—perhaps most notably in the craft beer industry. More non-alcoholic products, sober events, and shared conversations regarding our collective consumption habits are taking place than ever before, but a stigma remains. If you’re not drinking, why are you even in a beer space to begin with?

That’s exactly what today’s conversation is about. I’m joined by writers Jerard Fagerberg and Mark LaFaro to discuss Jerard’s sober-curious column “Let Go or Get Dragged” and Mark’s recent piece on Good Beer Hunting titled “Tapped Out — The Problematic Culture of Overdrinking in the Alcoholic Beverage Industry.” Neither writer shies away from sharing personal, sometimes very raw experiences with alcohol consumption, in an attempt to destigmatize moderation and sobriety as well as provide resources for those interested in cutting back. 

This episode is part of a series exploring both personal and cultural shifts regarding alcohol, where we discuss the evolving vocabulary around sobriety—or steps towards it—and unpack the core reasons why people congregate around beer in the first place. As someone who still works behind the bar, Mark reveals some ugly truths about what breweries expect from consumers (spoiler alert: It’s not always in the individuals’ best interest), as well as where they both find support in a sometimes judgemental landscape. You never have to explain why you’re not drinking, or even drinking less, but whether you’re curious about minimizing or eliminating alcohol from your diet, listening to those who have been through it before is a great foundation on where you can begin.

Over the last decade, one of the aspects of beer and brewing I've admired the most has been an increased attention from the world of academics. Wine has long been a centerpiece for research, but it feels like college faculty are now catching up thanks to a better understanding of the social, cultural, and community side of beer. There is a ton to be learned beyond the science of making beer and in this conversation, we'll get insight on how space and place inspire one professor. It may be summer, but we're heading back to campus with Josh Merced.

Josh is a geographer by education, with a Ph.D from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and teaching experience at Florida State University, UNC-Greensboro, Middle Tennessee State University, and come this fall, he'll be newly appointed at Northern Arizona University. At each stop, his research has had important crossover with craft beer, most recently teaching the class “Geographies of Craft Beer and Breweries” in Tennessee. If you’ve ever sat in a brewery or thought about how cities and landscapes impact who drinks craft beer and why, Josh will clue you in on valuable findings throughout our chat. From locations to music to our own lived experiences, it may come as no surprise that these all impact the way we come to interact with beer—or not at all. Josh will explain why this is particularly important for us to understand and change.

You don’t need to have a stack of highlighters or visit a bookstore to benefit from this educational opportunity. I hope that getting to know Josh and his work puts him on your map as someone to follow that will help you form deeper understandings and new questions about what craft beer offers and how we can consider what might change to offer more to more people.

Back in 2019, my husband and I traveled to Cuba, and as part of our entry into the country, we had to book a cultural experience. We chose a tour around the city of Havana, visiting different local spots while learning about the history and present day struggles of the country. Our tour ended at our guide's grandmother's house, where she served us rum and coffee. It was a beautiful experience that encouraged me to continue to get off the beaten path whenever I travel.

My friends Sara and Sam Kazmer champion getting off the beaten path. The couple met at a bar while traveling in Florence, Italy, so it's no surprise that seeing the world has become part of their lives and business. Since then, Sara and Sam have visited several continents  before opening Elsewhere Brewing in Atlanta in 2020. You can hear all about their story in episode 298 of this podcast. 

In this episode, we talk about their recent trip to Patagonia, Argentina, where they led a group of people with their friend, Richard, as a guide. After reading a post on Instagram from Sara recapping the trip, I knew I had to have her and Sam on the podcast to share their experience. 

You'll hear them talk about why it's important to create trips that allow them to connect to people and culture in a deeper way. They also aren't shy about sharing the difficulties of balancing their duties as hosts with the desire to disconnect and recharge or how a language barrier and fluctuating inflation made planning this trip much harder than they anticipated. Stay tuned to the end where they divulge their next destination, which sounds like a dream. 

As a former resident of Richmond, Virginia, and with family and friends still there, I visit the city fairly frequently. But seeing it through the eyes of someone else and hearing them describe places like the James River, Ardent Craft Ales, or Mekong made me long to go back. But the story you’ll hear about today isn’t a typical travel piece: Rather, it’s a bittersweet exploration of the city, an ode to a friendship that ended too soon.

In her first story for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Share What You Have — Seeing Richmond, Virginia, Through the Eyes of John Stoner,” writer and cartoonist Em Sauter takes readers on a uniquely personal journey to memorialize her friend John Stoner, a Richmond beer fixture and early supporter of her own work at Pints & Panels, her visual beer education and art business. John died unexpectedly in 2021, sparking a wave of grief Em couldn’t help but ride until she decided to honor his legacy and friendship by visiting his town to remember him as he was and to explore what he meant to her.

In this episode, you’ll hear how writing the story acted as a therapeutic balm for her, a way to sit with her feelings and memories as her own life moves forward. I’m sure you can relate to the idea of having online friends—and especially online beer friends—whose lives may or may not ever come in direct contact with you, but help shape your experiences in unexpected ways. In the end, it’s kindness that Em hopes people share with one another. That, and a love of beer.

Whether food or drink, there’s so much that goes into process. That could mean how a brewer combines hops, malt, water, and yeast to get the flavor of a beer just right, or how a chef takes even more ingredients to build a dish with cascading tastes on every bite. In this episode, process and place come together in a unique way from a brewery in Ohio.

Little Fish Brewing Company doesn’t just have a curious head brewer in co-founder Sean White, but also a James Beard Award-nominated executive chef in Becky Clark. And whether through their beer or restaurant menu, you’ll hear in this conversation common themes of appreciation for a place—Athens, Ohio—and process that makes local agriculture a key component of experiencing what Little Fish has to offer. While we start by discussing what it means to explore food and beer pairings, you’ll also hear how and why Becky and Sean care about the process of what they do and how they hope it shows up whenever someone takes a sip of Little Fish beer or a bite of their food.

It’s clear that Becky and Sean think about their home as key to what they’re building at Little Fish, and as you listen to what they share you’ll gain a better understanding of what the brewery and a college town in Ohio may offer you, too.

Many of the people who work in the craft beer industry got their start because they were passionate about the liquid in their glass. Eric Pham, head brewer and innovation brewer at Prison City Brewing in Auburn, New York, is one of those people.

After feeling unfulfilled at his desk job, Eric's fiancé suggested he look for a job in the beer industry since they spent many of their weekends visiting breweries. Eric found his way into beer in 2018 as a warehouse assistant at Lamplighter Brewing Company, with roles at Trillium Brewing Company, Tree House Brewing Company, and Other Half Brewing Company. Each role would eventually prepare him for a leadership position at Prison City. 

In our conversation, he’ll describe this journey from his early days at the company to becoming a head brewer. One of the valuable lessons he learned along the way is that there's no magic in big breweries like Trillium or Tree House, but simply a team of people working hard to get a pint in your hands. We also talk about his Michael Jackson Fund Scholarship and what he hopes to learn, but more importantly, how he hopes his moment in the spotlight will help him encourage other BIPOCs to join the beer industry. 

For years, spirits have taken up a larger share of alcohol consumption across the U.S. Almost exclusively stealing sales from beer, this trend has been boosted by increased interest in cocktails. Whether making them at home, buying them canned and ready to drink, or going out to a bar or restaurant, America’s cocktail culture is thriving as drinkers search for new flavor experiences. In this episode, we’re going to explore a few aspects of why.

Durham, North Carolina’s Kingfisher bar was among this year’s semi-finalists for a James Beard Award in the Outstanding Bar Program category. Considered one of the highest honors a food or drink-focused business can receive, the nomination came as a testament to the unique agricultural and gastronomic focus created by co-owners Michelle Vanderwalker and Sean Umstead. Along with a dedicated list of year-round cocktails built off southern fruit and vegetables, Kingfisher also experiments with the idea of time and place through special collections like its "Biome Series," a way to explore terroir through spirits through themes of different environments. A "Desert" cocktail includes yucca flower, a "Prairie" sunflower shoots and sunchokes, or "Marine" with its oyster shells and caviar.

But that’s the drinking part of what Kingfisher offers. As you’ll hear in the first part of our conversation, creating a sense of space at Kingfisher is pivotal to a drinking experience. Similar to how people may see drinking at a brewery taproom an immersive opportunity with beer, Michelle will walk us through why so much detail goes into building somewhere people want to drink cocktails and what that conveys when they sit down at the bar.

Spirits and cocktails are thriving all over the country and don’t show any loss in momentum. With Michelle and Sean, you’ll get a peek into why from their corner of the Southeast.

Beer has never been “just beer.” It can divide as well as it can unite. Some efforts to use beer as a force for good have resulted in initiatives that call for an end to sexual violence, raise money for lifesaving medical research, and even promote literacy. 

Among those leading the charge to use beer as a force for good are the duo behind Hana Koa Brewing Company in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Head brewer Josh Kopp and director of operations Chrissie Pinney launched Hana Koa in 2019, and from day one, focused on goals of sustainability, community building, and social good. Their most ambitious initiative, called Shine a Light, supports survivors of sexual assault and seeks proactive change to prevent sexual violence from occuring in the future. In this episode, you’ll hear from Chrissie and Josh as they outline the brewery’s origins, their own backstories, and how their upbringings led them to want to do good wherever they can, using the brewery as a conduit to make the world a better place.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, we do discuss things like rape, assault, and other potentially triggering topics, so please use caution when listening. But you’ll also hear how the pair balances a responsibility to their community with self-care and where they manage to find joy, even when carrying heavy burdens of trauma and struggle. Chrissie says beer is much more than a beverage, and I tend to agree with her.

I recently learned that California has 461 recorded Bigfoot sightings. That’s second only to Washington State, but far more than the mythical creature’s presumed home turf in British Columbia, which counts a mere 134 sightings since 1924. But how many sightings can be credited to the power of suggestion? Or were they all real instances that just so happened to occur to true believers? We may never know, but that’s not really the point. You can believe, or not believe, but staying open-minded to the possibility of unexplained mysteries is something humans should all strive for, according to freelance writer Jacqueline Kehoe. 

In her piece titled “Our Wilder Selves — The Hunt for Sasquatch in Middle America,” a story published as part of our Olly Olly series in collaboration with Oskar Blues, Jacqueline documents her own quest to find the creature known as Sasquatch and Bigfoot in the woods of Iowa. You’ll hear about what she finds, what she didn’t, and what she hoped to discover in the first place. We talk about cryptids and aliens and mythical monster folklore, but also about the magic behind humanity’s connection with nature and how to find catharsis in the wilderness. 

Society has tamed itself, pulling further away from what was once an untamed landscape. But there are pockets still out there, if only we look outside our own perceptions.

Today’s guest, if we’re speaking in beer years, is a lifelong friend. But what feels like a lifetime really only started around 2011 in Chicago when Good Beer Hunting, at the time just a personal hobby of mine, was basically unknown outside of a small community in Chicago. At the time, Paul Schneider was still a history teacher in the burbs homebrewing and volunteering at small start-up breweries around the area. 

We met at a Goose Island First Thursday event, which was a loosely defined monthly occasion where fans got together in the Seibel Institute room in front of the Clybourn Brewpub. We would share dark Goose Island beers, home-brews, and other sought after bottles. It was truly the glory days of the 2nd wave of craft beer kind of thing. 

The timeline is too full of milestones between then and now, but here’s a quick look at Paul’s career in craft beer:

• after volunteering around town, he got his first real gig at Solemn Oath in Naperville—as one of their first employees. 

• he went on to fill a broad role there between operations, special creative projects, some brewing and marketing

• he left to sign on as a founding brewer as a partner in a brewery in Pittsburgh that he initially consulted on and then was offered the role once they realize the multi-faceted talent and experience he brought

• that led me and Paul to work together in an official capacity for the first time, as GBH signed on to the project to help define the brand and trajectory of the brewery with Paul and the Warden family, for what would become known as Cinderlands 

Since then Paul has become a brewer’s brewer, making precise Lagers, exquisite Saisons, as well as crowd-pleasers like their sought-after Tartshake series. 

Paul’s unique perspective as a brewer, and also a student and former teacher of history, gives him a view on humanity and how beer fits into it that is uncommonly balanced. There’s an auteur in him of the finer elements of brewing. But there’s also the practical business person who knows better than to push back against the demands of the market. In fact, rather than be mutually exclusive as so many small operators often see these seemingly opposing forces—he seems to elegantly align the two to create opportunities for himself and others that are truly satisfying as a creator. 

And that’s not to say that holding that line is easy. It’s a position that’s maintained through a constantly shifting, reflective, informed effort to navigate a very human marketplace that can be both high-minded, hype-driven, and incredibly fickle at times. 

The history of beer is like the history of all things fashionable. And the present is no exception. 

Paul was in town for a collaboration release with his friends at Solemn Oath, and a bit of a homecoming. So we took the moment to catch up on some of these threads and open some bottles for friends and peers at the studio. We were also finalizing plans for our latest collaborative project—Cindi’s Hard Mountain Tea—which is launching at PNC park in Pittsburgh as I speak.

In the runup to the American Civil War, the number one political issue on everyone’s minds was…slavery. Of course it was. But it's easy to forget that the number two issue was alcohol. Back then, like today, debates over drinking boiled down to a few key points: who should drink what—and in particular what kind of liquor—how much, when, and what that drinking said about a person’s character.

When American drinkers, usually men, marched to war in the Union and Confederate militaries, the politics of alcohol enlisted with them. It’s the subject of a new book by Missouri Southern State University professor Megan Bever called “At War with King Alcohol: Debating and Drinking Masculinity in the Civil War.”

Her research reveals the many ways alcohol intersected with the war: as medical cures, an escape from the whiplash of combat and boredom in military life, as big business for opportunistic civilians, as a thorn in the side of temperance reformers, and as an ongoing point of discourse among leaders on both sides.

For this episode, I sat down with Megan to talk about this history and the deeper issues it laid on the table. When booze seeped into both Union and Confederate encampments—and it did by the barrel—it raised some big questions. If a soldier drinks, does that make them a coward? Can they perform their duty? Are they even a “real man”?

And in civilian life, contention also raged as to whether distilling whiskey or brewing beer meant entrepreneurs provided a valuable service or acted as profiteers stealing resources from the war effort.

Running through it all was the debate about whether “King Alcohol,” as some called it, was a tool for victory, or another insidious enemy to fight.

New York City is, in almost all respects, on the cutting edge, the vanguard of the very cultures we consume through fashion, art, music, and food. But when it comes to the craft beer scene, the city that never sleeps seems to have done just that—slept on the industry’s development and growth, until, of course, they joined the party, which is still going strong.  

In her latest love letter to New York, titled “Vagabond Shoes Longing to Stray — Through Years and Boroughs, for the Beer Bars of New York,” writer Courtney Iseman pens more than an ode to the people (and places) that shaped the city’s craft beer bar scene. It’s an encyclopedia of knowledge, punctuated with first-person accounts, recollections, and memories, all seen through a haze of looming nostalgia from her impending move away from the area for the very first time. She taps a dozen or more voices, each lending unique insight into the city’s growth, evolution, and future as part of the country’s overall craft beer scene. 

It’s a long but fascinating read, which lends itself to today’s conversation about her process, motives, emotions, and future plans as they relate to her relationship with the city and beer itself. We discuss that though there’s plenty about beer to feel discouraged about, sometimes it’s looking to the past that helps us rediscover how we got here and why we came in the first place.

Creativity of all kinds fascinates me. I love seeing artists work and watching their final products take form. But most of all, I love to hear them talk about their processes, their frustrations, their joys. No matter the medium—design, food, or in this case beer—I like to glimpse the way their minds influence their work. Those moments of visibility bring a level of understanding of the creative process that I couldn’t get to on my own. 

When I worked at Monday Night Brewing here in Atlanta, I had the pleasure of spending time with several creatives. Among them was Peter Kiley, the brewery’s brewmaster. On several occasions, a conversation about the latest beer release would turn into a deep dive into topics about life, creativity (or “producing,” as you’ll hear Peter call it), and beer culture.

Earlier this year, Monday Night dropped a spirit line, including gin, vodka, bourbon, rye, and an agave spirit. Hearing about this new venture, I wanted to talk to Kiley to hear his thoughts on this new realm. How did this transition differ from when he left the wine world to pursue brewing? In our conversation, we dive into his 16-year career making alcohol, why he likes to use the word “passion” sparingly, and his views of people who think they know it all.

Sometimes, hidden gems remain hidden for a reason. Those in-the-know may jealously limit access to outsiders; other times, it’s simply because surprises can blossom in the most unexpected places. When it comes to craft beer, our hidden gems tend to be places like old-school beer bars or hyper-local destinations that remain off the radar of tourists. But occasionally, entire subcultures have been built in the most unlikely of places—and that’s what we decided to spotlight in our newest series, Gas Station Week.

Gas Station Week is a celebration of the unconventional and a look into the roadside stands, convenience stores, and yes, gas stations that have influenced entire communities of beer lovers across the country. Kicking off our Gas Station Week series is the story that inspired it all. In his piece titled “The Gas Station That Changed Everything — Swett’s Tire & Auto in Bangor, Maine,” writer Nic Stevens describes how 30 years ago, craft beer wasn’t just a novelty in Central Maine. It was nonexistent—that is, until one discerning entrepreneur saw its potential. Eventually, the beer shelves at Swett’s Tire & Auto, a gas station strategically located on the Interstate 95 corridor, directly spawned a brewery, a beer bar, and helped develop a tight-knit homebrew scene and number of independent breweries, all with deep ties to the local community. 

Nic stumbled across the story, literally. In today’s conversation, he describes his unorthodox approach to uncovering stories such as this by hopping on public transportation and relying on the kindness of strangers to take him in as he explores the United States in search of the next great hidden gem. Since folks in Maine aren’t typically known for embracing outsiders—that is, anyone from outside of Maine—Nic says telling this particular tale wouldn’t have been possible through conventional journalistic methods. We’ll discuss his approach, as well as his discoveries that didn’t make it into the final draft and why he thinks this story couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

What if I told you one of the best places in the country to find the coolest, freshest craft beer is in Pasadena, California? That probably wouldn’t surprise. But what if I also told you that when you go to find the latest releases from Humble Sea or Trillium, or even a bottle of Cantillon, you could also fill up your gas tank a few dozen feet from that refrigerator door?

In this episode, you’re going to meet Shibli Haddad, who owns and runs a Shell gas station that has become one of the most important beer stores in the U.S. Not only does Shibli stock some of the most sought-after beer from across America, but he brings a clear passion for connecting with people because of it. You’ll hear him describe the way he talks to customers to learn about them and what would be exciting to find in his store, how he tracks trends, and why it’s important to offer special beer at an accessible price. He came to run the store because of his dad, started stocking unique beer because of his sister, and has become a part of California beer culture because of his commitment to forming relationships with his customers.

This conversation is part of Good Beer Hunting’s coverage for Gas Station Week, a series of stories, essays, and podcasts meant to highlight how people all over can find unique beer experiences in typically unexpected places. Make sure to visit goodbeerhunting.com for more voices that highlight this corner of the beer world.

Science has always been intimidating to me. I was never good at memorizing the periodic table or combining an array of chemical compounds to get a desired—and safe—mixture. Despite the challenges that lasted from middle into high school, I still found it all fascinating, the act of testing and discovery and using specialized equipment that can provide meaningful answers to all kinds of questions. And in this episode, we’re talking about it all in relation to beer.

Our guide will be Nicole Oliver, the laboratory operations manager at South Carolina’s Edmund’s Oast Brewing Company. She is an actual scientist and helps to oversee quality control at one of the Palmetto State’s fastest-growing breweries. And it’s not just her ability to help her colleagues create better beer that makes her role fascinating, but the way she’s doing it in an evolving beer market where it’s not just about making sure a Blonde Ale is brewed to perfection. Nicole has to collaborate with brewers to ensure that fruited Sours or pastry-inspired beers taste just as perfect and have the kind of shelf stability that other companies sometimes ignore, packaging beer in cans that may cause the package to swell, grow, and sometimes explode in a puree mess.

If your favorite brewery cares about its beer, it should have a quality control program. Not every business has the financial ability to have a full-time scientist to lead the work, but it’s pivotal work that improves everything about the brewing process. And as you’ll hear from Nicole, it can be nerdy and fun and exhilarating and meaningful. For her, her colleagues, and drinkers.

Non-alcoholic spirits, beer, wine, and beyond have finally graduated from punchlines to premium products in their own right, filling up store shelves and restaurant menus in greater numbers than ever before. But as writer David Neimanis explains in his latest piece for Good Beer Hunting, there’s still a long way to go for many of these products—non-alcoholic spirits in particular—to achieve their potential as legitimate and valuable alternatives to the status quo.

That piece, titled “Spirited Away — The Brands, Bartenders, and Bottle Shops Paving the Way for Non-Alcoholic Spirits,” which was published on February 4, 2023, looks as some of the pioneers of the industry, including makers who aim to create an entirely new space for their fresh takes on alcohol-free spirits, as well as those attempting to recreate signature spirits, such as gin or tequila, for drinkers who seek a familiar burn without the backfire. 

Both approaches have their benefits, but in today’s conversation, you’ll hear David unpack his own fascination with botanicals, who he sees as leading the NA charge, and why these developments are something to be excited about. He’ll explain some of the regulatory differences between standard spirits versus their non-alcoholic counterparts, and how he hopes that one day, consumers will perceive the value of each with equal respect. Today’s discussion is the first of what we hope will be several conversations around the rise of non-alcoholic options across beverage alcohol, so stay tuned for more discussions with other writers and explorers of the NA space.

The question at the center of this episode is simple: Does hard cider have a problem or an opportunity? The answer may be a little bit of both, with your own perspective making the glass of Angry Orchard or 2 Towns or Hudson North slightly more than half empty or half full. So, while we may not have clear-cut answers by the end of the episode, you will hear from a few different perspectives about this challenging and hopeful and evolving time for American cider.

To explore all this, you’ll hear from some great voices. In part one, we chat with Ryan Burk, a long time American cider pro who started out at Michigan’s Virtue Cider before spending years as head cider maker for Angry Orchard, the largest cider company in the country. He now leads formulation and sensory strategy for Feel Goods, Good Beer Hunting’s parent company that’s a full-definition studio that builds beverage brands. (Ryan is also a colleague of mine at Feel Goods, where I work as an analyst.)

After we set the stage with Ryan, we travel to Chicago for a conversation with Good Beer Hunting contributors Ruvani de Silva and Beth Demmon. The three of us were in attendance at this year’s American Cider Association conference and gathered for our own reflections on the state of cider and what we started to see and hear on our first day at the event.

When you think about beer or wine or spirits or any alcoholic beverage “beyond” these categories, what do you think of? Is it flavor? Friends? Or maybe just a vibe? It’s that last thing that I got stuck on recently thinking about cider and its place amongst all these options. For years, cider has been a steady 1(ish)% of the beer category in the U.S., where it’s classified. But at a time when some segments are trying to tread water, like wine or beer, that steadiness seems … pretty good.

And in the context of trying to consider what it all meant, I came across Massachusetts’ Artifact Cider Project. If you head over to their website at ArtifactCider.com, you’ll find the company actually does sell its cider on vibes. One cider is for "late night bonfires" while another is meant for "brunch and beach." There's even a cider named Wolf at the Door that carries the vibe of "fight not flight," adding a layer of mystery to whatever that may mean to you, dear drinker.

Anyway, while in Chicago for the annual American Cider Association conference, it was a great excuse to seek out Soham Bhatt, co-founder of Artifact, and someone who I came to learn has an insatiable curiosity. It’s that trait that led him to cider and as you’ll hear, drives what he and the Artifact team continue to do in search of all kinds of drinkers. In this conversation we get philosophical about how hobbies turn into careers and what it takes to convince people to pick cider over other alcohol options. Along the way, you’ll also get an appreciation for Soham’s never-ending quest to learn more—whether that’s about cider, movies, people, or just about anything else. Whenever you last picked up a cider, be it for a search for flavor or something a friend just handed you, Soham’s perspective will help you think about all this in another way. How vibes matter in the pursuit of something new.

Spring is a time of emerging, reawakening, and growing beer sales after the category’s typical winter lull—at least for most breweries. But Ohio’s largest brewery, Great Lakes Brewing Company, goes against that seasonal wisdom: Its slow season happens in the warmer months, while winter is its annual highpoint. What gives?

That’s just one of the questions writer and photographer David Nilsen attempts to answer in his latest piece titled “Lore of the Lakes — Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, Ohio,” which was published on February 1, 2023 as part of Good Beer Hunting’s Signifier series. Inspired by his own coming-of-age story as a beer drinker from Ohio, he dives into the brand’s history, legacy, and future, all of which seem tied together by two big questions: Just who is Great Lakes, and who is it becoming?

Today, David and I discuss how his story evolved from love letter to detailed look at the brewery’s operations and iconic beers themselves, like the beloved Christmas Ale that’s released each October. He doesn’t shy away from Great Lakes’ struggle to define itself in the face of a changing industry, and where it had to look to find inspiration. That inspiration is leading the brewery in interesting, and sometimes unexpected, directions, none of which are off-limits to the historic brand as it attempts to balance legacy and innovation. While the story of a beloved craft brewery and its cherished releases can often seem romantic, David reveals how the struggles behind the scenes aren’t always quite so charming. But there’s still plenty of beauty in each word and picture, so come on a journey to the shores of Lake Erie and hear all about it.

Experiencing the uninterrupted beauty of nature should be easy, and in theory it is—for some. As writer Stephanie Grant explores in a new story, going camping can feel like an insurmountable barrier reserved for the wealthy and white. But she hopes that’s changing, thanks to organizations like Outdoor Gear and Beer, which are building a more inclusive beer community for people of color and Black campers who simply wish to enjoy the majesty of the great outdoors. 

In her Olly Olly piece titled “Unplugged Under the Stars — How Black Beer Organizations are Diversifying Camping,” published on March 1, 2023, Stephanie discusses resources for Black campers both in and out of the beer world, outlining the many reasons why they may not feel comfortable camping or out in nature at all. Nick and Amanda Brooks of Outdoor Gear and Beer help break down some of common fears and hesitations for the uninitiated, acting as expert guides before and during the camping process. Stephanie learned first-hand how their guidance gives people a new perspective—it’s one she gained herself on a recent trip, one that took her dreams of camping and made them a reality.

In today’s conversation, Stephanie reveals how her expectations for the trip compare to her experience, and why she continues to feel strongly pulled to nature. It’s an instinctively human feeling, but one that can be out-of-reach for certain people due to time, money, or fear. Fear plays a big role in both the piece and our discussion: Stephanie talks about how it robbed her of years of potential outdoor enjoyment, how to conquer it through knowledge, and the difference between things like fear of bears and fear of people (because sometimes, it’s the people who are the most unpredictable). 

Olly Olly is all about getting outside, finding freedom in the possibilities of the Earth. What possibilities does Stephanie see?

At some point in your life, you’ve probably been told that you’re not supposed to talk about religion or politics in certain settings. Especially when you meet someone for the first time. In this episode, we’re breaking that rule. As much as it may be one, at least.

This conversation combines the secularness of beer with values of Judaism as our guest walks us through why this is a balance that will bring something new and exciting to the industry. Jesse Epstein is a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion and the new owner of Shmaltz Brewing. The brand was founded in 1996, retired in 2021, and right at the end of 2022 came back to life after Epstein bought the rights to one of the longer-tenured craft beer brands in the country. While Judaism has always been a part of  Shmaltz’ schtick, Epstein plans to deepen that connection even more through his own education and work and commitment to caring for others and social justice.

A homebrewer-turned-owner, Epstein is brand new to the professional world of beer, but his vision for what he wants Shmaltz to become is rooted in who he is, the values he’s learned from family and his synagogue, and an interest for exploring what a Jewish beer brand can accomplish in 2023 and beyond. His hope is that one pint at a time, he can provide a reason for drinkers to consider how they can be a part of repairing the world through human connection. Join me in getting to know Jesse over the first 15 minutes of our conversation, which will give lots of context for why religion and politics becomes center to the rest of what we talk about, and what he wants to do with beer.

Everybody loves bubbles. What’s not to love? They’re fun, they pop, and they taste amazing—especially in drinks like Champagne, or what the French writer Voltaire called “the most glorious expression” of French civilization. In her first piece for Good Beer Hunting, writer and wine enthusiast Rachel Hendry explores Champagne’s history as a status symbol as well as its influence on other beverages—specifically, beer.

That piece, titled “Traditional Method — Exploring Champagne’s Influence on the Brewing Industry,” was published on January 4, 2023 and covers 500 years of history, evolution, and the ongoing significance of the luxurious beverage, one that some beer makers (you’ll find out who) believe they can outshine. I’m not sure that’s the case, and neither is Rachel. 

In our conversation today, she’ll reveal when and why she decided to pursue writing about the opulent world of Champagne and how her original idea transformed into a sprawling exploration of the celebratory bubbly. We’ll hear about when Champagne went from still to sparkling, how a demand for wartime wood changed the structural integrity of glass bottles—which helped stabilize Champagne’s volatility—and what fascinates her about the wine, which remains out of reach for the average person on an average day. We go from high to low, beer to wine, and beyond. Take a walk on the sparkling side with us, right now. 

Nearly all of the stories you read and interviews you hear from Good Beer Hunting include professionals in beer. But one of the wonderful things about this beverage is you don’t have to be a working pro to make and enjoy it. And like other areas of the industry, there’s a growing collection of people who’ve embraced homebrewing that bring demographics and backgrounds historically underrepresented in beer. That’s a space we’re exploring in this episode thanks to Ray Ricky Rivera, the journalist behind one of Good Beer Hunting's Next Germination stories—a series produced in partnership with Guinness—that focused on the SoCal Cerveceros, the largest Latino homebrew club in the country that’s also been dubbed “one of the most important homebrew clubs in the world.”

As a member of the group, Ray brings a unique perspective to his story you can find on goodbeerhunting.com and one you’ll get a sense of here. Instead of recapping what was written, however, we’re going to share with you three acts to represent growth and change in homebrewing, with a highlight of what’s next. First, you’ll hear from Julia Herz, executive director of the American Homebrewers Association, to learn about the hobby and priorities for the organization. Then, Ray will take us to a SoCal hangout, where we’ll meet a couple members, learn about their involvement, and listen in during their brew day. Lastly, we’ll catch up with Ray to hear about the ongoing impact SoCal Cerveceros has on its members and local beer lovers in California.

This is the audio companion to “‘I See You’ — The Evolution of SoCal Cerveceros,” stories for our Next Germination series, produced in partnership with Guinness. First, we visit with Julia Herz of the American Homebrewers Association.

This conversation is all about stories. Tales of recent history and childhood memories. Recalling inspiration from others and happy accidents. Joining me to stroll down memory lane is Julia Herz, someone who has provided plenty of people in and around beer their own mental souvenirs to cherish.

Julia is a longtime fixture in beer, having served for years as a de facto “face” of craft brewers’ trade organization, the Brewers Association. She was part of a round of COVID-influened layoffs in 2020, but is now back with the Brewers Association’s sister group, the American Homebrewers Association, serving as executive director. Julia’s connections, relationships, and impact runs deep in American beer, and you can get a good sense of that as well as reflections on a temporary career change in Good Beer Hunting podcast episode 286 which features a conversation with Julia and GBH colleague, Beth Demmon. 

But in this episode, you’ll hear Julia talk about her own appreciation for homebrewing, some of what her organization is up to, and share stories of the many things that led her to where she is today. Including a chance encounter with the Homebrewers Assoication’s original founder that feels uniquely perfect to her journey.

Representation in beer matters for everyone—the more people means more ideas means better experiences—but as you’ll soon hear, it holds particular weight for Ruvani de Silva. She’s the journalist behind one of Good Beer Hunting's Next Germination stories—a series produced in partnership with Guinness—that focused on a diverse group of women who showcase breweries and the beer community in Utah.

Ruvani will provide you with the background and a proper introduction, but here’s a sample of Ruvani’s writing that helps set the stage for what to expect in her story and what you’ll experience in this podcast.

In her profile, Ruvani writes of the Brown Gradient Beer Wenches: “The energy the foursome exudes as a group is visible; it reminds me of the electric sparks of a band delivering a set so tight the members’ connection feels telepathic …They are luminous in each other’s presence—and they know it.”

We hope these conversations offer a little extra light for you, too.

Climate change. Drought. Lack of clean water. We hear about these issues all the time, but how much do we see them? Do we feel them? And are we really doing anything about them?

In her latest piece for Good Beer Hunting, Mexico City-based freelance writer Chelsea Carrick talks about some of these problems; specifically, how they are affecting the beer industry in Mexico in real time. That piece, titled “Waiting for the Rain — How Drought in Northern Mexico Impacts the Country’s Beer Industry,” which was published on January 12, 2023, explores the historical inequity of water access between the United States and Mexico, how the water-intensive beer industry contributes to economic instability, and how shifting the issue from North to South might not have the favorable results the country’s president hopes for. 

In today’s conversation, Chelsea and I talk about the evolution of her piece, as well as what we can do as consumers to limit the destructive aspects of food and drink production as a whole. As individuals, climate change can feel insurmountable. But we shouldn’t, and can’t, ignore the environmental injustices that will affect us all at one point or another, no matter how far we bury our heads in the sand. Protecting the Earth is everyone’s problem, and everyone’s responsibility. Let’s hear about the balances she’s made and the choices we’ll all face.

When I’m doing prep for the interviews you hear on this podcast, I try to look across digital footprints for insights that help me gauge a person, their personality, and the kinds of questions I should ask. It’s all based on instinct and hope that my own impression from a distance gives me enough to offer you a meaningful conversation that introduces someone new or helps you gain a deeper appreciation for someone who’s familiar.

Sometimes, the idea of a person I’m researching matches exactly who they are in our conversation, and that’s the case with Jesse Valenciana. As you’ll hear right away, the trail of breadcrumbs he leaves on social media and with his professional connections make it clear he cares deeply for his loved ones and his heritage.

Jesse most recently worked as director of marketing for Kentucky’s Against the Grain Brewery—his time there ended after we recorded this podcast as part of budget cuts at the brewery. So, if you hear us talking about Against the Grain in the present tense in this conversation, that’s why. Jesse says it’s onward and upward for him and his career, however, which also includes a varied skill set: he’s also a food and beverage journalist, author, cook, and a person who seems to always consider how his past connects to his present in these roles.

In this conversation, you’ll learn about all this, from his childhood visiting family in Mexico to how those roots shaped his personality and relationships, including the way his history and culture helps him view America’s craft beer industry. After years of working in beer, Jesse shares the way he’s been shaped by his own passions, microaggressions from others, and why it matters to the way he does his job now and in the future.

You’re used to hearing about beer, but in this conversation, we’re pairing that topic with food. Brewpubs and beer-focused bars and restaurants across the country all have their particular takes on menus that incorporate the two. What you’ll hear momentarily shares philosophy and strategy around what people can expect from California’s Fort Point Beer Company, which features full-time culinary director Cecile Macasero.

Cecile has worked at prestigious restaurants recognized with James Beard awards and Michelin stars. He’s organized menus for staff at Google. And as you’ll hear, the things he’s learned elsewhere have helped him conceptualize what food can provide to beer lovers when they visit Fort Point and what it means to create dishes that try to capture the spirit of San Francisco.

Along with Cecile, we’re joined by Dina Dobkin, co-owner and chief brand officer at Fort Point, who sheds additional light on the ideas and processes to create a special on-premise experience for people who visit the brewery to drink and eat.

Together, Cecile and Dina explain why it’s important to have a component of food at a taproom, how their family histories from outside the United States have shaped their own appreciation for food, and how beer and food can find a fun middle ground between what’s interesting and what’s easy to love.

It was 1922, and August A. Busch, Sr. needed a break. A long one. It turns out that running a gigantic brewing company like Anheuser-Busch during Prohibition was kind of stressful. And so, being the patriarch of one of the country's wealthiest family dynasties at the time, Busch did what dynasts do: he treated the word "summer" like a verb.

On May 15th of that year, Busch boarded the SS George Washington, a passenger ship about half the size of the Titanic, bound for a three-month retreat at the family's country estate in western Germany. Now, we could all get a cheap laugh at the elitist image of Anheuser-Busch's president leaving his titan brewery so a luxury liner can whisk him away to his personal castle on a German hillside, but I urge you to resist the temptation. If you'd had the run that Busch had so far, you'd need a vacation too.

Prohibition in the United States, which banned the manufacture, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide, had been in effect for over two years now–which meant the beer that had built the Busch family's empire was illegal. 

Many of the nation's thousand-ish breweries simply closed, but Anheuser Busch was one of the few that tried to survive in a post-beer country. And so far…it wasn't going well. The brewery was millions in the red, the products they made to replace beer weren't cutting it, and the government was failing spectacularly to contain the growing hordes of moonshiners and bootleggers across the country.

But if you're going through hell, keep going. Whether it was pure faith or rational assessment, Busch believed that Prohibition wouldn't last forever. Even so, it was clearer every day that fighting the 18th Amendment would be a marathon, not a sprint. Which brings us back to the George Washington.

Busch boarded and the ship set sail, but the George Washington was barely underway when Busch saw something shocking. As soon as the ship passed into international waters, and out of U.S. jurisdiction, the ship's staff threw open cabinets full of liquors, wines, and beer, and opened up a bar. Actually, they opened five bars, all over the ship. And because American alcohol producers, like Busch, had all been put out of business, the booze was entirely foreign in origin–even the so-called "Old American Moonshine Whiskey."

As you might imagine, this made Busch a little angry. The George Washington, like many American passenger liners at the time, wasn't just some ship. It was owned and operated by the United States Shipping Board, a government agency. In other words, the government that was enforcing Prohibition on Americans was also slinging drinks on the side.

August Busch wasn't about to take this lying down. The United States government had become, in his words, the "biggest bootlegger in the world," and everyone was going to know about it.

In this episode, the strict impositions of Prohibition draws a once and future titan of the brewing industry, Busch, into a very public feud with Albert Lasker, an advertising guru turned reluctant chairman of the Shipping Board. Their battle over the right to sell alcohol at sea delighted a sensationalist media, put a finger on the scales of the 1922 congressional midterm elections, spurred a Supreme Court case, and laid bare the strange politics of the Prohibition era. As Prohibition expanded the size and reach of the U.S. government, it also kindled political conflicts that went far beyond the morality of drinking beer. In fact, Prohibition laid bare the complications involved in implementing, adapting to, or coping with high minded social concepts. Whether that idea is a controversial moral creed like banning alcohol, or a hopefully straightforward ideal like democracy, the devil will always be in the details.

What does a banana taste like? I want you to take a moment to consider it, whether you like them or not. As you think about unpeeling the fruit and taking a first bite, do you imagine something sweet? Maybe the texture is mushy. Is there a scene playing out in your mind? I promise this question isn’t for nothing, and in this conversation, you’ll eventually hear how one skilled brewer thinks about eating a banana he can only find in memory.

Get ready to meet Rafael D’Armas, who came to homebrewing and the beer industry through a career that started in political science and international relations. Originally from Venezuela, you’ll hear how politics, history, and culture shaped his early assumptions of what he wanted to do for work, and then how a friend and some beer changed his mind. Rafael started in beer at New York City’s Bronx Brewery through an internship program made possible with Beer Kulture, a nonprofit working to foster a more inclusive beer industry, and is currently a brewer at Montclair Brewery in New Jersey. This fall, it was announced he received the Michael Jackson Foundation’s Sir Geoff Palmer Award for Brewing to attend the prestigious Siebel Institute of Technology, which has trained generations of some of the best brewers in the world.

But all that is just background for the person you’ll come to understand Rafael to be as we talk about his home country, what it was like trading political science research for beer, what “innovation” means when it’s made personal … and bananas, of course. This is a chance to get to know an up-and-coming brewer who has unique and deep ideas of what beer can be, and how he wants to be a part of change.

Past is prelude, as they say, and it’s always interesting to find foreshadowings of our contemporary beer culture deep in the history books. Take monastery breweries, for example, which are some of the oldest beer makers in the world, with a tradition going back a thousand years or more. But not all monastery breweries date back quite so far. In fact, new ones are still opening up today—not often, of course, but at least occasionally, as at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire, England, which only started brewing its beer, called Tynt Meadow, in 2018.

In this episode, I’m talking to the beer writer Mark Dredge, who published a Signifier, “The More You Master Something, the More Free You Feel,” about the new monastery brewery at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey on October 19, 2022. But that’s not the only story Mark has done for us recently. His article “Lost in Translation — How Flavor Wheels and Tasting Tools Can Evolve to Speak with Global Beer Drinkers” was published on August 18, as part of our Next Germination series, made in partnership with Guinness. 

If monastic brewing has centuries of backstory, then the topic of “Lost in Translation”—tasting notes, and the way we describe flavors in beer—is a much newer practice. As Mark explains, the comparative language we use to describe flavor mostly originated in the wine world in the 1970s. His story explores this evolution, and also questions how relevant those words and terms are for someone on a different continent, or in a different culture. 

In this episode, we delve into both of Mark’s recent stories, and explore the possibility of updating flavor wheels and tasting tools for more modern—and more diverse—audiences. We also discuss monastic brewing, the rigors of monastic life, and Mark’s abiding interest in running, which leads into another article he’s been working on for us.

One of the wonderful and unique things about food and beverage is the ability to transcend time. Something with a long history and personal past can be made and shared today, connecting points in time in ways we never might have expected. In one of Good Beer Hunting's Next Germination stories—a series produced in partnership with Guinness—reporting from Anna Sulan Masing plays the part of time machine. For her piece, "A Land of Rice and History," she traces the background and cultural connections of tuak, a drink brewed from rice native to Malaysia.

Tuak is rooted in ritual and memory and in this episode, you'll hear from Anna, the people making tuak lovingly referred to as "aunties," and business leaders trying to find ways to expand understanding of tuak and the opportunities for modern drinkers to enjoy it. We start with something that goes back into Anna's own background and highlights what can be next for herself and others.

You don’t have to be an in-the-weeds beer enthusiast to figure out there can be a whole lot of ways to make a beer. Just look at any taplist. There are different ingredients, fermentation options, ABVs, and plenty more spaces in which a brewer can play. When seeking any kind of flavor experience—guided by tradition or new ideas—there can be an endless array of choices to make.

In this conversation, we meet with two of the beer world’s smartest minds to learn more about the research and development of beer at one of the country’s leading craft breweries. At Oregon’s Breakside Brewery, collaboration and innovation come together for Ben Edmunds, the company’s brewmaster, and Natalie Rose Baldwin, Breakside’s R&D brewer. Inspired by food, other beverages, and nature, the pair will share with us how they translate ideas from out in the world into a glass of beer and why it’s important to think about ingredients instead of just flavor.

When it comes to creating a new beer, what does innovation mean today? And where do successful brewers look to consider what’s next? In a world full of Pastry Stouts and New England IPAs that can all feel sort of familiar, it’s brewers like these that get to run with fun, weird, and unique combinations of ingredients that can offer new experiences and ideas of how and when we can enjoy a beer.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if French women scream at the top of their lungs for acceptance, respect, and change, does anyone listen? That’s the question freelance writer Anaïs Lecoq set out to answer in her piece for Good Beer Hunting titled “Pas Encore — French Women Are Sick of Waiting for Their Beer Revolution,” which was published on October 20, 2022.

In the piece, Anaïs describes the pervasive avoidance the French beer scene has towards conversations about sexual harrassment, violence, and assault when such conversations are initiated by women. When they do occur, they almost always end in litigation, ensuring that the current culture of fear, trauma, and repression continues to be the status quo. In fact, in our conversation today, she says the entire reason she wrote the piece is due to the fact that despite publishing an open letter signed by hundreds of women working in the French beer scene, they were met with virtual silence and apathy. What will actually get people to listen and make change, she wonders? I find myself wondering the same thing.

You’re about to hear what she thinks it will take, as well as a recent bombshell she hopes might trigger a #MeToo movement similar to the one Brienne Allan instigated in the United States in 2021. However, Anaïs’ hope is clouded by pessimism when we discuss how even those efforts, once promising, have fizzled. Actions may start with words, but they shouldn’t end there, and she describes what actions need to be taken in order for the fledgling French beer scene to grow in such a way that everyone is valued. Let’s listen to what has happened, what’s happening, and what she thinks is about to happen. 

Sometimes it feels like everything that can be said about beer has been said. But then something comes along that fundamentally changes the way we think about a style, or our culture. For me, that recently took place with David Jesudason’s GBH story, Empire State of Mind – Interrogating IPA’s Colonial Identity. 

Today’s hop-forward beers are so divorced from the original 18th century IPA that it’s rare to even hear the acronym spelled out – India Pale Ale. And until now, I’d never given much thought to how the marketing of IPA could reflect our modern understanding of empire – or lack thereof. 

Empire State of Mind combines personal storytelling with historical reporting, and in the space of a few thousand words, IPA goes from a symbol of craft beer’s revolution to one of colonialist invasion, exploitation and erasure. The article was mostly born out of David’s frustrations at having to educate himself about this important and dark part of British history.

What’s new is old and what’s old is precious in a small corner of southern England, where writer and journalist Jacopo Mazzeo takes us on a tour of the wild and sprawling New Forest National Park. In his latest piece for Good Beer Hunting titled “Curiouser and Curiouser — In Search of Brewing Novelty In England’s Ancient New Forest,” which was published on October 13, 2022, he explores the ancient landscape with a local’s eye, sharing the natural beauty and growing beer scene through personal experience, community connection, and research into the nearly thousand-year history of the region. 

In today’s conversation with Jacopo, he shares how the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to look closer to home for travel inspiration, which led to fortuitous results. Growing up in Italy, the countryside wasn’t as accessible to him as it is in the United Kingdom, the country he’s made his home over the past 11 years. That’s why he treasures the nearby New Forest, a historical area he continues to be drawn to time and time again. He talks about that draw of nature, as well as why he keeps coming back to experience the growing craft beer scene first-hand. 

He’ll also share a few insider tidbits that didn’t quite make it into his final piece, as well as where he’s headed next as the world slowly continues to reopen. (I’ll just say his upcoming trips to Lebanon and the Seychelles sound deliciously libatious.) Let’s start our journey into this rustic wonderland, right now.

One of my favorite things about hosting this podcast is the chance to meet people and discuss who they are, not just what they do in the world of beer or beverage alcohol. It’s really important for me to showcase the humans who make up these industries, what makes them think, and what makes them special.

In this conversation, our two guests do the heavy lifting to introduce themselves. Their voices and experiences will help guide you to consider what it means to be a black man in beer, an entrepreneur and visionary, and each a better half of a dynamic duo. There’s Joe Mettle, an author and educator, and Roger Apollon Jr., a musician, educator, and co-founder of Four City Brewing Company. Located in New Jersey, both are also the minds behind an educational startup that is helping to launch new ideas and careers.

Together, Joe and Roger started Entrepreneurship and Equity in Brewing, a training program that offers Black, Indigenous, people of color, and other underrepresented people an opportunity to learn the business of beer. Their program was launched with the hope of helping others find greater appreciation for beer, the potential for a new career, and most important, advancement in the beer industry.

In recent years, many organizations, events, and efforts across beer have worked to lift up people long underserved and less seen, and Entrepreneurship and Equity in Brewing—which you’ll also hear referred to as “EEB” in our chat—is another example of grassroots work creating change. I’ll let Joe and Roger take it from here so you can learn what makes them tick and why their work deserves our attention and admiration.

You can’t fully understand the awe-inspiring nature of an African safari until you’ve experienced it for yourself, or at least so says freelance writer and journalist Megan Eaves. In her first piece for Good Beer Hunting, she inches readers closer than ever to the majesty, fragility, and sometimes violent necessities of life in the bush in her longform feature titled “Life Stays Close to the River — Solar Beer and Wildebeest in the Serengeti,” which was published on October 5, 2022.

Through her words and photos, Megan brings readers on a special journey, and shares how beer brewed in this  remote place is more than just a drink. It’s a lifeline to clean water in a parched land, and an economic addition to an area that’s heavily dependent on tourism for the survival of most, if not all, of its inhabitants. She paints a vivid portrait of life, death, and rebirth in this fragile region, one that doesn’t just deserve our attention and awe, but requires it for its preservation. 

We’ll take her experience even further in today’s conversation. Megan shares additional memories from the 14-day sojourn into the heart of the Serengeti, including a bloody encounter with a pride of lions and one unlucky elephant. From the dizzying spectacle of the night sky to the haunting sound of 100,000 migrating wildebeests, Megan’s experience becomes our experience, and one we’re lucky to peer into.

In July 2022, Miller Lite hosted an event in Philadelphia where the brand released a special-edition can. It used beer history to convey a simple message: "There's no beer without women."

The can celebrated Mary Lisle, a woman who owned and operated a brewery in the early 1700s. According to Miller Lite–and many of the books and articles you might find on American women's beer history–Lisle was the first documented woman brewery owner in colonial American history.

Celebrating Lisle was a way to spotlight the countless ways women have sustained, elevated, and even saved the American brewing industry. That was true in colonial times, and it’s true now. The acknowledgement is overdue: women's contributions are regularly diminished or overlooked entirely among beer’s commonly-accepted narratives.

This history isn't just dusty trivia that's nice to know. It helps us understand why statistically few women, especially single women and women of color, own breweries today. It helps reveal the social and economic barriers behind those statistics as the injustices they truly are. Putting Mary Lisle's story on a beer can, especially one as high profile as Miller Lite, helps do that. And we're fans.

…but…

Mary Lisle wasn't the earliest known woman to own a brewhouse in colonial North America. That's a misconception that just happens to get repeated a lot. The messy history of the early colonial beer trade actually contains lots of evidence that women brewed and sold beer professionally before Lisle–so many that we don't personally know who was first! But rather than worry about firsts or historical nitpicks, we're going to focus on another woman brewery owner: Sarah Frankes.

Frankes brewed beer for her own tavern in 1670s Boston, some 50 years before Mary Lisle took the reins in her own brewhouse. Again, Frankes wasn't the first any more than Lisle was, but we chose her because her life and career reveal not just her own contributions to American beer, but those of her entire generation. They also reveal the omnipresent, shapeshifting barriers that women brewers have faced since America's earliest days.

This episode is a conversation about what we've found, and what it means today.

We spoke to several women across the U.S. who own, or hope to own, their own breweries. Even though there are plenty of differences between Sarah Frankes' 17th century world and our own, their stories overlap in places. The past and present barriers hindering women in the beer trade have more in common than they should.

If you’ve spent a significant time in the beer community, then you probably have heard the name Ale Sharpton. Back when I was a fledgling beer writer and looking for a mentor, I stumbled across Ale’s work and immediately knew I needed to meet him. One unanswered email later, which I still tease him about, and we finally met at the inaugural Dames & Dregs Beer Festival. 

Since bombarding him with questions on how to break into the industry, Ale has been in my corner supporting me as I find my own way in beer. And he continues to serve as a model of what you can accomplish in the beer industry, through his partnership with New Belgium Brewing on the ongoing Piano Keys collaboration, as well as his involvement in the newly founded Leaders of the Brew School (a collective of BIPOC brewers, beer industry pros, and enthusiasts). 

Despite being a transplant, one thing’s clear: Ale Sharpton loves Atlanta and its growing beer scene as much as this local. You can see it in the way he’s repped this city for more than a decade. In how he makes it a point to support the people and breweries that make up its beer community, or in how he uses every chance to give back to the city through his charitable contributions. You’ll hear him talk about how the beer city he dreamed of is blossoming now, where his journey into the industry has taken him so far, and how he turned a beer collab with New Belgium into an opportunity to donate to Black-owned nonprofits.

The concept of “beer-flavored beer” doesn’t actually exist—at least not universally. One person’s disgusting is another person’s delicious, and a lot of it has to do with your upbringing, culture, and culinary traditions. With this in mind, writer Lana Svitankova calls beer an opportunity to experience “liquid nostalgia,” a concept that she explores in-depth in her latest piece titled “Sour, Salty, Umami — The Ukrainian Brewers Transforming Pickling Traditions Into Beer,” which was published on October 12, 2022 as part of Good Beer Hunting’s Critical Drinking series. 

In the piece, Lana delves into the relatively young beer industry in Ukraine, which has experimented with pickle beers and other culinary-inspired styles in ways places like the United States have only begun to explore. From tomato beers to those inspired by gazpacho or borscht, these beverages have the ability to connect drinkers with the past as well as the very land around them, a land that remains under threat to this day.

We’ll talk about that ongoing conflict, as well as Lana’s ability to find joy not just in beer itself, but in the strength, courage, and resilience of the beer community as it grapples with survival as well as the human need to experience comfort and cheer. She describes her favorite anecdote she’s told thus far, which involves oysters and a personal redefinition of what beer is, as well as the very specific food-inspired beer she’s holding out for an intrepid brewer to make. Finally, Lana breaks down individual preferences not just in what we eat or drink, but the music we listen to, the art we love, and the way we experience the world around us. Chaos can be as gorgeous as a symphony, and with an open mind, the possibilities for new sensations are endless.

In recent years, there’s a good chance you’ve read, heard, or watched news about the incredible rise of non-alcoholic brands. A company like Athletic Brewing—one of the fastest-growing breweries in the country—or non-alc wine appearing in the latest TV revival of Sex and the City. There are examples galore, but the truth is that even as these sub-segments of non-alcoholic options grow rapidly, they remain a literal fraction of today’s alcohol market. And the opposite, high-end ABV side of things is also showing lots of strength.

In this episode, we talk with Colleen Quinn, CEO at America's first brewery to exclusively focus on beer and seltzer at 8% ABV and up, Greater Good Imperial Brewing Company. Based on a recent analysis for Good Beer Hunting’s Sightlines+ subscriber news section, we found that somewhere between 8-10% of craft beer sold in retail carries an ABV around 8% and up, a share that has basically tripled from five years ago and continues to grow. If we have products offering something for non-alcoholic occasions, Greater Good is working to position itself at the other end of the spectrum as the brewery people turn to for big, bold flavors in beer.

Colleen's beer industry experience that led her to the Massachusetts-based company started with Craft Brew Alliance—a consortium of beer companies from across the country—before a short stint with Anheuser-Busch after the company bought Craft brew Alliance in 2020. After running her own consulting firm, Colleen is now at the reins of Greater Good, which grew its production by +66% between 2019-2021. Simply put, this brewery is positioned to capitalize on an established trend in a unique way and has lots of room to run.

What does that mean for how the company accomplishes a goal of being the leading producer of big beer in the U.S.? That’s for Colleen to explore and us to learn.

The Earth is burning—so why don’t more people care? It turns out, one way to get people’s attention is to let them know that if things don’t change (a lot, and soon), we might not have beer for much longer. 

In her piece titled “Seeds of Change — The Promise (and Challenges) of New Brewing Grains,” which was published on September 28, 2022, freelance writer Hollie Stephens explores the world of experimental and sustainably oriented grains like Kernza and Salish Blue, which agricultural scientists hope will change the face of craft beer and the ingredients that it’s made from. As a writer who often covers topics like sustainability and climate change, Hollie describes a sense of growing fear she feels as she learns more about the agricultural side of things. But in today’s conversation, she also shares a sense of optimism due to the ingenuity and passion of people working to make the world not just a better place, but one that simply continues to exist.

Today, you’ll hear about her initial discovery of experimental grain growing programs and why she decided to dive into their origins, scientific importance, and their effects on craft beer. We also discuss the ways that we as consumers can help incentivize brewers to invest in this developing technology. As it turns out, things are changing whether we like it or not, so time is of the essence if we hope to keep up. Hollie says it’s a wonderful time to be a beer drinker, but only if we collectively commit to understanding and engaging with where that beverage we all hold dear comes from, and where it might be going next.

How many of us have dreamed of opening a “third space”—as in, a social space that isn’t our home and isn’t our workplace—whether it be a collective art studio, a bookstore-slash-gallery, a coffee shop with live music—or perhaps a beer bar with shelves upon shelves of vinyl records? Well, the Maestro family did just that, and they did it well. 

In Courtney Iseman’s piece titled “Better on Vinyl — BierWax in Brooklyn and Queens, New York,” which was published on Good Beer Hunting on September 21, 2022, she dives deep into BierWax’s history, origins, pandemic struggles, and unique place in New York City beer history. She encourages visitors to head to BierWax to discover something new, whether it be beer or music, and leave with a sense of welcoming community that serves to engage and inspire. 

In today’s conversation about her piece, we’ll talk about how Chris and Yahaira Maestro created an extension of their home, how they became living proof of a dream realized, and why there simply aren’t more places like their bar out there. We’ll also discuss how it is possible to like your job, how Courtney found a new family at BierWax, and the ways in which authenticity and intention can help nurture a warm, inviting space that remains an all-too-rare outlier in the beverage scene. If you’ve ever nurtured a still-unrealized dream, this is the conversation that may encourage you to finally go for it. This is Courtney Iseman on BierWax.

When people think of South Dakota, beer doesn’t likely come to mind. Maybe Mount Rushmore. Probably agriculture. But in this episode, we’re exploring what it means to be a part of building a culture and knowledge for beer in a state where that’s still sort of new.

We’re chatting with Nicki Werner, director of brewing at Jefferson Beer Supply in Jefferson, South Dakota, a city with a small population and until just recently, a lack of exposure to homegrown beer. Nicki opened the business with her partner and Jefferson native, Anthony Roark, and together the pair are showing how a commitment to education and community can grow something unique in places where the idea of “craft beer” is still new. Light Lager may dominate the minds and taste buds of local residents, but Nicki’s skill in the brewhouse is working to introduce customers to pastry Sours, Imperial Stouts, and Hazy IPAs.

As you’ll hear from Nicki, it takes a holistic effort to pull it off, and it helps to also find inspiration from peers that show how connecting to the place where you live and work can be translated to the way you make and sell beer.

So … what did you do over your summer vacation? It’s a classic question so many of us would answer whenever returning to school each fall, and if Reggie Duvalsaint was sitting in a circle with peers to recap, he’d have a hell of a story.

This summer, Reggie crisscrossed the country to work at baseball stadiums in every corner of the U.S. As a ballpark vendor, he sold beer and food to fans. And as an astute social being and with a good business mindset, he also took note of what people became excited about and why ideas of “local” can drive sales.

So, in this conversation you’ll meet Reggie, hear about his one-of-kind journey to visit 30 ballparks, and pick up some inside tips of what people were eating and drinking while out to a ballgame. It’s a fun snapshot to a moment in time with a tour guide who spent months compiling experiences and knowledge. With that, he hopes to inspire others to find excitement with whatever they may want to accomplish, whether that’s with travel, meeting new people, or just finding an excuse to do something new and different.

There’s an inherent tension in making art. The best art comes from a deeply personal place, but also speaks in a universal register. That's not to say all art is for every person, but when the artist can successfully weave specific, individual moments into the grand themes of life, the results can be sensational.

In his column for Good Beer Hunting called “This Must Be The Place,” writer Oliver Gray shares glimpses of his life through the lens of beer: sometimes directly, other times more esoterically. His lyrical observations about finding his place as a beer lover, father, partner, and friend remind me of songwriting, in that there may or may not be an obvious answer at the end, but it sure has a beautiful flow. 

Today, Oliver and I discuss how he evolved from a nonfiction writer to a blogger to a columnist, as well as why he shifted from his own outlet to Good Beer Hunting. You’ll hear which writers and artists inspire him, as well as why he thinks certain things simply matter in the way that they do. We’ll also dive into what struck me specifically in his latest entry called “Boxed Up,” which pinpointed the freeing, but chaotic, experience of moving. 

Oliver describes his short, poetic entries as comfort food, a descriptor with which I agree wholeheartedly.

In this episode we’re taking a trip to Des Moines, Iowa, where Whitney and Scott Selix share with us stories of their hospitality careers and what it means to create an innovative tap list at Lua Brewing. It’s that latter piece that caught my eye when I first came across Lua, with a lineup that includes traditional German and English beers alongside various hazy IPAs and slushee Sours.

If like me, you may not know a lot about the brewing scene in Iowa, and Whitney and Scott offer context of being part of a growing beer culture where you can introduce a drinker to new styles with something like an English Mild, but you also have to provide access to something fun and different—like a “Blue Razz Electrolyte Sour” that as it turns out, wasn’t the first take in Des Moines on that collection of flavors and ideas.

As partners at Lua and in life, let’s get to know a little more about this brewery and what it means for Whitney and Scott to make something special in a burgeoning market.

This is Lua Brewing’s Whitney Selix, president and co-founder, and Scott Selix, director of operations and co-founder.

Lager might be having a moment, but as a whole, craft beer drinkers don’t always reach for the easiest beer on the menu. Instead, the newest, most intense, biggest beers on the block tend to get the most attention. But sometimes—often—the best beer is actually the familiar one, the favorite, the old reliable. Sometimes, it’s Narragansett. 

In his story “Hi, Neighbor — Narragansett Lager’s Return to Ubiquity,” writer Matt Osgood manages to tie the Red Sox, the movie “Jaws,” and the iconic ’Gansett Lager into one historical romp through the brewery’s origins, influence, evolution, and impact on today’s craft beer culture. As you listen, we’ll talk about why he tends to write about singular beers and breweries through a historical lens, what he wished he could have explored more in his piece, and why this story couldn’t have happened anywhere but New England. We’ll also unpack how Narragansett manages to balance nostalgia with modern-day beer culture, and why this unassuming “hipster” beer is enjoyed by everyone. 

Beer doesn’t have to be a challenge to drink, and today’s conversation is as easy as popping open a cold Ganny and crushing it like Quint. Don’t get the reference?

It’s time to talk apples. Or, at least, how apples fit into all the other flavors you might experience when you pop open a bottle or can of hard cider. To help with this journey, we’re chatting with Jasmine Mason and Ashley Johnson, a pair of cider lovers and entrepreneurs behind the Cider Jawns. As to what a “jawn” is exactly we’ll get into during the conversation, and along with some Merriam-Webster definitions, Jasmine and Ashley will share with you insights into what feels exciting to today’s cider drinkers.

For some, it’s finding a kind of hard cider that surprises, whether dry or sweet. For others, it’s about the flavors that can be added on top of an apple base to create something fun or different. But regardless of your level of experience with cider, Jasmine and Ashley will give us a good barometer of what’s working in today’s market and for who, and how they like to use that to guide the way they think about and make cider.

From the jump, it’s easy to hear and understand Ashley and Jasmine’s enthusiasm for cider and how they’re working to carve out a space for themselves and others. And by the end of this conversation, you’ll also know how they hope to take that effort further in the future.

Like many craft beer enthusiasts entering their late 30s and early 40s, I’ve found the booze real estate in my refrigerator is starting to shrink. First, I started adding cans of LaCroix knockoffs from ALDI. Then I swapped a few beers for some hard kombuchas, followed by regular kombuchas. Right now, I’ve got cans of fruited sparkling tea, and recently I realized that the only alcohol I have left in the house are samples for work.

I am, like thousands of others, beginning to dabble in reducing my alcohol consumption. The motivations for doing so are myriad, whether it be intentionally for health, economically because of inflation, or for any number of other reasons. These shifts, once cast as secrets among craft beer fans, became much more openly discussed when longtime beer writer Norman Miller announced he was giving up alcohol for health reasons in 2018, along with his beer column, “The Beer Nut.” It was a revolutionary admission, and one that resonated with fellow beer writer Jerard Fagerberg, among many others.

In the first piece for his new column, Let Go Or Get Dragged, Jerard speaks with Norman four years after that announcement of his sobriety. You’ll hear clips from Jerard and Norman’s conversation today, as well as Jerard’s inspiration for the column, his personal drinking history, and his approach to sobriety. We’ll also discuss the pros and cons of non-alcoholic beer, and the societal movement that’s seeing more Americans embrace being sober-curious. This isn’t a critique on the beer industry itself: Rather, it’s a holistic look at how alcohol shapes our lives, our culture, our minds, and our bodies.

This statement shouldn’t come as a surprise: Beer is agriculture. With ingredients that come from the ground there are so many ways a region, climate, and growing practices can impact the flavors of our beer. And in this episode, we learn a bit about how something like craft malt can make a difference for a brewer trying to not only offer something that tastes unique, but brings story and connection to the earth and people.

Liz Preston is an owner, farmer, brewer, and chef at Prestonrose Farm and Brewing in Paris, Arkansas, so you can imagine her understanding and appreciation for all things agriculture runs through everything she does. Along with hearing a little about her background as a scientist and lab manager, you’ll gain an appreciation for the ways Liz considers the nuance and importance of farming and the way that moves from the people who grow something from the ground to an ingredient used to make her beer. You’ll also gain a better understanding for what it takes to create beer in the South during a time when temperatures are a little bit hotter, rain can be slightly more sparse, and climate change impacts the way Liz thinks about the cycle of what we grow and how.

In this conversation you’ll hear about what it takes to grow a brewery in Arkansas and what it’s like being part of an in-state industry that’s working to change perceptions of what beer can be.

Around the world, the craft beer community disagrees on a lot of things, but one big schism is over what beer actually is. Is it a rigid adherence to historical methods and styles? Or could it also be over-the-top, avant-garde experiments that are as far from tradition as it’s possible to be while still remaining liquid? At Omnipollo Brewing, it turns out beer can be both.

In his latest piece titled “Lead Us Not Into Temptation — Omnipollo Brewing in Stockholm, Sweden,” writer and filmmaker Jonny Garrett goes headfirst into the wacky world of Omnipollo, a brewery best known for its outrageous Pastry Stouts and iconic aesthetic. But being known for one thing hasn’t kept them from branching out—even if they’re not quite sure where they’re going. Today, Jonny reveals what it was like to have his own preconceptions about what beer is challenged by Omnipollo, and how brewing Pastry Stouts emulates the artistry of baking actual pastries. He describes Omnipollo as “tearing up the rulebook” of beer, with outlandish—and yes, delicious—results. 

We also talk about how filming, photographing, and even writing about the art of others is an art form in itself, rife with challenges that can often yield something entirely new. Finally, we’ll touch on that Yellow Belly controversy: what it was like to hear about it firsthand from Omnipollo’s founder and brewer, their intent, the impact, and how context changes over time and in different places. Beer is always more than just beer, so let’s talk about it. 

Right now, a lot of things seem really bad. There are microplastics embedded in all of our bodies—including millions of bodies now stripped of autonomy, thanks to the Supreme Court. Wildfire season is heating up (literally), everything costs more than it used to, and it’s hard to escape this pervasive feeling of existential dread permeating every corner of our lives which, unfortunately, also includes beer.

In his piece titled “Slow-Dancing in a Burning Room — The Cost of Climate Change on Beer’s Favorite Crop,” published on May 12, 2022, Matt Osgood shares insights from farmers and scientists about the impending changes hops face in light of what he calls the “unbiased chaos of natural disaster.” It’s dire out there, he explains, but he believes the best chance for beer lies solely in the hands of human ingenuity mixed with technological advances. 

Today, Matt and I discuss our collective responsibilities as beer drinkers and journalists, but also as citizens of the world—a world that seems like it’s changing no matter what we do. But by claiming our power as individuals, we retain the hope that our children and our children’s children stand a fighting chance of not just existing, but enjoying Earth’s bounty, including craft beer. All of these issues are intertwined, and it can feel like playing whack-a-mole when making decisions. But this push and pull of human restraint against human destruction only continues to gain importance, making conversations such as these crucial for the future of beer, people, and Earth. Let’s dive in.

When we think about beer and brewing, it’s easy for our minds to wander toward the person making the beer we drink. Brewers create a little bit of magic combining art and science, and because of that, are often considered the backbone to a business that makes and sells beer. Sometimes, they can even be thought of as rock stars with engaging personalities and thoughtful approaches to what it means to make beer.

But there are so many more people we may miss when we think about beer as an industry.

In this conversation, we’re chatting with Kindsey Bernhard, director of hospitality for Austin Beerworks, and also a background of all sorts of skills and expertise. Kindsey has worked as a bartender and before her role with Austin Beerworks, was taproom manager for Hi-Wire Brewing's location in Louisville, Kentucky. She's also a peer in media, having written for Porch Drinking and hosting her own podcast, Boys Are From Marzen, which showcases women and non-binary people who work in beer.

When we connected, Kindsey had just recently moved to Austin to begin her latest job, so you’ll hear about what it’s like to transplant as part of pursuing new career goals and what’s caught her eye as a new resident of Austin, Texas. We’ll also talk about the variety of skills she’s learned and displayed as a person working in beer and how her passion for the industry has driven her to better understand career goals and finding balance in her life.

Kindsey is one of many amazing people working for a brewery who doesn’t make the beer, and I hope you’ll come away from this chat with an appreciation for her and the behind-the-scenes effort she embodies.

Okay, maybe it’s not Harry Styles or Bad Bunny, but writing about beer history is, relatively speaking, kind of hot right now. Writers at a number of publications are unearthing cool stories about the origins of beer glassware, influential breweries, and obscure beer styles. There are Twitter and Instagram accounts dedicated to beer in art, vintage beer advertisements, and other visual aspects of brewing history. And here at Good Beer Hunting, we have our own series of history-focused articles and podcasts, Source Material.

While a new generation of writers might be just starting to focus on beer history, some of the most influential voices in the field have been doing it for quite a while—and they’re still going strong. In this episode, I’m talking to one of the strongest: Martyn Cornell, who has published his beer blog, Zythophile.co.uk, since 2007, though he started writing about beer much earlier. In 1988, Martyn was a founding member of the British Guild of Beer Writers. Over the years, he’s won numerous awards from the Guild, including Beer Writer of the Year.

In our talk, Martyn and I discuss beer writing and why there are so many errors and mistakes in beer history. We talk about how he does his research, as well as his books, including “Amber, Gold & Black” and “Strange Tales of Ale.” We discuss his recent article, ‘Tishonest Prewers’ and Lager Bier Operas — Uncovering the True Origins of American Lager Brewing, which Martyn wrote for our Source Material series. I also ask Martyn about the changes in beer culture that he’s seen over the years, and his take on the current status of Cask Ale in the U.K.

HBCUs—or Historically Black Colleges and Universities—have long been important institutions in the Black community. The first HBCUs were established before the Civil War to provide higher education opportunities to Black high school graduates, and since then have continued to grow. Today, there are 101 HBCUs in the nation. 

Over the years, HBCUs have graduated many prominent leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; Oprah Winfrey; Toni Morrison; and the first female, first Black, and first Asian-American vice president, Kamala Harris. HBCUs have given birth to many leaders across society, including the beer industry. 

This is the landscape in which Atinuke Akintola Diver’s recent piece is set. “‘A Black Woman Made This Beer’ — How Historically Black Colleges and Universities Shaped a Generation of Black Women Brewers” was published on May 11, 2022 as part of our Next Germination series (made in partnership with Guinness). Tinu’s story draws a connection between the many Black women brewers working today and the HBCUs they attended, and explores the role of these institutions as essential incubators of Black brewing talent. She noticed this connection after researching her feature-length documentary “This Belongs to Us.” (If you want to learn more about her documentary, I recommend listening to the podcast she recorded with her main subject, Briana Brake, and host Bryan Roth.) 

In this episode, we talk about the importance of giving Black women their flowers, our love of storytelling, why a complete beer history includes the contributions of Black people, and where Tinu’s beer journey has taken her so far.

As a writer, photographer, translator, and the first Certified Cicerone in Ukraine now living in Switzerland, Lana Svitankova wears a lot of hats. One of them is to capture moments through her photography and to share them with the world. Another is to collect memories and enshrine them through her storytelling. But one particular hat is that of an ambassador, on a mission to immortalize a beer from her homeland of Ukraine.

Ukrainian Golden Ale isn’t an official beer style—yet. But Lana believes that it’s unique enough to warrant inclusion in style guides across the world, despite some skeptics. No, it’s not the most exciting beer ever brewed, she admits. But with more eyes than ever fixed on Ukraine, people are beginning to take an interest in her quest. That being said, Lana remains adamant that this beer style shouldn’t be considered for anything other than its own merits, explaining that the campaign for recognition has been going on for years. Still, it’s heartening to know the world supports these efforts.

Today, we’ll hear about those efforts, as well as Lana’s work as a photographer. COVID robbed her of her ability to capture pictures of people—her preferred subject—but slowly and surely, that pendulum from isolation to socialization is swinging back once more. Beer is meant to be temporary, but photographs last forever.

I first learned about Montclair Brewery during Black History Month. Since opening in 2018, the brewery has honored prominent Black figures—from Harriet Tubman with its Tubman Railroad Strawberry Pale Ale to Chadwick Boseman with its Boseman Wild Ale.

I had the chance to talk with Denise Ford Sawadogo, the co-owner and founder of Montclair Brewery, for an article I was working on for the New Brewer. While speaking to her, I was amazed at how much the couple’s backgrounds showed up in their work at Montclair Brewery—Denise’s family is from Jamaica and her husband, Leo, is from West Africa. Their culture appears in the music, programming, and of course, the beers they brew. It’s a great reminder of the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and how exposure to other cultures can increase our knowledge of the world around us while also teaching us something about ourselves.

In our conversation, we talk about how the brewery’s story began in Montclair, New Jersey, and the beautiful neighborhood which it’s named after. Denise also shares how the couples bring their culture into the brewery, including the inspiration behind their Black History Series. We also talk about our moms, their entrepreneurial spirit, and how we learned never to give up on our dreams.

The first time I connected with Emma Janzen off social media happened last year when she, very graciously, offered to help guide me in the early stages of my book proposal. Since then, she’s continued to mentor me through the harrowing process of actually writing a book. She’s also made big career moves; recently published her latest book, “The Bartender’s Manifesto” with Toby Maloney and the bartenders at noted Chicago bar The Violet Hour; and even picked up a James Beard Award for her previous book, “The Way of the Cocktail,” co-authored with Chicago bartender Julia Momose.

Throughout that time, she’s also continued her work as a journalist, editor, photographer, and storyteller. Emma published an almost painfully beautiful personal essay for Good Beer Hunting titled “Slow, Reflective, Quiet — Meditations on Mezcal in San Baltazar Guelavila,” on May 18, 2022. The story, which was born out of a straightforward press trip, evolved into something that resonated deeply within her soul, which in turn created an opportunity to tap into her voice as more than just a witness to creation.

In today’s conversation about her piece, Emma shares what it was like to break out of a more journalistic mindset in order to experience what was happening to and around her, the importance of balancing a generational legacy of artistry with increasing global awareness and demand, and what’s at stake as mezcal marches towards a fork in the road, where one way leads to commodification and the other honors time and tradition. That story culminates with a feeling of optimism—or at least, I hope it does.

Bonus: In the latter part of the conversation, Emma mentions a Spotify playlist that helped center her thoughts at the end of her trip to the heart of Oaxaca. If you’re curious about the vibes, here’s a link to said playlist.

Today’s episode is a preview of a festival coming up in Pittsburgh on July 30th called Mixed Culture. GBH is intimately involved as partners on the branding and content side of the festival—and that’s in large part because the people behind it are both clients and long-time friends of ours at Cinderlands Beer Co. This festival is a sort of “coming of age” moment for their whole crew. On the back of so many big wins—launching their second and third locations, reinventing the Foederhouse to make exquisite wood aged and mixed culture beers, and taking a medal this year for Gregg, their saison, I couldn’t be more proud of what these folks have accomplished. And their brewer Paul Schneider is a personal friend of mine and we both fell into beer around the same time in Chicago going to bottle shares and tagging along at breweries until we could get our foot in the door. Of all the brewers who we worked with for our Uppers & Downers festival, no one took the assignment more seriously than Paul did when he was brewing at Solemn Oath in Naperville, Illinois. He’s probably made more coffee beers than any other brewer on the planet.

Expertise is an easy thing to pin down … or is it? There’s the oft-cited 10,000 hours that it takes to become an expert. Or there’s a dictionary we could pull from a book shelf or mobile device to look up a definition. Or maybe we just know it when we see it in action. There are all sorts of experts who share all sorts of expertise with the world, and whether they know it, like it, or claim it, it’s inspiring. We could turn to Google any time we want, but there’s something special—and perhaps necessarily human—about not relying on a manual or book and finding expertise from another person.

In this conversation, we hear from Sarah Flora, a homebrewer with a large following across social media and YouTube, an award-winning podcast, and by all means, an expert. She connects people across the globe with tips and insights on the homebrewing process, beer reviews, and light-hearted reflections on what it means to exist in the beer and homebrewing worlds. Throughout this chat, we connect these things to how Sarah approaches educating herself and others, the value of taking risks, and why it’s valuable to have loved ones giving you a little push when you need it.

Sarah was part of Good Beer Hunting’s 2021 Signifiers—an annual collection of people GBH celebrates who shape the future of the beer industry. It’s Sarah’s expertise that puts her in that position, and a drive to learn and improve that will help you understand the “how” and “why” she inspires others. The thousands of interactions Sarah gets on Instagram posts or YouTube videos every week are basic measurements of her impact, but as you learn more about her as a person as we talk, you’ll likely find an even greater appreciation for how she uses her skills to make being an expert delightfully human.

Sometimes, we can make the mistake of thinking history only applies to things that happened long ago. But as Wisconsin-based beer historian and writer John Harry reminds us, events that happened in our lifetime can still resonate and help inform our collective understanding of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

In his piece titled “Racism in a Can’ — How One Beer Epitomized the Native American Struggle for Treaty Rights,” which was published on April 14, 2022, John describes how one beer, which was inspired as a fundraiser for a white supremacist initiative against Native American rights, changed Wisconsin forever. That beer, known as Treaty Beer, ultimately lost money and steam, but the stain of its racist agenda is still felt in the area today. In fact, in our conversation, John reveals how hard it was to get anyone to speak with him for this story, how he came across Treaty Beer, and why he decided to research its place in regional history. We also talk about how in reality, cancel culture is actually just consequences and accountability, and why education is key to understanding fundamental human issues.

John explains that despite a history of repeated oathbreaking by the United States government, especially towards its Indigenous population, any treaty made in good faith between two sovereign nations is just as legitimate as any other. Beer history is never just about the beer, and there’s plenty of work to be done to continue questioning, fighting, and improving.

Welcome to the first episode in our Next Germination series, produced in partnership with Guinness.

For those of you that have been reading and listening to Good Beer Hunting for years, you know how important the underwriting we receive is. Alongside hundreds of paying subscribers, whom we call the Fervent Few, our underwriters enable us to pursue big, ambitious projects. And no one has been more supportive and continuously so than Guinness. Years of support has helped us build an unprecedented editorial team in beer. This team has claimed dozens of awards over the years, including the North American Guild of Beer Writers awards, which we won roughly half of all those awards last year. The Society of Professional Journalists award. And this past weekend, a James Beard award.

All this momentum and continuity would not be possible—not even close—without the support of the folks at Guinness.

And today marks yet another step in that collaborative journey with the Next Germination series.

When we were scoping out the themes and ambitions for this two-year stretch of underwriting, nothing was more important to Guinness and our team than extending that long table of beer to include more people who have traditionally been marginalized from the industry and its culture, which is often prone to a monoculture.

For a brand that’s known and loved around the world, in countries like Ireland the UK of course, but also Nigeria, the Caribbean, and the U.S. where they built their latest production facility and taproom in Baltimore, Guinness’ future is directly dependent on the growth of beer drinking audiences, and the increasingly diverse and equitable spaces and cultures that surround it.

This series—called Next Germination—reflects our editorial team’s desire to continue our own mission of helping beer drinking audiences get smarter, more impassioned, and inspired about the world’s most popular drink.

It’s a perfect alignment in both mission and ambition.

So what exactly is the Next Germination?

Well, we believe the beer world is so much more than its homogenous stereotypes. Today, a new and diverse generation of drinkers, change-makers, and doers is continuing to push for progress in every direction. Their aims are varied, but their shared emphasis on equity, community-building, and access has deep reverberations that go beyond the liquid in your glass.

So together with Guinness, The Next Germination is a series of stories and podcasts that celebrates the people making beer brighter and broader—and transforming its future for the better.

In this first episode, I’m talking to Beth Demmon, one of our best writers and hosts about her first piece that kicks off the series - called “Keeping Neurodiversity in Mind — How Two Groundbreaking Breweries are Making Beer Spaces More Accessible”

We both rely on our limited experience as parents of neurodiverse children as a way in to appreciating and articulating the experience of neurodiverse beer drinkers, and how the industry has an emerging opportunity - especially in its hospitably sector - to broaden its approach to a wide array of audiences with specific needs that could help center them in the future of beer.

Does the world really need another craft brewery? Honestly, no—but Daniel Muñoz and Jeremy Grinkey think the world just might need their brewery, which is coming very soon to the city of Orange in Orange County, California. It’s called Everywhere Beer, but they’re not just stopping at beer. The two co-founders, along with their partners Stefan Weber and Keith Pumilia, hope to create a space that’s comfortable, welcoming, and approachable for everyone in their community, something that unfortunately still remains a relative rarity across the craft beer industry.

In today’s conversation, Jeremy, Daniel, and I discuss the future of Everywhere, but also their pasts. Listeners might know of Jeremy as the long-haired and long-bearded director of production at The Bruery, or as @Sour_Jesus on Instagram. Both of them are veterans of the wine industry as well as The Bruery, where their partners also worked before banding together to form Everywhere. What led four guys to leave The Bruery to start their own? As it turns out, lots of things, including a shared need to write their own legacies instead of perpetuating someone else’s; the search to find their own voices as artisans; a pandemic-inspired realization that our time on Earth is finite (so get busy living); and finally, a desire to expand representation in a mostly white culture. How do four dudes in Orange County plan to accomplish that? You’ll just have to keep listening.

You’ll also hear about the ups and downs of finding their space, which beer styles and breweries inspire them, what consumers they hope to attract, which types of beers to expect (as well as beverages outside of beer, like wine, hard seltzer, and maybe even craft soda), and why they feel philanthropy is a crucial element to supporting their local community. The sky’s the limit: Or at least, their 20-tap system is. Everywhere Beer is tentatively slated to open in August 2022. Let’s hear about how they’re going to make that happen and where it will go from there.

In today’s conversation, Anthony and I talk about the early, uncertain days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which spurred a collective return to familiar flavors, with beer being no exception. He found that comfort in a can of Best Bitter, brewed collaboratively between Boxcar Brewery and Mills Brewing. Unbeknownst to him at the time, that beer ultimately led him down this path of exploration into what the Best Bitter actually is, where it comes from, and how it shapes the identities of brewers over generations, even in the face of inevitable evolution. The style is currently at a crossroads, one where allegiance to history and tradition is butting up against changing demographics and contemporary craft beer culture. But despite those changes, it’s still a beer style that means something to many, if not most, British drinkers.

Today, you’ll hear about that shared experience, what makes a Best Bitter a Best Bitter, what Anthony loves about the easy-drinking style, and his musing on where tradition may be headed. Don’t let the name fool you—there’s a loving sweetness in the soul of every cask pour of Bitter.

Breweries love to talk about what they bring into the world. In other words, their beer. Breweries tend to talk less about what they leave behind. Their focus is on the next batch of beer, not the last one. In a lot of ways that makes perfect sense...but if you want to keep track of your business, your favorite brands, or the industry as a whole, a forward focus can also leave a blindspot. Breweries imprint upon the world with more than just their beer. They forge facilities with both equipment and character. They create all sorts of physical objects like tap handles, labels, cans and bottles, coasters, merch, and so on.They create terabytes of information: websites, graphics, brew logs, TikTok videos, and recipes to name a few. Even more gets created in their name by other entities, from government to Google. Most romantic of all these are the memories, relationships, ideas, and inspirations that breweries create. They both affect us individually and ripple out into communities. On and on it goes. A brewery's imprint today is expansive, it's redundant...and it's fleeting.Of all the stuff I just mentioned, very little of it is built to last.Beer gets consumed. Virtually all brewing facilities eventually close, even the wildly successful ones. Websites get taken down. Merch wears out or gets thrown out. Computer files get lost or deleted. And unless we record our memories somehow, they'll inevitably fade with us.

All this to say: as time passes for a brewery–or anything else in this world–what's known becomes limited to what's left. Imagine what gets lost in a year. Imagine what gets lost in a hundred.

While beer is in the name of this podcast, we explore all kinds of beverage alcohol with our guests. In recent episodes, we’ve talked about alcohol-infused coffee, agriculture, filmmaking, and more. If you follow alcohol industry news—or just stroll through your local grocery or liquor store—you know hard seltzer and canned cocktails increasingly take up space on shelves and in conversations. All of which is to say, the entirety of alcohol matters more every day as people explore new options, flavors, and expand their own understanding and expectation of how they enjoy and connect to whatever is in their bottle, can, or glass.

These themes are what led me to Paula de Pano, an advanced sommelier, wine educator, and entrepreneur behind Rocks + Acid Wine Shop, a new bar and store in North Carolina. Paula is a longtime industry vet with an education in culinary arts from the Culinary Institute of America—that’s the “CIA” you’ll hear mentioned in this interview—and she is opening this new venture with a focus on ways to court all kinds of drinkers. Wine can kind of feel stodgy at times given its history and pop culture status as a drink of choice for older, more affluent people, but Paula is making distinct choices about how to stock wines and interact with customers that seem necessary to reach a wider audience. She’s taking a unique stance on who she buys wine from and why, and even the physical layout of Rocks + Acid is meant to provide an atmosphere where education feels welcomed, not forced.

The past 20 years has offered narratives of beer’s decline, spirits’ rise, and wine’s … consistency. It hasn’t really lost volume or sales, but it has faded a bit in terms of attention, especially for younger drinkers. So, while we talk about and see the evolution of alcohol into all sorts of flavored concoctions that line store shelves, Paula is looking to make wine more familiar, welcoming, and exciting for all.

In her exuberant and extremely thorough piece titled “Spill It — Twisted Tea’s Unpredictable, Unparalleled 21-Year Success Story” journalist Kate Bernot unpacks everything there is to know about the cult favorite: its experimental origins, its shockingly consistent sales numbers, and the brand’s plans for future expansion in order to bring the gospel of boozy tea nationwide. Not that it needs to sell itself too hard—Kate describes Twisted Tea’s unusually fervent consumers, who’ve remained loyal for two decades and are showing no signs of straying. 

In today’s conversation, we share stories about our own experiences with the brand and how craft beer’s tunnel vision can sometimes make us unaware of successes outside our own spheres. She also shares some of her insight into the when, where, why, and how of Twisted Tea’s origin—and wonders why it’s so hard to get the full story from its creators. If there’s one thing to take away from our discussion, it’s to have an open mind when it comes to what you drink. You may be surprised at what you’re missing.

Today’s guest has been a bit of a ghost int he GBH machine for more than a decade - since our founding really - and he’s someone I think about every time someone asks me how GBH got started - and as you’ll discover shortly, he had no idea. 

Greg Browne was the brewer at a brewpub in Chicago’s NW suburbs - a place called Mickey Finn’s. He was known for brewing a hefeweizen - a recipe he inherited from his predecessor when he took over as head brewer. 

More importantly, for me, he was the host of a weekly Beer School at The Map Room in Chicago - a midday gathering on Saturday’s where guests would enjoy some bread and cheese and learn about beers in a thematic way - and the themes were whatever happened to be on Greg’s mind that week. 

It’s an incredible memory for me - from a time when I’d only had a smattering of craft beer experiences to rely on - and I hardly considered myself a fan of beer in any particular way. It was just causal and sometimes interesting fun. Most of my bar experiencers a the time involved $1 off specials of Blue Moon and some Golden Tee. Not exactly sophisticated stuff - but it was kind of the Chicago way. 

Map Room - and Greg Browne’s beer school painted an entirely different picture however. And I’m forever indebted to that moment when he served me my first Saison Dupont. That’s the beer that inspired GBH - and Greg is the one who created that moment, unbeknownst to him. 

But that’s not the real reason we’re talking today - that’s a story we could have shared at any point in in past decade really. Today I’m talking to Greg because for the first time in a long time, I saw his name pop up as part of a new brewing project called Art History, and it recently started supplying two fantastic beers to Chicago’s Hopleaf Bar. As far as I know the sis the first time Hopleaf has ever had a house beer. The venerated tap list there is a target for anyone trying to make a name for themselves in Chicago’s beer scene. Brewers host parties just to celebrate getting on tao there for the first time if they’re lucky enough to make the list at all. So for Greg to have a new gig - and so quickly become a mainstay on that list as a pair of house beers - is an unprecedented achievement. 

And for this episode, I reached out to Michael Roper of Hopleaf for his perspective on all that. 

It was a sign for me that it was finally time to get Greg on the podcast, share this story with him, and hear so much more about his own. It takes us deep into Chicago’s craft brewing past - and paints pa picture of the future that I’m very excited about. 

The color bar may be Britain’s most shameful secret—even though it’s not so secret after all. In journalist David Jesudason’s intensely researched and deeply personal new piece titled “Breaking the Color Bar — How One Man Helped Desegregate Britain’s Pubs (and Fought for an Anti-Racist Future),” which was published on March 16, 2022, David shares the story of Avtar Singh Jouhl, a British Indian activist, communist, and beer lover who was instrumental in bringing awareness to and dismantling segregated drinking spaces in Britain.

In this conversation, David and I unpack his process for approaching the piece: how his personal experiences and identity help him tackle thorny topics like racism, what he didn’t learn from the history books (and what he took upon himself to discover), which current events led him to write this, and how Britain continues to deny its legacy of racism both yesterday, today, and tomorrow through the residual effects of imperialism and nationalism. You’ll also hear a clip from Avtar himself, sharing his own experience in his own voice, as a part of living history.

This is a good time to remind anyone who still thinks beer isn’t political how wrong they are, and how far we still have to go to ensure safe, inclusive spaces for all. Join us, right now, to hear about how one extraordinary man made an enormous impact in the fight against racism in Britain, what didn’t make it into the story, and what comes next, both in and out of beer.

There is a lot of calculated nuance in today’s beer industry. You have to be purposeful in your business plan, consider who you’re selling to and where, and what your company stands for. Good beer is the table stakes, and these are differentiators that help create a successful business. It’s not easy to carve out a niche, but it is possible, when you see all this nuance.

In this conversation we meet Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland of Talea Beer Company. The pair are the co-founders and co-CEOs for the Brooklyn-based brewery, which has built its early success on attracting previously underserved consumers and creating a unique atmosphere at their taproom to appeal to all. You’ll hear them cite statistics and anecdotes as we chat, and their background in non-beer industries gives them a valuable perspective on new ways to differentiate themselves. I know it’s cliché to talk about how an outsider can bring new ideas and perspectives to old industries, but in a market where space is at a premium, both on shelves and in people's minds, Tara and LeAnn recognize what they can do to create something special and expand their reach across New York City.

You’ll get to hear about what first brought them to this moment and even what they see as important next steps for themselves and the future of the business. All of what happens between is intentional, thoughtful, and works to establish itself within this complicated nuance that allows a company to make connections that can create lifetime customers.

Who wants to talk about money? We’re going to. I’m joined today by Jerard Fagerberg to talk about his piece titled “Pour Clean, Like the Source — CA Draft Tech in Oakland, California,” which was published on Good Beer Hunting on February 18, 2022. 

In this piece, he outlines the creation, evolution, and expansion of CA Draft Tech, a sanitation service for taprooms, bars, and restaurants across the Bay Area. With the help of SMBX, an alternative financing company that allows consumers to invest directly in local businesses, CA Draft Tech was able to grow their business outside a bank’s traditional loan structure. 

It was Jerard’s first time exploring the niche world of hospitality financing, but it’s probably not the last. He describes the research and writing process as a challenge, but a necessary one in order to demystify finances and introduce a level of transparency not often seen when discussing that big elephant in the room—money.  You’ll hear from Jerard about how the story took shape, how to best discuss the business of beer without ignoring the very real human element, just what bonds are, how SMBX taps into communities in order to elevate businesses, and why this model is well-suited to the high-capital, low-margin world of hospitality. 

One note for listeners: This story was published as part of Good Beer Hunting’s Compound Interest series, underwritten by SMBX, which highlights different ways small businesses can get the funding they need; all of the businesses profiled in this series have worked with SMBX to achieve part or even all of their funding. And on that note, we have our own bond offering on the platform for anyone interested in investing in Good Beer Hunting’s future.

The long-awaited return and continuation of Foeder for Thought - GBH’s collaboration with Green Bench Brewing Company in St Petersburg Florida. GBH’s Founder, Michael Kiser, hosts a series of talks with wile ale producers from around the world in front of a live audience.

Episodes from 2022:

FFT-013 Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company

FFT-014 Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company

FFT-015 Jeffery Stuffings of Jester King Brewery

FFT-016 Christian Gregory of 3 Fonteinen

FFT-017 Pierre Tilquin of Gueuzerie Tilquin

FFT-018 Jason Perkins of Allagash Brewing Company

FFT-019 Tomme Arthur of The Lost Abbey

The long-awaited return and continuation of Foeder for Thought - GBH’s collaboration with Green Bench Brewing Company in St Petersburg Florida. GBH’s Founder, Michael Kiser, hosts a series of talks with wile ale producers from around the world in front of a live audience.

Episodes from 2022:

FFT-013 Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company

FFT-014 Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company

FFT-015 Jeffery Stuffings of Jester King Brewery

FFT-016 Christian Gregory of 3 Fonteinen

FFT-017 Pierre Tilquin of Gueuzerie Tilquin

FFT-018 Jason Perkins of Allagash Brewing Company

FFT-019 Tomme Arthur of The Lost Abbey

The long-awaited return and continuation of Foeder for Thought - GBH’s collaboration with Green Bench Brewing Company in St Petersburg Florida. GBH’s Founder, Michael Kiser, hosts a series of talks with wile ale producers from around the world in front of a live audience.

Episodes from 2022:

FFT-013 Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company

FFT-014 Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company

FFT-015 Jeffery Stuffings of Jester King Brewery

FFT-016 Christian Gregory of 3 Fonteinen

FFT-017 Pierre Tilquin of Gueuzerie Tilquin

FFT-018 Jason Perkins of Allagash Brewing Company

FFT-019 Tomme Arthur of The Lost Abbey

The long-awaited return and continuation of Foeder for Thought - GBH’s collaboration with Green Bench Brewing Company in St Petersburg Florida. GBH’s Founder, Michael Kiser, hosts a series of talks with wile ale producers from around the world in front of a live audience.

Episodes from 2022:

FFT-013 Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company

FFT-014 Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company

FFT-015 Jeffery Stuffings of Jester King Brewery

FFT-016 Christian Gregory of 3 Fonteinen

FFT-017 Pierre Tilquin of Gueuzerie Tilquin

FFT-018 Jason Perkins of Allagash Brewing Company

FFT-019 Tomme Arthur of The Lost Abbey

The long-awaited return and continuation of Foeder for Thought - GBH’s collaboration with Green Bench Brewing Company in St Petersburg Florida. GBH’s Founder, Michael Kiser, hosts a series of talks with wile ale producers from around the world in front of a live audience.

Episodes from 2022:

FFT-013 Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company

FFT-014 Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company

FFT-015 Jeffery Stuffings of Jester King Brewery

FFT-016 Christian Gregory of 3 Fonteinen

FFT-017 Pierre Tilquin of Gueuzerie Tilquin

FFT-018 Jason Perkins of Allagash Brewing Company

FFT-019 Tomme Arthur of The Lost Abbey

The long-awaited return and continuation of Foeder for Thought - GBH’s collaboration with Green Bench Brewing Company in St Petersburg Florida. GBH’s Founder, Michael Kiser, hosts a series of talks with wile ale producers from around the world in front of a live audience.

Episodes from 2022:

FFT-013 Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company

FFT-014 Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company

FFT-015 Jeffery Stuffings of Jester King Brewery

FFT-016 Christian Gregory of 3 Fonteinen

FFT-017 Pierre Tilquin of Gueuzerie Tilquin

FFT-018 Jason Perkins of Allagash Brewing Company

FFT-019 Tomme Arthur of The Lost Abbey

The long-awaited return and continuation of Foeder for Thought - GBH’s collaboration with Green Bench Brewing Company in St Petersburg Florida. GBH’s Founder, Michael Kiser, hosts a series of talks with wile ale producers from around the world in front of a live audience.

Episodes from 2022:

FFT-013 Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company

FFT-014 Tim Adams of Oxbow Brewing Company

FFT-015 Jeffery Stuffings of Jester King Brewery

FFT-016 Christian Gregory of 3 Fonteinen

FFT-017 Pierre Tilquin of Gueuzerie Tilquin

FFT-018 Jason Perkins of Allagash Brewing Company

FFT-019 Tomme Arthur of The Lost Abbey

It’s been nearly one year since craft beer began to face its biggest reckoning against sexism, racism, and toxic work culture to date. In that time, there has been some progress, but there has also been a growing polarization between those making calls for change and those making accusations about an out-of-control cancel culture.     

In the midst of this ongoing controversy and debate, Kate Bailey from Hand & Heart has been working to establish a first-of-its-kind foundation for reconciliation and progress within hospitality. As a consultancy that aims to improve business operations by advocating on behalf of workers, Hand & Heart developed the Mikkeller Reconciliation Program and the BrewDog Affected Workers Registration Platform in order to acknowledge, document, and hopefully reconcile issues to the satisfaction of affected workers and leadership at both businesses.

These efforts have come with a significant amount of challenges: emotionally, legally, and financially. Some of those witnessing the challenges have raised some questions. How does this work? Who’s paying the bill? Are there any guarantees of a safe and satisfying outcome? I spoke with Kate Bailey and ask some of these questions, although it’s important to note that since our first conversation recorded here on March 29, 2022, several new developments have come from both Hand & Heart as well as BrewDog in the ever-changing controversy. In a statement made by Hand & Heart on April 2, Kate does clarify that payments were made by Mikkeller to Hand & Heart for mutually agreed upon services rendered as part of the Reconciliation Program. In a similar statement made in response to BrewDog on April 1, Kate explains that although Hand & Heart’s preliminary efforts towards reconciliation do not hinge on any promise of financial compensation, if a business were to opt into an individually tailored program, fees associated with carrying out the services would be agreed upon and expected as with any consultancy agreement. As of today, there are no current negotiations between Hand & Heart and BrewDog. Either way, at no point are victims or accusers expected or required to pay Hand & Heart for their services. 

In this conversation, you’ll hear Kate explain her investigative background and when it dovetailed with beer, how she’s able to facilitate between victims and breweries as a third-party, the risks this business model assumes, and her take on what real leadership looks like. We also discuss that despite the impossibility of a one-size-fits-all solution, the effort towards healing is a crucial, yet relatively new model for the craft beer industry. Kate says people don’t want revenge—they want accountability. And she wants to help build that, despite the numerous challenges and criticisms that she, and many other activists, face when demanding responsibility from anyone upholding toxic systems. 

It’s a high stakes process—and safety is top of mind for Kate every step of the way. Find out exactly what she does to ensure safety and establish credibility, how she aims to facilitate a two-way dialogue that requires trust on both sides to accomplish a mutually beneficial—if not sometimes uncomfortable—path towards positive change, and why she remains hopeful at the possibility of redemption, even when the evidence gives her no reason to believe. This doesn’t end wrapped up neatly with a bow. But what ever does?

Craft beer is starting to show up in places where many of us have never been, and maybe never even thought about visiting. The small South American nation of Paraguay could be considered fairly remote by most standards: Paraguay is fully landlocked, roughly in the middle of the continent, bordered by the much larger countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. Its capital, Asunción, is fairly off-the-radar compared to popular South American tourist destinations like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. And yet even in Paraguay, good beer is really starting to make waves, as the writer William Costa reported in his recent story for us, “Mother of Cities — Subtropical Wanderings in Asunción, Paraguay.”

Paraguay’s location makes for some interesting dynamics. As a landlocked country, going to the beach for relaxation or swimming means heading to a river, not the ocean. While Asunción is mostly Spanish-speaking, Paraguay actually has two official languages: Spanish and Guarani, which is the only Indigenous language to be spoken by the majority of a non-Indigenous population in the Americas. And distinctive local ingredients, including yerba mate, cassava flour, and the medicinal herbs known as pohã ñana, are now starting to show up in Paraguayan beers.

In this episode, I talk to Costa, a long-term British resident of the country. We discuss beer, his article, snack foods, and even talk about some unique sounds from his daily life in Asunción, Paraguay.

As far as we can tell, many of the earliest beers ever made were actually beer-wine hybrids, brewed out of both grain and fruit. Fast-forward 10,000 years or so, and beers made with grapes are once again in fashion. Sometimes called “Oenobeers,” after oenology, the science of winemaking, Grape Beers or Grape Ales are becoming more popular in a lot of beer regions, especially in Italy and other wine-loving countries.

In this episode, I’m talking to Alessandra Agrestini, the president of the jury at a new tasting competition, the Italian Grape Ale Beer Challenge, which took place near the end of 2021 in Turin, Italy. (Full disclosure: I served as one of the competition’s international judges.) Alessandra has been active in beer judging and beer education in Italy for quite a while — she and I first met at the Birra dell’Anno beer competition some 10 years ago. 

In our conversation, we discuss beer-wine hybrids, the current Italian beer scene, and beer travel, as well as beer education, food and beer pairings, and Italian Pilsner. We also touch on the notion of styles, and wonder if it’s right to call all modern beer-wine hybrids “Italian” Grape Ales, regardless of where they are made. There is some justification for that claim: Italy probably produces more Grape Ales than any other country. The competition’s website has a map showing more than 220 Grape Ales from over 130 breweries in Italy. However, Italy wasn’t the first country to create modern beer-wine hybrids. Not all Grape Ales in Italy are produced in the same way, and there are wide variations in strength, color, flavor, aroma, acidity, and sweetness, which makes it hard to argue for Italian Grape Ale as a style unto itself. 

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the website ItalianGrapeAle.org. The competition is open to entries from around the world, so if brewers you know make a great Grape Ale, Grape Lager, Oenobeer, or some other beer-wine hybrid, tell ’em to send it in this fall. And after this interview finishes, stick around for an update with the names of the competition winners.

That’s exactly why writer Alexander Gates decided to profile Cindy Goldstein, a national BJCP judge and fierce advocate for craft beer in Hawaii. In his piece titled “Finding Her Own Route — A Honolulu Brewery Crawl with Cindy Goldstein,” which was published on February 2, 2022, he outlines Cindy’s extensive background in science, homebrewing, judging, and community-building, and how her efforts have helped shape the small but ever-changing Hawaiian craft beer scene.

In today’s conversation about that piece, Alexander and I discuss what it’s like writing about a mentor (and why people should seek out their own), why he decided to share her story, how Hawaiian beer is better than ever—despite the pandemic’s massive disruption to tourism and the supply chain—and his own judging experience through the Beer Judge Certification Program. You’ll hear how beer unites the chain of volcanic islands, thanks in no small part to Cindy’s tireless and ongoing efforts, and what he’s hoping to see as in-person beer classes, events, and competitions begin to awaken once more.

If you’re a beer enthusiast, you’ve likely come across Jeff Alworth at some point. The longtime blogger, journalist, author, and podcaster is one of the most valued in the country, and his research and storytelling is nearly unmatched. This isn’t meant to be hyperbole, as the reason Jeff and I are talking on this episode is because we got to catch up as he traveled the country to promote the second edition of his book, The Beer Bible.

We sat down outside at Asheville, North Carolina’s Zillicoah Beer Company, to talk about his book and his own education and growth as a journalist and human. In the first half of this conversation you’ll learn about what went into creating The Beer Bible and then recreating new parts of it for its new edition, and on the back half we chat about what it means to explore ideas of beer today, whether that’s the hops that go into a beer, or the way we think about styles.

And if you haven’t yet read, heard, or met Jeff, I hope this conversation is a worthy introduction to someone who is kind and meaningful in their work and how they move in the world. We can learn a lot about beer by reading and listening to Jeff’s work, but I hope this episode helps you appreciate him as a person as well.

JW Lees’ Harvest Ale is not a beer to drink casually, and it’s not one to speak casually about, either. As an icon of British brewing, this Barley Wine is described by journalist Adrian Tierney-Jones as elegant, eloquent, and contemplative in his piece titled “The Arrow of Time — How JW Lees’ Harvest Ale Has Defined British Brewing for Decades”, which was published on February 16, 2022.

As a longtime freelancer who writes about beer, pubs, and travel, Adrian has a unique perspective on Harvest Ale, in that he’s had a front-row seat to this beer’s evolution over the decades. He’s also been witness to how it’s stayed the same—a paradox we discuss in today’s podcast. We talk a lot about time: How flavors deepen, how appreciation for history changes, and why there may never be another beer like Harvest Ale, thanks to FOMO beer culture and social media. He walks listeners through the JW Lees vertical tasting he attended while researching this story, which featured bottles dating back to the ’90s, and reminisces about the styles and beers of bygone days that have influenced today’s craft beer culture.

There’s a time and a place to hold onto beer, but it’s always a good day to savor one. I recommend taking a look at your stash right now and selecting something special to pair with this podcast. As Adrian says, “Beer is fascinating.”

GBH Co-Founder and Creative Director, Michael Kiser returns with of one of our favorite festivals with Greenbench Brewing in St Pete, Florida, and a new kind of fundraising that helps you invest in the future of GBH and our industry.

In this episode, we explore what it means to chase flavor memory with Zahra Tabatabai, founder and CEO of Back Home Beer, a fast-growing company based in New York City rooted in her family’s past. Zahra started homebrewing in order to recapture past tastes from her grandfather’s days of homebrewing in Iran as a way to bring those memories back for her family. A hobby soon became more, and now her Sumac Gose and Persian Lager act as ways to recapture the ingredients and flavors of the past.

As you’ll hear in this conversation, at the core of Zahra’s journey is her grandfather, Gholam-Reza, who was better known by his familial nickname of “baba joon,” a term of endearment that translates to “father dear.” Join me and Zahra as we talk about what led her to this moment, the speed of which her beer flies of shelves in New York and now Washington, D.C., and what it means to look back in time to bring something special into today.

There are some artistic endeavors that occur against all odds. Perry, or cider made with pears, is one of those things. Perry pears are hard to grow, hard to ferment, and sometimes hard to explain. But when all the elements of time, energy, climate, effort, and care come together, the end result can be otherworldly.

In his piece titled “Madness and Bitter Fruit — Making Perry in the Shadow of May Hill,” writer Anthony Gladman dives into the relatively unknown world of perry, and how ancient seeds have helped create a contemporary cult following around this marvelous and mythical drink. He admits that you have to be a bit of a nerd to really get into perry, but once you do, there’s no turning back. 

In today’s conversation, we talk about who’s making perry (and why many people don’t), how perry’s PR problems have created confusion about what it actually is, the importance of preservation in the face of climate change, and how this fragile fruit may hold the key to our past and our future. If you can (legally) partake, this conversation and article are best experienced with a bit of cannabis influence, and, of course, with a nice pint of perry as well. We only scratch the surface of what there is to know, but it’s a great place to start.

In this episode, we meet the people behind one of the companies carving out a corner of this increasingly successful—and interesting—hard coffee space. We meet Amin Anjedani, Sam Madani, and Kai Drewry of BOMANI Cold Buzz, a 5.7% alcohol-infused cold brew. The trio are friends who have identified this percolating space and have created a premiumized version for a category once monopolized solely by Pabst Blue Ribbon Hard Coffee. 

How can this space exist? How is this not Four Loko 2.0? These are things we'll learn about as the three co-founders give insight on a continued evolution of beverage alcohol. We're at a point where consumers can find just about anything to fit their mood or occasion—with or without alcohol—so it actually makes perfect sense that in 2022, we should be talking about what's next for alcohol-infused coffee.

In this episode, we’re talking about dads. Their influence on us, the things they taught or didn’t teach us, and how we do or don’t follow in their footsteps. That’s actually a small part of this conversation with Dave Infante, but perhaps the most surprising and fun piece of it all. Come for the dad talk, stick around for a reflection on alcoholic milk, labor relations, journalism, and more.

It’s an eclectic lineup of topics, but if you’re familiar with Dave, it may not be surprising. As a two-time James Beard Foundation award winner, he’s earned one of the highest recognitions for journalists covering food and beverage. He’s currently a writer-at-large for VinePair and the reporter behind Fingers, an alcohol-focused newsletter that covers the space where booze and culture connect. Dave’s archive of stories spans clickbait on Thrillist about hating IPAs to investigative pieces uncovering the crowdfunding finances of BrewDog.

If there’s something culturally-relevant that’s taken place in beverage alcohol, Dave has likely been on it, and you’ll get the chance to better understand his work and motivations in this conversation. You’ll also get to learn about his dad.

Today, you’ll hear from Missy and Shyla about when they decided to open a brewery, how their local community supported them before and during the pandemic, how Albuquerque’s unique location allows for a diverse mix of locals and travelers, how New Mexico is shaping the craft beer culture at large, and what success means to them as part of this family-run business that they call a labor of love. Of course, we’ll also talk about the beers themselves—how sustainability in water and foraged ingredients shapes their recipes, how seasonality determines which ingredients are used, and how they balance delicate flavors with the wild beauty and bounty the land provides.

Brienne Allan became a household name in the beer industry last year, when she inadvertently sparked a reckoning against sexism in beer that quickly went global. Her face and words were featured everywhere from Imbibe to the Boston Globe, Eater, right here at Good Beer Hunting, and her Brave Noise initiative with Ash Eliot was named Brewbound’s Cause of the Year for 2021.

But now that nearly a year has gone by, what’s changed? For starters, Brienne left her home at Notch Brewing in Salem, Massachusetts, something she’d never envisioned doing until she became a worldwide phenomenon. Part of that decision was due to the sudden, and often scary, visibility she had to confront as a public face of social justice and change, which forced her to quickly figure out who she could talk to and who to trust. But even in the darkest times, she describes pockets of joy and hope that shifted her perspective about craft beer, but ultimately kept her within its space in order to keep driving positive change.

Today, Brienne and I talk about the past year—what she’s learned, how she’s changed, what she wants people to know, and what she’s looking forward to. Later in the conversation, we’re joined by her fiancé and partner Michael Fava, who shares his reaction to the reckoning as well as some of their future plans as business owners. You’ll hear an exclusive announcement about that business (yes, it involves Lagers), and why we shouldn’t expect the name Brienne Allan to go away anytime soon. We finish with a conversation about the current reconciliation plans for Mikkeller, which she calls a “huge breakthrough” as the first-of-its-kind effort to acknowledge, apologize, and atone for past sins. The dust hasn’t settled yet, but with the help of people like Kate Bailey, Fanny Wandel, Ash Eliot, and more, Brienne’s path forward is becoming slightly more clear.

From talking frogs to Bud Light loving dogs and Will Ferrell unexpectedly shilling Old Milwaukee, there's a long history of beer advertisements that have found cultural relevance. Viewers across the country see these commercials every week during sporting events and reality TV shows. But as fewer people drink beer and more cut the cable cord, what's next for this segment of advertising?

That's the question at the core of Kate Bernot's story on Good Beer Hunting that explores what happens when overall minutes of beer ad airtime decline and all kinds of entertainment fills up our days. And in this conversation, Kate and I explore the ins and outs of why beer brands advertise on TV today and the reason big beer companies still see this avenue as an important way to connect with people, whether customers or distributors or retailers.

What if beer commercials are no longer just about trying to sell more beer in a literal way? And how can you measure cultural impact if it doesn't show up in sales? Saying "Dilly Dilly" can only take you so far.

“For the past two years, the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) has conducted an awareness and advocacy campaign to combat human trafficking, an initiative whose focus and scale are unprecedented in the organization’s history.”

That’s from the start of Kate Bernot’s story on Good Beer Hunting about a worthwhile cause to fight a global problem of trafficking here in the United States. But as you’ll read and as you’ll hear in this conversation, there’s far more understanding to what it all means. And that’s before we get to the many unknowns, which include unanswered questions about why the Association and some of its supporting organizations can’t or won’t provide details of how this effort came to be, and how they’re quantifying success. Human trafficking is not a cause directly related to the beer industry. But industry professionals and elected officials say beer distributors have the ability to be on-the-street “eyes and ears” and are uniquely positioned to help.

So what does this all mean, exactly, when one of the largest trade organizations in beverage alcohol makes human trafficking a priority? And what are the questions we still want to learn more about? That’s in this conversation.

Whether you’re speaking with her directly or reading her words, Ruvani de Silva seems to emit an effortless effervescence that’s both passionate and genuine. Her enthusiasm for her adopted home state of Texas is obvious, and her curiosity about the people moving it forward is heartfelt, which leads her to reveal compelling truths about beer and beyond. 

In her latest piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Capturing the Flavor of Texas — Community Cultures Yeast Lab in San Antonio, Texas,” which was published on December 15, 2021, Ruvani describes how an encounter with the duo behind the San Antonio-based yeast lab galvanized her to dive into the world of clean foraged yeast propagation and what it means for the future of Texas terroir. Calling it one of the hardest projects she’s ever undertaken, Ruvani’s story explores both the science and art of cultivating hyper-local yeast from the Lone Star State, and how Community Cultures is redefining Texas craft beer in real time. 

Texans are fiercely proud of their land and people, and this story is no exception. If you read Ruvani’s feature and are now listening to this conversation about it, you might be surprised to find out that Texas ranks 47th in breweries per capita, according to the Brewers Association. (I know—I was surprised!) But as Ruvani describes it, the state of Texas craft beer is “dynamic, diverse, and inclusive,” which are powerful words for a growing industry. And, thanks to the work of Texans like Ruvani and Community Cultures, the craft community at large has front-row seats to what’s happening right now. 

If you’ve gone on a brewery tour or listened to someone wax poetic about what goes into a beer, you may have heard this phrase: “Beer is an agricultural product.” It’s a simple statement, but one that’s repeated because it can often get lost. We most often exist around beer’s final state—an alcoholic liquid dispensed from a tap or poured from a bottle or can. No wonder we aren’t actively thinking about what happens before we take that first sip.

In this episode, we’re taking a chance to step back in that timeline with Audrey Gehlhausen and Chris DellaBianca of Billy Goat Hop Farm, a 32-acre, family-owned farm in Montrose, Colorado, where Audrey and Chris harvest hops like Cascade, Chinook, Comet, and more. They’re responsible for one of the core ingredients in beer that provides a host of aromas and flavors. But we’re not just talking about all that, as Audrey and Chris’ connection to beer through farming raises a range of other important topics that touch climate change, labor, and running a business.

While I’m certainly guilty of not overthinking each beer I’m drinking, I love knowing the value of interactions like this. To pause and think about how beer touches so much before it hits the side of your glass. Beer is an agricultural product, and in this conversation, you’ll get another opportunity to learn why.

There’s a brewery with a funny name hidden away in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains that’s slowly growing into a local powerhouse. Named after a nearby lake, the beer from Wallenpaupack Brewing Company is good—I can attest to that—but it’s the way this business is setting itself up for the future in the middle of Yuengling Country that caught my eye, and brings owner, Becky Ryman, and head brewer, Logan Ackerley, to your ears.

In this episode, we’re going to hear from Becky and Logan about what it takes to establish a brewery in a place mostly known for transient vacationers, how they build a tap list to smartly incorporate traditional styles and contemporary trends, and what the future holds for a brewery that has rapidly added staff and increased production. This summer, the Wallenpaupack team also celebrated the opening of a second space called “The Wake Zone,” a 6,000-square foot space designed to house interactive indoor golf and sports experiences along with a taproom.

All together, it’s a very modern approach to what it takes to excite drinkers in a taproom, on store shelves, and ensure ongoing success. This conversation is a great timestamp for this business and what it takes to succeed in beer, and I hope it also offers a better understanding of what Wallenpaupack represents outside a funny-sounding name for those not in the know.

Emily Monaco’s latest story starts off with a very loaded concept, that controversial T word: terroir. This romantic, albeit somewhat undefinable term, has been synonymous with wine—and especially French wine—for generations. But now, as French beer continues to come into its own, the tastes of right here, right now are being emphasized by a number of breweries, but one in particular: Deck & Donohue.

Not that Deck & Donohue would use the word “terroir” to describe its mission. In Emily’s piece “Liberté, Égalité, Authenticité — Deck & Donohue in Paris, France,” which was published on November 24, 2021, she takes a deep and deeply personal look at what makes this opinionated, locally driven brewery tick. Accompanied by a collection of arresting photographs by Eileen Cho, the piece looks at the brewery’s beginning, its goals, and its future as a hyper-local producer of artisanal beers that relies on as many organic and France-sourced ingredients as it possibly can.

In today’s conversation about the piece, Emily reveals her own entry and evolution in beer, and when this particular story began to take shape in her mind. We discuss how French craft beer culture has seen beer evolve from mostly an aperitif to a legitimate beverage to pair with food. We also look at how the history and tradition of winemaking differ from the more forward-looking beer scene, how the United States has influenced French beer (and how it hasn’t), and even where to find the best chai in Paris. But most poignantly of all, she reveals what else she learned in her research for this story, and how it has inspired a number of other stories she hopes to share in the future.

Genuinely nice people seem to be harder than ever to come by. But Chris Leguizamon, otherwise known as “Chris The Beer Educator” on Instagram, is one of them. As the education program manager at Pure Project in San Diego, California, Chris is in charge of teaching both his coworkers and consumers about the joys of craft beer, coffee, and mead—a role he takes very seriously, but always manages to do with his trademark ear-to-ear smile. 

Chris has been a fixture in San Diego’s craft beer scene since 2014, and as one of only two Advanced Cicerones in the county as well as a Certified BJCP judge (with his eye on a National ranking), he’s easily one of the most knowledgeable folks in the local industry. But where he stands out goes beyond his positive attitude and almost inescapable enthusiasm for the beverage. It’s his absolute willingness to share everything he knows with anyone who wants to hear it. 

In our conversation today, you’ll hear from Chris — his journey into beer, his identity as a first generation Colombian-American, why he does what he does, and the value of formal beer education, as well as where those programs need to evolve to engage with the next generation of aspiring beer experts from all backgrounds. The conversation wraps up with both of our takes on the global collaboration, Brave Noise: how we feel about it, what we hope comes from it, and the urgency of listening to the voices who so desperately need to be heard. 

Today’s podcast was inspired by a single tweet, or more accurately a reply to tweet, from Bissell Brothers cofounder Pete Bissell. It came in response to a post about a new Good Beer Hunting article entitled Making it to a Million — How Allagash Helped Grow Maine’s Grain Economy.

It was a story about the remarkable fortunes of a handful of grain farmers and maltsters in Maine, who have benefitted from Allagash’s drive to include more local grains in their beer. It’s a wonderful example of a brewery doing something not because it’s easy, but because it’s right – something the myth of craft was built on. But as the article made clear, Allagash were not the only Maine brewery pursuing the strategy. Bissell Brothers were also name checked, and Pete’s brother Noah actually quoted. Still, Pete wanted to make it clear that local grain wasn’t little aside for the brewery, or some kind of corporate responsibility box ticked. It was a passion of theirs, and their contribution to Maine grain’s rise is perhaps as big as Allagash’s.

That fact, coupled with Pete’s little moment of Twitter defiance, gets to the heart of Bissell Brothers. On the surface they seem like another haze-focused brewery – complete with a world-famous double IPA, a killer brand identity and lines around the block every other weekend. While that’s all a source of pride to Pete and Noah, it’s only the start of the Bissell story – something the brewery struggles get across.

In this podcast I sit down with Pete and Noah to talk about the brilliant fact that their flagship beer, Substance, is 97% Maine grain, but more so about everything that surrounds that choice – the positives such as the impact on sustainability and local business, but also the negatives such as higher costs and accepting the fact that many customers simply won’t know or care. We reflect on the beer industry as a whole in the light of COVID and widespread condemnation of its working culture, and consider how marketing has become so reductive that doing the wrong thing is getting easier, while explaining how you do the right thing is only getting harder.

Hops are in Roger’s blood. He grew up on a hop farm and, after a few years in IT, came back to that world to work for Farams. In our conversation you’ll get a real sense of the pride he takes the business, as well as his deep knowledge of hops as both an agricultural plant and a beer ingredient. But most of all you’ll hear his passion for British hops, which its fair do not inspire the same level of excitement that many new world varieties do. That though, might be about to change.

We start by talking about the challenges of this year’s harvest, which has been affected by adverse and unpredictable weather, only to be released to a market with much lower demand as many brewers are still working through their stock of 2020 and even 2019 hops after the disruption of COVID.

These crises could not have come at a worst time for the UK hop industry, which Rogers says is at its lowest ebb – and even a make or break moment. Some hop growers are considering turning their fields over to more reliable crops, and with just 59 growers left in the UK it would only take a few quitting to reach a critical mass that destroys the industry. Rogers, however, sees a lot of cause for optimism.

We talk about the renewed excitement around traditional british beer styles and their ingredients, as well as taking a deep dive into Faram’s hop breeding programme that has seen the release of seven new varieties design to offer up the high aroma, high alpha qualities of American hops – but all grown in British soil, British sun and rain, and without the use of irrigation.

Throughout our talk it becomes clear that British hops have a lot to offer the world of modern brewing if it can survive this moment to rebrand itself and create its own space.

Melissa Hidalgo might be the smartest beer person I know. She has a Ph.D in Literature from U.C. San Diego; is currently a professor of women’s, gender, and ethnic studies at California State University, Long Beach; and, if she wasn’t busy enough with her work in academia, she’s also a longtime beer writer who often goes by the pseudonym Dr. Beer Butch.

Melissa has been writing about beer for over 10 years, but it was a pint of Guinness that started her beer journey well before that. As a Los Angeles native, she was an early organizer of queer spaces in her local community, helping to form a beer education social club called Queers and Beers, as well as a blog called Butch’s Brew, all with the intent of taking up space in what was then, and could still very well be considered, an extremely white, cis, male beer scene.

As a freelance writer, Melissa mostly writes about beer for L.A. Taco, but her desire to tell stories about people, history, and culture transcend food and drink. In our conversation today, you’ll hear her tell her own experience and journey into beer, the prejudices she’s had to overcome in order to explore the industry she loves, what’s changed over the years (as well as what hasn’t), who inspires her, and the preciousness of human connections through a shared passion. 

If you’re a voracious fiction reader like I am, your biggest impression of Maine may come from Stephen King novels. But the United States’ northeasternmost state is far more than pet cemeteries and telekinetic prom queens. It’s also home to some of the country’s highest-quality grain growers and maltsters, many of whom are based in an area that’s long been used for another crop: potatoes.

In her piece titled “Making It to a Million — How Allagash Helped Grow Maine’s Grain Economy,” writer Catie Joyce-Bulay dives into this world of farm-to-pint malting and how Allagash Brewing Company’s pledge to use 1 million pounds of grains grown and malted in Maine by the end of this year has helped spur new infrastructure and symbiotic relationships throughout the local industry. As a resident Mainer, she explores the importance of that hyper-localism pervasive among her tight-knit brewing community, and how mutual respect and a shared commitment to quality binds those tilling the earth to those brewing our beer.

During this conversation, Catie discusses what it’s like to live, work, and drink in Maine, a place that fiercely protects its own, but embraces those who share their sense of rugged individuality. We talk about how the slow growth towards using solely Maine-grown grain is a welcome corrective to our current culture of instant gratification, what she wishes she could have expanded on in her piece, how using GPS in rural Maine may lead you to some unexpected places (and snacks), and what to pair a can of Allagash White with. (Hint: it’s everything.)

In today’s alcohol marketplace, it’s all about the pivot. You better be able to change on a dime when it comes to what you make, where your brands are sold, and how you think about growth. But well before the COVID-19 pandemic brought all these things into focus, Mighty Squirrel Brewing Company created its own reinvention, turning itself from a company making a sport-focused, protein-enriched beer in 2015 to one of the most successful Hazy IPA producers in the country by 2018.

The beer that's gotten them to this point is Cloud Candy New England-Style IPA, which this year has made as much in chain retail stores as the iconic Pliny the Elder from Russian River Brewing. The meteoric rise of Cloud Candy is the impetus to talk with co-founder Naveen Pawar and Adam Leibowitz, director of sales and marketing, and you’ll hear the story of bringing it to life and what it means to complete with a New England-style IPA in New England, where hop heads reign supreme. Along the way you’ll get to hear about what it means to be among the fastest-growing breweries in the country, and how to try and not be seen as a one-hit wonder.

Cloud Candy may have put Mighty Squirrel on the radar for many beer lovers—it certainly did for me—but what you’ll hear from Naveen and Adam give broader context to what it means to be a company making beer in 2021, and the importance of always evolving for yourself, your staff, and the people who sell and buy your beer. And if you haven’t yet heard of Mighty Squirrel, know it won’t be long until this rapidly-growing business catches the eye and taste buds of beer drinkers across the Northeast.

In summer 2021, Jamaal Lemon, Brian Alberts, Mike Stein, and Peter Jones worked together to publish Tek Cyear uh de Root, an article series that explored the way beer history and culture merged with systems of racial oppression in the 19th-century Charleston Schützenfest. In that series we mentioned an even earlier example of the same phenomenon, a brewery owned by Edmund Egan in the 1770s.

Egan’s brewery ran on the labor of six brewers, two coopers, and seven other Black workers, all enslaved, but most historical representations of Egan minimized this fact so much that bringing it up again started some conversations. One of the biggest breweries in both Charleston and South Carolina is Edmund’s Oast Brewing Company which, you guessed it, is named after Edmund Egan.

Back in the summer of 2018, Good Beer Hunting readers were introduced to a name that stuck with me for years: David Jernigan. He’s one of the country’s leading researchers in the area of alcohol use and policy and at the time, was acting as an expert for a government task force in Maryland looking at potential alcohol reforms. In reporting for Sightlines, his name was mentioned by sources who also said words like “prohibition” or “temperance.”

That connection will make better sense to you after this conversation with Sightlines reporter Kate Bernot, who explains how a modern academic is seen by some to have a connection to a generations-old movement to limit Americans’ choice in how and when they consume alcohol. From Jernigan’s point of view, however, he’s simply using his research and platform to lead studies that might encourage greater responsibility toward ourselves and others.

In Kate’s profile of Jernigan and his work, which you can read on Good Beer Hunting, she shares how Jernigan has worked for decades to impact government decision making while potentially stretching research beyond clear conclusions to earn attention from media and politicians.

Who is David Jernigan and why should you care? Let’s find out.

Buzzwords like “craft,” “ethical,” and “sustainable” seem to be everywhere in hospitality. But do those terms actually mean anything, and if so, how do they relate to the most important resource of all: people? Burum Collective founder and writer Helen Anne Smith explores this strange and sometimes intentionally dissonant question in their first piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Last Call — The Human Sustainability Crisis at the Heart of the Hospitality Industry,” which was published on September 29, 2021. In it, they explain how resource sustainability, while crucial, often disregards the human element, and what consumers and employees alike need to do about it. In this podcast conversation, Helen reveals how they’re channeling emotions like cynicism and anger to push for a better industry for everyone, how to harness a sense of powerlessness and turn it into action, the importance of intersectionality when making necessary demands, and how we all need to collectively work together to ensure the safety and survival of the most vulnerable among us. This isn’t a conversation for you to listen to, lament, and set aside. I encourage you to sit with the discussion and think about what you can do to make the hospitality industry a better, most just, more liveable, and more equitable place.

In this episode we’re going to chat about the present and look back in time. You’re going to get to meet Cortni McKenzie, an aspiring beverage alcohol professional who got a taste of what it’ll take to excel in the industry this past summer and continues to put in the work to establish herself this fall and beyond.

Earlier this year, Cortni was part of the Many Faces Initiative, a North Carolina-based internship program that provided mentorship and immersive training for people of color interested in pursuing careers in beer and other alcohol categories. The program was started by Town Brewing and included four other businesses, each with their own intern. After a ten-week period at Charlotte's GoodRoad CiderWorks, Cortni continues to work there and has also launched her own business called Cortly Crafted, meant to help people and businesses find unique drinks and drink experiences. In this conversation you’ll hear Cortni share stories about her experience entering the beverage alcohol workforce and a capstone project where she created pop-up shops that offered new ways to create more inclusive events for people of all backgrounds and interests.

One of the special things about hosting the Good Beer Hunting podcast is an ability to meet new people and hear about how their experiences shape what’s happening in real time in alcohol industries. Cortni is part of that change, and when you meet her, you get an important perspective that reminds us of the excitement that comes with creating something new.

Earlier this year, I had the honor of moderating “The Art of Storytelling: Highlighting Important Stories” at Crafted for Action, a four-day, hybrid conference for craft beer lovers. One of the members of the panel was Aaron Hosé, an Aruban-born filmmaker who has been working in the biz for over 20 years. Though the panel was virtual, I had a chance to meet some of the speakers in person at the opening event here in Atlanta. That’s where I met Aaron Hosé. He was actually the first person I ran into at Atlantucky Brewing, where the opening was happening.

We quickly fell into a conversation about the film that he was premiering at the conference. It was easy to see how passionate he was about the story he was telling about Black people in the beer industry and the difficulties they experienced opening their own breweries. It took me mere minutes to ask him to join me on this podcast, even before I viewed the film. Once I saw the film, I was captivated by the stories and mildly amused at seeing some of my friends and acquaintances in the film. The Black beer community seems small when you know almost everyone on the screen.

In our conversation, we talk about the film and the inspiration behind creating it. We discuss the importance of going with the flow, and how people of color should tell their own stories--the topic of our panel at Crafted for Action. Aaron also shares how he gained the trust of his interviewees and what he wishes he could change about the film.

Over the past several months, Good Beer Hunting reporter Kate Bernot has been at the forefront of covering allegations of sexual harassment, bullying, and unsafe working conditions at Mikkeller, a Denmark-based brewery with bars and brewpubs all over the world, including a prominent location in San Diego. Kate’s coverage has included stories on protests at the brewery’s Copenhagen headquarters and stories from former employees who alleged instances of inappropriate workplace behavior and silence from leadership. Most recently, Kate has written about how these previous storylines came together ahead of the company’s Mikkeller Beer Celebration Copenhagen, one of the most prestigious beer festivals in the world, from which dozens of breweries withdrew in opposition, and eventually garnered an apology from Mikkeller.

In this conversation, Kate will recap all this and more, and give you insight into what it’s been like to report on an evolving story. This is an opportunity to better understand what it takes to write about all of what’s happened to, with, and toward Mikkeller since this summer, and get a better understanding of the context behind it all.

There are a lot of parallels between good music and good beer, from the similarly creative processes of conceptualizing new beers and writing new songs to the way independent makers are fighting for their place at the table in two industries that are dominated by massive corporations. Beer media and music publications have a lot in common, too. 

Although I mostly write about food and drink nowadays, I got my start by writing music reviews for the San Francisco Bay Guardian while playing guitar in an indie band in the city. Several beer writers, actually, started out as music writers. And more than a few brewers, publicans, and brewery owners had early careers in the music industry.

In this episode, I talk to Blake Enemark, head brewer at Tailgunner Brewing Company in Calgary, Alberta. Before he became a brewer, Blake played guitar in a band called We Are the City, touring in a van from show to show and recording a bunch of cool songs. Since he left the band, he’s become an award-winning brewer who spent a couple of years working with Mike Lackey at Great Lakes Brewery in Ontario, followed by gigs at breweries like Last Best and OT Brewing in Calgary. We met at the Central European Brewers Conference in Budapest, Hungary, where Blake was giving a presentation on modern IPA techniques. (Interestingly, he says that one of his most popular beers at Tailgunner is a Czech-style pale lager, a style that is close to my own heart.) We talk about music and brewing, what the two fields have in common and what sets them apart, as well as Blake’s influences, from brewers he never brewed with (but was inspired by) to mentors like Luc “Bim” Lafontaine of Godspeed Brewery in Toronto.

By chance, we’re speaking at the Hungarian Rock Museum, which is filled with vintage guitars, musical equipment, and photographs of people rocking out.

There are more than half a million bartenders working in the United States, although it’s a pretty safe bet that those numbers have changed in COVID’s wake. Still, that’s a heck of a lot of people mixing cocktails, pouring beers, and popping bottles for guests, all while also acting as therapists, entertainers, and occasionally bouncers for the mere privilege of serving us. But where do we form our collective expectations about the role of bartenders? In her latest piece for Good Beer Hunting, freelance writer Gloria Rakowsky describes her early introduction to the sometimes-illustrious position from places like The Love Boat and Cheers. Her piece, titled “Do It With Flair — The Changing Role of the Bartender in Pop Culture,” unpacks how society views the people between us and the drinks we love through a cultural analysis of movies, television, and other influences that have redefined the role over the years. As a writer who also serves beer at a local brewery in her hometown of Syracuse, New York, Rakowsky’s perspective as both observer and participant gives her a unique insight into what it means to serve. During this podcast conversation, she discusses a range of topics from how to differentiate empowerment from exploitation, the disconnect between who we’re shown as icons of hospitality versus who’s actually behind the bar, and how society has influenced our perception of bartending as either a glamorous end goal or temporary stepping stone.

Producing and hosting a weekly local radio show likely isn’t how most beer writers get their start—but that’s exactly where Emma Inch’s career in beer began. With a passion for rockabilly music, which she saw as an outlet from the stress of her day job as a mental health crisis worker, Emma went from hosting club nights to approaching her local radio station with a show idea. Then a few years later—as she began noticing a change in her local beer scene in Brighton, England—she pitched an idea for a new show, and in late 2015 Fermentation Beer and Brewing Radio began. Initially a live monthly radio show with a local focus on the beer scene in and around Brighton, Emma later decided to continue producing the show as a podcast instead. As she puts it, with most podcasts sought out rather than stumbled upon, as radio programs often are, this enabled her to not only broaden her geographical scope (from Brighton to the rest of Britain and beyond), but to narrow her focus and take a deeper dive with the stories she was telling. And in 2018, Emma’s storytelling skills won her the U.K.’s highest accolade for a beer writer: the Michael Jackson Gold Tankard for Beer Writer of the Year. When I ask her to take us back to that moment, her memories are a bit fuzzy. Not from alcohol, but from the rather tough bout of sinusitis she was battling at the time. But when I ask her to reflect on how the win has impacted her career since, she rapturously reels off a list of the incredible opportunities it brought her way. We also discuss the impact of her win on the industry more broadly, and what it means to be a queer woman taking home the top award in a space still dominated by straight white men. And with Emma’s recent election as Chair of the British Guild of Beer Writers, the organization behind the awards that recognized her work, she tells us how she’s keen to bring further focus to issues of diversity, representation, and equity within the beer writing community. From looking forward to her newest role, we then take a look back at her longest-standing one. Alongside her current career as a drinks writer, audio maker, and podcast consultant, Emma is a part-time university lecturer in social work. We explore how that role—then and now—has influenced her perspective on the beer world, her approach to her work, and the stories she chooses to tell.

Conversations around beer often focus on what to drink: I had this great beer the other day. Here's something you might like, or a brewery worth supporting. Fewer conversations focus on what not to drink.

But that’s exactly what happened on a spring day in 1974, between a Teamsters union leader named Allen Baird and a gay leftist activist named Howard Wallace. Wallace ran into Baird outside a supermarket in the Castro, San Francisco's queer neighborhood, and they started talking about Coors beer, which at the time was one of the most sought-after brands in the Western United States. But they weren’t talking about drinking it—on the contrary, Baird was there to protest it.

The two were taking part in one of American history's longest conversations about what not to buy. More than that, the unlikely alliance they formed would rejuvenate an iconic consumer movement that joined organized labor with civil rights groups of all stripes.

These were the Coors boycotts of the late 20th century, and they were a big deal. Confined neither to Coors' hometown of Golden, Colorado nor San Francisco, the boycotts were a nationwide phenomenon that swept from the brewery’s gates through California, Montana, Utah, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, and many more places in between. Officially, the boycotts lasted over 30 years, from 1957 through 1987.

And for some, they never ended. Reverberations and reminders of the boycott's legacy endure even to the present day. That’s because the boycott merged the motivations of underrepresented community groups, labor unions, and leftist organizations, transcending single issues to become a shared cause. For everyone involved, it was about much more than just beer.

Note: During this episode, we inaccurately refer to LGBTQIA+ rights activist Harvey Milk as the first openly gay person elected to Congress. Instead, Milk was the first openly gay elected official in California's history, when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in early 1978. He was assassinated later that year while serving in that role. We apologize for the error.

Every now and then, I get to host an episode where the conversation has very little to do with beer or other kinds of beverage alcohol. This is another one of those opportunities as we hear from Hoby Wedler, an organic chemist with a Ph.D. from UC-Davis, an entrepreneur, teacher, and genuinely positive guy. If I had my way, I’d likely put that last description first for sake of what Hoby radiates out into the world.

He was recently named to Wine Enthusiast’s “40 Under 40 Tastemakers” for his work in wine research and education, which is where you may have come across his name, but Hoby has been recognized many times for the contributions he’s made to science and beverage. He’s been blind since birth and as a sensory expert, regularly takes others on journeys through their own imagination to more fully appreciate what each of their senses can provide and help them discover. You’ll hear in our conversation why this matters and the richness it brings Hoby and those he meets.

This is not an episode about beverage alcohol, although we do talk a bit about wine. It’s more an exploration of happiness and not just existing in the world around us, but finding excuses to be consumed by it in the best ways. So whether or not you’ve heard of Hoby or heard him talk, I invite you to join us, consider what makes these next moments great for you, and experience today’s sounds and tastes a little bit differently, with a little more adventure, and a lot more positivity.

This is Hoby Wedler, chemist, sensory expert, and entrepreneur.

Every inch of the land now known as the United States of America actually belongs to someone else. Some call them Native Americans. Others prefer American Indians, First Nations, Indigenous Americans, or use other monikers to describe the multitude of tribal identities that have been used, abused, and exploited throughout the generations by (mostly) white imperialist settlers.

But these invaders didn’t simply erase history—they repackaged it with a new narrative, one that leverages ancient connections between the earth and its peoples for advertising purposes. History teacher and beer historian Doug Hoverson unpacks this widespread practice and beer’s role in it for his latest piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Chiefs, Maidens, and Image-Making — A History of American Indians in Beer Advertising,” which was published on September 22, 2021.

Here, Hoverson and I discuss how his historical expertise and Midwestern roots led him to explore this phenomenon, as well as how other industries—such as professional sports—have finally begun to address the problematic nature of Native caricatures in advertising and beyond. He describes how Prohibition spawned a new wave of strangely puritanical marketing and how his research ultimately led him to tackle this project. You’ll hear what lies we’ve been told not just through advertising, but through history itself, and how the inescapable snare of white supremacy continues to emphasize tradition over collective improvement.

It’s a complex conversation around a complex topic. But history buffs, beer drinkers, advertisers, and all Americans can learn something about ourselves, our communities, and our current social situation by looking at the past with fresh eyes. Let’s look back together.

If you’ve gone job hunting in the past 15 years, you may have sought out new professional challenges, a different geography, or more money, but there’s an ever-important part of the process for many that seeks out a harmonious crossover of personal and professional. I know I’ve looked for some semblance of that, where I don’t want my job to define who I am as a person, but I do want who I am as a person to influence how I go about my job, and ultimately, how much I may enjoy it. On a hunt to feel fulfilled, it’s perhaps inevitable, and in a healthy way, it’s needed, too.

In this conversation, we’re lucky to hear from Amber Rosado, who has tracked a career path from restaurant server into the beer industry, and now as brewer at North Carolina’s Mason Jar Lager Company. At every step, she’s sought a deeper connection to what she does through who she is—using her personality, family history, and culture—and also found ways to bring along loved ones for the ride.

If you’re a beer enthusiast and have friends or family in your life who don’t feel the same passion but like to turn to you for ideas, inspiration, or guidance for what to drink, you’ll enjoy Amber’s stories of using new found skills and experiences to help those closest to her. Or maybe you’ve reflected recently on your own career path and how you strive to find ways to create excitement and meaning, in which case you can probably relate to how Amber has seemed to find her place in beer instead of other areas of hospitality or beverage alcohol.

Most of all, one of the things I appreciated hearing from Amber is the perspective of someone who has come of age as a drinker and a professional at a time when the stodgy rules of categories and what to drink when are blurring and being reshaped. Amber’s family may have guided her in what she enjoyed before, but it’s her hands-on work, a love for beer, and a pursuit of new ways to create flavor that drive her today. This conversation is going to be meaningful to you like it was for me because of how all of these things come together—Amber’s past and present creating a new and exciting future as a part of the beer industry.

Throughout my freelance beer-writing career, one person’s name has continued to pop up as someone to pay attention to. That person is Laura Garcia, a brewer who has worked across the state of Baja California, but primarily in Baja’s capital city of Mexicali, which also happens to be her hometown. But this isn’t a story about how I know Laura. It’s a story about why you should. Hailed by many as the best brewer in Baja, Laura worked her way from beer lover to beer judge to brewer and beyond. The pandemic interrupted her career trajectory, but she hasn’t let that dampen her enthusiasm for the craft. In fact, she’s using this time and space to reflect on what she wants for herself, for her beer community, and the Mexican craft beer scene at large. During the course of our conversation, Laura reveals how Mexicali’s scorching heat and surprisingly early brewing history helped launch the area’s now-thriving craft beer industry. She talks about how the region’s sometimes limited access to resources, coupled with her community’s willingness to share everything, has led to a tight-knit bond not seen in many other places in beer. We, of course, discuss how the United States—and San Diego specifically—have influenced the Baja beer scene, but also how its ability to accept that influence without compromising authenticity has led to amazing results. Laura also pushes back against misconceptions about Mexico in general, and invites listeners to experience the best of Mexicali without fear, with plenty of recommendations for the city’s ridiculously underrated food and drink scene.

As the curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Theresa McCulla has access to some of the United States’ most treasured brewing artifacts. It was the uncovering of one such artifact that led her to explore the life of Patsy Young, an enslaved woman, brewer, wife, and mother who fought for her freedom (twice) and who left an indelible legacy on the narrative of American brewing.

In her first piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Patsy Young — American Brewer, Fugitive From Slavery,” which was published on September 15, 2021, McCulla unpacks the realization that there is no single part of American history that the stain of slavery has not touched. We discuss her role as a historian and her responsibility for sharing the stories many have worked hard to erase, as well as how writing for a different sort of audience was a welcome challenge, if not also an academic duty. It’s only through analyzing history that we have any chance at informing the present, regardless of how difficult or traumatic the past may be, and she doesn’t flinch when faced with that inescapable truth.

Is there a happy ending for Patsy Young? It’s hard to say. But McCulla likes to think so. Let’s find out why.

I’ve found myself adding some qualifiers to interview requests lately, ensuring people that while I create stories, analysis, and podcasts for Good Beer Hunting, the interests of myself and the publication extend far beyond what the name may suggest. If you click around goodbeerhunting.com or scroll through our podcast archive, you get the idea—we focus on so much more than just beer.

That’s the way of the beverage alcohol industry these days, and why we’re talking to Vikram and Vivek Nayar in this episode. The pair are behind Two Robbers, a regionally-focused hard seltzer company that represents an ever-increasing portion of the category. There’s a good chance you know about White Claw, Truly, or Bud Light hard seltzers, but there are dozens of others who have found success by setting themselves apart from the most mass-produced examples on the market.

What you’ll hear in this conversation is a reflection on current narratives of hard seltzer and what it means to build a company in a category that has completely changed beverage alcohol. Whether or not you’re a hard seltzer fan, the context and insight from Vik and Viv will help you better understand what it’s like for businesses in this rather new segment. And whatever headlines you may see, know that hard seltzer is wildly outpacing growth of beer, wine, and spirits in retail, which is why discussions like this can be so helpful to understand realities from within the industry.

What is an IPA? Most drinkers around the world would probably identify IPA as the flagship style of the modern craft beer movement. As its popularity has grown, it has become known for a bunch of different—and often contradictory—characteristics. A modern IPA is either bitter or not bitter; pale, white, or black; very strong, sessionable, or nonalcoholic. But while IPA in all its forms is loved around the world, relatively few drinkers would be likely to name the drink’s intimate connection with the history of colonial exploitation. In this episode, I talk to David Jesudason, the author of a recent article, “Empire State of Mind — Interrogating IPA’s Colonial Identity,” that ran in our Critical Drinking series. In this conversation, we discuss David’s article and his take on the history of IPA, or India Pale Ale, to use its full name. We talk about mercantilism, extractive capitalism, and the East India Company, a massive corporation which maintained its own private army to protect its lucrative businesses during the British occupation of India. We talk about beer advertising and beer labels, and we discuss the prevalence of colonial-themed décor in modern British culture, including plantation shutters, and what seems like a widespread nostalgia for colonies and empire there.

The intersection between digital media and the more slow, meandering works of book authorship is one that, on its surface, might not seem to be well populated. But these days, to be a writer at all means being a lot of different things. You might work across channels, platforms, industries, styles, digital and print, freelance and newsroom, and all that mode switching is a lot. It’s just, a lot.

The folks I’ve seen handle it really well tend to think and work in big phases - blogging or freelancing for a year and then diving into book writing for another year - reemerging some time later to ramp up their speedy output again. It’s an ebb and flow kind of thing, even if the changes aren’t so clearly defined as they might like.

And underneath all this is the need to have a personal life that feels more continuous and permanent in some way. Some sort of arc of the author’s own story and interests that might never make it to the page or the browser, but certainly serve as a sort of invisible-to-the-reader backdrop for the things they write about most often. These things can be world-shaping, and perspective-creating and often, lost in the rigamarole of just trying to keep up with the work.

Today’s guest, Emma Janzen, has been through all that - and this past year she’s found herself taking a big step back and weighing it all - sifting through the things that bring her joy and those things that maybe just ping her inbox, insufferably, with little value or meaning.

She’s written full-length books and worked as a digital editor, often at the same time, and most recently found a collaborative process she really enjoys. All while navigating a pandemic and it’s many disruptions - some welcome, some not - to the path she was on.

I’m sitting down with her on a farm in Michigan near where she’s been living, writing, and gardening. You’ll hear the airiness and insect-laden sounds of the farm itself as we share a couple pints from River St John brewery on-site - which if you haven’t been is a remarkable place full of saisons and freshly harvest vegetables, and on this particular day, a dead-of-summer sun that just wouldn’t quit. If sweat made a sound - you’d hear it.

Where does inspiration end and innovation begin? When it comes to contemporary takes on established traditions, that line can seem a bit blurry at times. But in David Neimanis’ piece “The Architecture of Brooklyn Amaro — What it Means to Make Amari in the New World,” which was published on August 19, 2021, he expertly explores that line, its lineage, and what the future holds for American-made amari. In our conversation, Neimanis describes what led him to write about amaro, and Brooklyn-made amaro specifically. He’s looked to the past before for Good Beer Hunting, but his passion for his home borough is evident throughout this piece, thanks in part to his ability to meet with subjects in real life once more, after a year where so many in-person events and tastings have been stifled. We talk about who inspires him as a writer, what attracts him to the bitter spirit, how balance coupled with bitterness can create unexpected flavor sensations, and what qualities he looks for in his glass. By exploring the tension between tradition and innovation, local versus global, and the various philosophies swirling together in this modern-day spirits renaissance, Neimanis doesn’t just talk about what it means to make amaro in Brooklyn—he shows us.

There’s a lot of change taking place in beer and broader beverage alcohol, but you might not notice it. It’s not the form of sales shifting for hard seltzer or Mountain Dew announcing an uncaffeinated, alcoholic version of the soda, but in the quiet space of distribution.

Alcohol sales are broken out into three traditional tiers—the producer (tier one) who makes it, distributors (tier two) who move it, and retailers (tier three), who sell it. These are broad brushstrokes, but are a key part of the painting Kate Bernot is going to create for you in this episode. Kate, Good Beer Hunting’s Sightlines reporter, has recently had a series of stories focused on what’s happening around shipping beer and other products, and we’re going to spend a good chunk of time talking about a very grey area that’s allowed some shipping companies to do business in a space of uncertain legality.

Here’s why this podcast matters to you, whether you’re a drinker, business owner, or legal pro: there is a jockeying for power you may not see, with ramifications that you may not know until later, about a future that is increasingly blurry as drinks and drinks businesses explore new ways to make a buck. What you hear from Kate will matter to you, whether you’re thinking about it now or seeing it later.

And with that in mind, I should also note that Kate and I are doing this kind of deep dive regularly for Good Beer Hunting’s Sightlines+ newsletter, which is an extension of our newsy Sightlines coverage and has a goal of combining objective data and reporting to help industry pros make informed decisions about managing a portfolio, access to market, and more. You can learn more at goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines-premium.

Finding good, honest people making good, honest beer isn’t as easy as craft beer has led us to believe. But every once in a while, a truly singular brewery—shielded by geography and rooted firmly to the land—reveals itself, putting forth artistry in liquid form while also providing a safe, beautiful, and intentional space for everyone who stumbles across its path.

Fox Farm Brewery is one such place. In his latest piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Degrees of Intent — Fox Farm Brewery in Salem, Connecticut,” Matt Osgood explores the unique utopian vision that founders Zack and Laura Adams have for their small New England operation, along with the cosmic coincidences that helped pave their way. By harnessing genuine curiosity and a sense of discovery, the family-run brewery remains a rare example of craft beer actually living up to expectations of humanity, where the beer is revered but the people are paramount. 

As Matt explains in this podcast conversation, everyone’s stories matter to somebody, and we all share memories of family, community, and communion through food and drink. He describes what drew him to Salem in the first place, and what will likely keep him coming back. We explore the overlaps between beer and wine, however esoteric, and how spontaneity tinged with intent can yield delectable results. And we also talk about what else he’s working on, why he loves profiling people, and where he’s going next. 

Every once in awhile I like to have someone on the podcast who I’ve been talking to or working with for awhile.

It’s not always easy to know when the right time is — I have to keep my eagerness in check. Often for a long time. Whether it’s the state of their business, or a major transition, or as market factors shift around it — I try to look for a sweet spot where the guest has learned enough about who they are and what business they’re in, but also started to develop their own vision for what the future might hold. It’s a moment where I see them sort of settle in to a groove. And the challenge is to get them to reflect on what that settling in moment is all about.

Today’s guest, Manny Valdes of Cruz Blanca in Chicago is someone I’ve consulted with over the past couple years off and on and he’s sought some perspective on all that. He’s a master at soaking up different perspectives and gradually, patiently, synthesizing his own.

Indeed, much of the work we’ve done has often felt like a slow-drip conversation between friends over a late dinner. And I’ve walked away with more intriguing questions than I had answers.

Manny falls outside the lines of how I’d describe most brewery and brewpub owners. While he’s a good operator and focused on the details, he clearly spends most of his time observing, imagining, and listening to the stories people tell about his brand. He factors it all in.

And while he’s spent a lot of time the past couple years trying to articulate who Cruz Blanca is - lately he’s seemed less…concerned. Or less…exacting about that. He’s been more playful and reclined in a way. And that, for me, was an indication that something was shifting and maybe positively so. And I wanted to talk to him about it.

Cruz Blanca has a particular history in Chicago - which we’ll get into. It was founded alongside Rick Bayless, a renowned Chicago chef who is largely credited with making Mexican food in the Midwest an accessible cuisine (that’s a very complicated thing to say, and those are my words, not Rick’s or Manny’s). And over the years, Rick brought that culinary mindset to craft beer as well, back when he created Marisol with Goose Island, a sort of citrusy, spiced wheat ale that’s a bit of a legend in Chicago.

Then he partnered with Constellation Brands to produce Tocayo - a beer that was supposed to fit into that Blue Moon area of the market - and was intertwined in some complicated ways with the Cruz Blanca brewpub in the beginning - but mostly just because of the timing. Tocayo and Cruz Blanca shared a sort of launch story - even if they were separate ventures.

So it’s important to clarify - I’m not sitting down with Rick Bayless, the chef and restauranteur today. I’m sitting down with Manny Valdez, Rick’s longtime partner in Frontera Foods, and the person who imagined and launched and is now independently building Cruz Blanca. A brewery with a story all its own - and mostly still ahead of it.

The last few months in the British beer industry have been tumultuous. Inspired by the brave work of Brienne Allan, Britshbeergirl – real name Siobhan Buchanan – used her instagram platform for British beer people to tell stories of sexism, sexual harassment and exploitation in the industry. Scandals rocked several much loved small breweries as well as some of the UK’s biggest – including BrewDog.

My guest today, Charlotte Cook, started her career there, and while she left nearly seven years ago she is still affected by the experience – feeling strong enough about the situation at the Scottish brewery to be a signatory for Punks With Purpose, a campaign group focused on holding BrewDog’s owners and directors to account and ensuring positive change.

Long before that though, Charlotte – now of Coalition Brewing – has been vocal about the exploitation of workers in the beer industry, and a keen advocate of unionisation. Her outspoken nature has resulted in her being interviewed on BBC Radio, and has also inevitably got her embroiled in several online spats. As is so common with grassroots movements, she never intended to become a voice for the industry but has found herself in the role because she refused to stay quiet. We talk about how that responsibility lies with her, how she deals with the abuse she receives, and what solutions there are to the problems that plague the brewing scene.

We also talk about the profoundly different breweries she’s worked at during her 10 year career that also includes stints at Pohjala, Cloudwater, Hammerton and Trumans, as well as her new role as head brewer at London’s Coalition, the first time she’s joined a brewery at the very beginning of its journey.

As much as craft beer places value on authenticity and artistry, it’s not always an industry that likes looking backwards. Instead, the search for innovation—innovation in beer styles, in brewing techniques, and in the raw materials of beer—is what propels it forward. That means many older ways of doing things have been left by the wayside. On the malt side, with technological and agricultural advancements continuously improving crop yield and efficiency, are old-school brewing methods like decoction mashing even necessary anymore?

Anthony Gladman thinks so. And he’s not alone. In his piece for Good Beer Hunting titled “Pillars of Tradition — How a New Generation of Brewers Returned to Decoction Mashing,” which was published on July 20, 2021 as part of our Age of Rediscovery series made in partnership with Menabrea, Gladman dives into the deeply historical Lager brewing tradition, and what it means to the current roster of brewers around the world. He admits there aren’t a ton of people devoted to decoction mashing today. But those who are often find themselves with beer that transcends the day-to-day and approaches true greatness. 

In this podcast conversation, Gladman and I discuss the elusive definition of “drinkability” and what it means to him. We talk about the difference between “craft beer” and “crafted beer”—and there is a difference. We also unpack the perception of preciousness in brewing, and how it’s not the same as honoring time-tested traditions honed over generations. He reveals what led him to explore this largely under-discussed (but very appreciated) brewing technique, and the regret that he felt when COVID prevented him from sampling the work of modern-day decoction masters on their own turf. It’s a little bit of wanderlust, a dash of technical brewing talk, and a lot of fun.

Today’s guest is a rare revisit action with a previous guest - Phil McFarland from episode 25 - when he was on the even of shutting down what had been one of Chicago’s premier craft beer bars. The advertising career that gave way to his life as a craft beer bar operator was about to give way to something new - as he took on the sales director role at one of Chicago’s premier craft breweries, Half Acre, just as it was making a step change in its growth and ambition.

That was then. Now, we’re meeting Phil after another big transition as he traded that role for one in Cannabis. And in this new role of Director of Innovation Acceleration, a lifetime of skill and experience is coming to bear on an industry with an unprecedented opportunity in the US - rapidly legalizing, evolving, and expanding, cannabis is a rare new frontier for beverage and packaged goods.

How does Phil’s background in advertising, retailing, and sales direction parlay into the future of Cannabis?

Well, we’ll try to connect the dots for you.

What’s in beer today? Unless you’re a brewer, do you know? I mean, do you really know?

Usually, Western beer is made up of water, hops, a malted grain like barley, and yeast. That’s the standard answer you’ll get from books, articles, even podcasts. There’s even a famous law in German history, called the Reinheitsgebot, which decreed that proper beer could only contain those four ingredients. But few brewers outside Germany stick to that rule 100% of the time.

When we want to get a little technical, we’ll talk about extra ingredients that are added for flavor or some other reason—everything from rice and corn; to herbs and spices; to chocolate, coffee, and the occasional jelly doughnut…hmm, maybe some rules are there for a reason.

But if something else was in there…some other ingredient whose purpose you didn’t immediately recognize, maybe with a name that’s hard to pronounce…could you tell?

Would you care?

Do you have a right to know?

Today’s episode is all about Americans whose food was changing so fast they struggled to keep up. Then beer changed too, so people wanted answers. And they got them. From brewers both reassuring and duplicitous. From temperance reformers and consumer activists with axes to grind, from newspapers acting as little more than gossip brokers, and from state and federal governments mulling over a Reinheitsgebot of their very own.

The name of the game was adulteration, and it went on for more than half a century.

This is “Name Your Poison,” the third and final episode of our debut series, “Lager Beer, Governing Bodies,” which looks at strange ways public health debates waded into a sea of American lager during the 1800s.

If you haven’t already, check out Parts 1 and 2 of this series, where we explore 1850s arguments about whether lager beer could intoxicate a person, and simultaneous paranoia about whether deadly diseases like cholera could be caused by beer.

As we’re about to see, debates over adulteration were fueled by the same mix of legitimate fear and paranoia, fact and propaganda, and political jockeying that bore out those other issues. But adulteration dialed everything up to eleven.

What is art? Throughout the course of human existence, critics, academics, and common people have all attempted to unpack the meaning and value of art as part of society, as well as its role as a reflection of the current discourse. Art can be political. It can be reflective. It can be a weapon. And it can be history in itself.

In her latest piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Gin Lane vs. Beer Street — How One Artist Captured a Pivotal Century in Our Drinking History,” published on July 1, 2021, writer Courtney Iseman takes a look at how art has shaped the way we perceive and interact with alcohol from as early as the 17th century up to the present day, specifically focusing on 18th-century Europe. 

For our podcast conversation, we talk about how beer was positively perceived by the middle and upper classes of the time. Working-class people, meanwhile, faced hand-wringing and public outcry for imbibing what was once considered a cheap and debaucherous beverage: gin. Iseman shares where she found the inspiration to dive into this piece after seeing an exhibit of Dutch masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Calling the writing process a “fever dream,” she wonders aloud about the 18th-century artist William Hogarth’s motives for creating the groundbreaking and not-so-subtle pair of prints that gave the piece its title. 

We explore how alcohol plays into class lines and how consumption habits have evolved over the centuries. We also look at how both alcohol and art can divide as much as they can unite. She describes how the story unraveled—and how there’s still more to tell.

What happens when politics and public health intermix? We’ve spent the last year learning all too well that, unfortunately, just about anything can happen. And that’s always been the case.

In the mid-1800s, when lager beer was still pretty new to the United States, Americans had to figure it out where it fit into a society that wasn’t much newer. The country was growing, it was urbanizing, it was incorporating new ethnicities and communities, and it was redefining morality almost by the day. All of these things came with public health challenges that were just as new. It didn’t take long for beer to get tangled up in the maelstrom.

We’re kicking off the Source Material podcast with a 3-part series looking at some of the ways lager beer paired with questions of public health in 1800s America. In Part 1, we talked about a wave of legal battles that washed over the US during the 1850s as old ideas about drunkenness mixed with new American communities, new politics, and new drinking habits. Now, we’ll look at how those same factors led many Americans to associate lager beer with disease. During the cholera outbreaks of 1849 and 1866 in the United States, lager could be either the cause of, or solution to, a deadly epidemic.

This is Lager Beer, Governing Bodies Part 2: ‘The Devil’s Chloroform.”

Holly Regan believes that we are all surrounded by opportunities to have transcendent experiences. As humans, we’re often prone to looking inward, thanks both to our egos as well as our desire to seek solace from the chaos and noise of the world. But when we’re able to tap into the beyond, through whatever means available, we have the potential to commune with each other, ourselves, and all creation beyond our sometimes-limited scope of perception.

If this sounds a little woo-woo, that’s okay. Holly admits they’re a bit of a hippie, but that doesn’t make them wrong—far from it. In their piece “Psychedelic Pints — Finding Oneness Through Beer and Other Drugs,” which was published on June 23, 2021 on Good Beer Hunting, they manage to tie together the universality of seeking cosmic consciousness with how individual identity can influence the journey, as well as how the human experience can be shaped by mind-altering substances—from beer to hallucinogens—in both intentional and unintentional ways.

In this conversation with Holly, they describe why—and how—they were called to write this piece, which they describe as the most challenging one they’ve ever attempted. In fact, in writing it, Holly found their own future transformed in ways they could have never imagined. The mere ritual of writing in and of itself opened them up to a new path: perhaps bringing the entire concept of oneness full circle. We discuss where (and how) they find God in every living thing; how ceremony and ritual can change people’s lives under the right circumstances; how trust, vulnerability, and an open mind can yield incredible results; and even what they consider the meaning of it all. It gets heavy at times. But by talking about what makes life worth living, Holly reveals their own personal truths and invites others to partake in the possibilities.

While I cover the beer and beverage alcohol industries, I started from a simple place as an enthusiast. I was excited to drink different beers, then it was fun to homebrew, and eventually write about all those experiences. But for many people - perhaps most - beer is just beer. I can't tell you how many times I've had discussions with friends and family who ask about "beer flavored beer," and they're in the majority.

So, what does it mean if we get the chance to share that passion and educate others? What kind of difference does that make for them, us, and the beer industry as a whole? In this conversation, Shawna Cormier and Jess Keller Poole give us some ideas and answers. The pair are the founders of Seattle Beer School, an events and education company, as well as long-time hospitality professionals, certified experts, and more. Perhaps above all else, they're passionate about beer and what it means to people. That enthusiasm is likely to rub off as you hear them describe why it's important to share that love, how you can talk to people to get them excited about beer, and how all this may be more important than ever as the industry works to become a more welcoming and inclusive space for all.

Whether we realize it or not, beer connects to many aspects of our lives outside a bar or taproom, and Shawna and Jess offer all of us an important way to explore what that means through history, appreciation, and enthusiasm.

The overlaps between beer and whiskey are plentiful. Both rely on craftsmanship and quality ingredients, and share certain production methods in common. Modern makers in either category have the luxury of looking at tradition while pushing the boundaries of innovation for the future. But it’s the differences between the two that keep things interesting. Single malt whiskey producer Stranahan’s in Denver, Colorado is one such modern maker, one that’s helping to define the budding American single malt whiskey category against Scotch and other international players. A visit in 2018 led writer Gabby Pharms to dive into their process, history, and position as Colorado’s first new legal whiskey distillery since Prohibition for her latest piece in Good Beer Hunting titled “Whiskey and the Mile High City — The Distillery Making Single Malt in the Rocky Mountains,” which was published on June 16, 2021. In our conversation about her piece—which was written for our Beer and a Shot series, made in partnership with Miller High Life—Gabby reveals what led her to spotlight a producer who she feels is at the forefront of an American spirits revolution. Not only does their early entry into the category position Stranahan’s at the vanguard, but their literal mile high location also serves to shape their products in a unique way. In our conversation, Gabby discusses how she prefers her single malt whiskey (neat, or perhaps with one cube) and which beverages she tends to pair with barbecue (it’s not Light Lager, as I incorrectly presupposed). She also muses on what the future holds for American whiskey makers, finds some silver linings in the wake of COVID, and believes there’s truly a whiskey for everyone. If American single malt whiskey has a cheerleader, it’s Gabby Pharms.

You’re listening to a special-edition, three-part podcast series about Charleston’s Schützenfest, a mid-19th-century German gun and beer festival that initially was a diverse and welcoming environment, but which gradually evolved into a site of white supremacy. In our first two episodes, we delved deeper into both the history of the fest itself and the kinds of beer you might see around Charleston in the 19th century. Now we’ll take a more contemporary view by talking to people living in, advocating for, and brewing in Charleston today. First, I speak with a childhood mentor of mine, Mr. Sammy Backman. Mr. Sammy isn’t a brewer. He runs Backman’s Seafood, and has spent more than 50 years fishing South Carolina’s coast. The same fundamental forces that transformed the Schützenfest have followed Mr. Sammy’s boats his whole life. But in turn, he’s thriving, and he’s taught me since my childhood about the indelible mark Gullah Geechee communities continue to make on Charleston life. Next, I catch up with KJ Kearney, host of Black Food Fridays on Instagram, who’s worked tirelessly to help Gullah Geechee communities be better recognized and included in the Holy City. On his Instagram series, KJ educates fellow Charlestonians about Black food traditions by preserving Gullah foodways and history. We talk about the power of food and beverage history to erode racial barriers, our love for (and our frustrations with) Charleston, and KJ’s work to make things better. Finally, I talk with Jaime Tenny of Charleston’s own Coast Brewing Company. She discusses her brewery’s need to better include new communities, and how much learning she still needs to do before that’s possible. As our conversation shows, many breweries don’t know how to foster authentic inclusion within their spaces, even if they do know that it’s on them to learn.

Join us in finishing our journey through the Schützenfest, Charleston, and the centuries-long work of racial oppression. Here’s 60-year Charleston native—and part of my village—Mr. Sammy Backman.

You’re listening to a special-edition, three-part podcast series about Charleston’s Schützenfest, a German gun and beer festival that initially was a diverse and welcoming environment in the mid 19th century, but which gradually evolved into a site of white supremacy. In our first podcast, we spent a lot of time exploring how African-Americans were excluded from the Schützenfest and later the craft beer industry. Now we explore a simple question: “What were they drinking at the Schützenfest, and what were those excluded from the Schützenfest drinking?” We have Mike Stein and Peter Jones, president and CEO of the Lost Lagers beverage research consultancy, respectively, to help answer that question. Mike and Peter were also researchers for the three-part editorial series that went out on Good Beer Hunting this week—if you haven’t already, give those stories a read. In this episode, they’ll talk about indigenous ingredients, enslaved brewers, and some of the first Guinness beer to reach the United States. After this, tune into Part Three of this podcast series, where I meet up with Mr. Sammy Backman of Backman Seafood, KJ Kearnery of Black Food Fridays, and Jaime Tenny of Coast Brewing Company, to talk about the influence of exclusion in Charleston and in their respective industries.

Charleston, South Carolina:, a city with a villainous history and a place I call home. From the palmetto-lined streets to the many saltwater creeks and whiffs of pluff mud, The Holy City is a place of geographic charm with a history rooted in exclusion and racism. It’s also the subject of this three-part podcast series, which explores a lesser-known chapter in the city’s past. The Charleston Schützenfest, a shooting competition and community festival transplanted from Germany, was held every year at the German Rifle Club’s grounds on the banks of the Ashley River beginning in the 1850s. The fest was a place where German-Americans used their culture to help negotiate both local and national inclusion, and Black Charlestonians were initially welcome to join in. But white supremacists soon began using it too, and by the 1870s the Schützenfest was the premier expression of militant racism in Reconstruction-era Charleston. This gun and beer festival was held just outside the Wagener Terrace section of the city, where around six breweries operate today. It could very well be the blueprint for how modern-day exclusion operates within Charleston’s beer spaces. The event allied the Gullah Geechee people—formerly enslaved West Africans—and German immigrants during a time of social and political upheaval, but eventually it drove them apart. Lost potentials like these still reverberate in taprooms across the country today—calling forth false assumptions like: “Black people don’t drink beer” or, “Going to breweries is some white-boy shit.”

Mus tek cyear uh de root, fa heal de tree is a Gullah Geechee proverb denoting the importance of addressing potential problems and issues in their infancy. In writing about the Schützenfest, we tried to better understand the roots of Black exclusion from 21st-century beer spaces. For the full story, check out our three-part article series, published on Good Beer Hunting this week, where we recount the origins and evolution of the fest; discuss the resurgence of white supremacy in Charleston after the Civil War; and celebrate the parades, food, fishing, and myriad other ways Black Charlestonians have thrived even while enduring racial oppression. Together, both the editorial and podcast series explore the lineage of the city’s suppression of African-American advancement socially and economically, and reveal how the Schützenfest’s legacy still shapes Charleston’s beer spaces today. Reading all three parts will give you the foundation and historical context to break down these constructs yourself. Then join us for three podcast episodes that go even further. In the first episode, Brian Alberts expands on the vast research compiled for this project, explains a little more about the Schützenfest, and shares some ways the story goes even deeper than we could fit into the written series. In the second, historians Mike Stein and Peter Jones walk us through the types of beer we would have seen in 1800s Charleston, and how they fit into our broader story. And in the third episode, we head to Charleston to get a contemporary point of view: Mr. Sammy Backman of Backman Seafood, KJ Kearnery of Black Food Fridays, and Jaime Tenny of Coast Brewing all speak on the influence of exclusion in their respective industries, and how they want to move forward to make Charleston's food and beer scene even better.

Through her business—Zymology Labs, based in Essex Junction, Vermont—Amy offers analytical testing, training, and consulting for the fermented beverage industry. And she’s working to expand the conversation on beer quality in both producer and consumer circles.

Although Amy spends much of her time in her own lab space, she’s no stranger to brewery environments. She was a keen homebrewer in college, and the “What’s Brewing?” and food science courses she took during her chemistry degree led to her lightbulb moment: that she wanted to pursue a career in beer quality. After a course and apprenticeship with the American Brewers Guild, she got her start in the cellar at Burlington, Vermont’s Magic Hat Brewing Company before ultimately running their lab. It was there she started wondering what smaller breweries did without the same access to equipment that she had, and the idea for Zymology Labs was born.

Despite the name of her business, Amy is quick to remind us that quality isn’t just about the lab. She actually prefers the term “quality program,” as it indicates that there are many processes breweries can have in place to help monitor their product without requiring their own lab setup.

Passionate about demystifying what a quality program entails and how to set one up, Amy talks us through some of the basic steps any brewery can take to get started. We also discuss the difference between a quality program and a sensory program, and how they complement each other.

We then turn our attention to some of the quality issues that have hit industry headlines of late, ranging from ABV mislabeling to exploding cans. Amy helps to shed some light on what causes these issues, how they can be prevented, and how prevalent they actually are.

You’ll hear Amy stress that quality isn’t just about preventing things from going wrong. It’s about making sure as many elements of the brewing process as possible go right, so brewers can provide a consistent product for their customers. And if quality’s not a priority for your brewery? As Amy says, there are thousands of other breweries out there for consumers to choose from.

Intangible, hard-to-define terms like “local,” “craft,” and even “ethical” remain debatable within beer spheres, but they’re far from limited to one industry. Longtime beer writer and more recent bean-to-bar chocolate expert David Nilsen touches on these topics and more in his newest piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Cacao, Brewing, and the Price of Nostalgia — Toward a Better Future for Chocolate Beer,” which was published on June 8, 2021. 

In this episode, David and I discuss the preconceived notions Western consumers tend to have about chocolate, including where it comes from, how it should taste, and the often unknown—or at least overlooked—human cost behind each exquisite bite. Chocolate is far from just a one-dimensional snack found at supermarket checkout lines and in Halloween buckets. Instead, it can be as varied, complex, and multifaceted as malt or hops to beer drinkers, and the many cultural overlaps between beer and chocolate may surprise you. They certainly surprised me, as did the often-invisible, but pervasive human rights violations that exist in the cacao supply chain. 

In our conversation, David explains the hard truths behind what it takes to transport goods from the global South to the U.S. and how we can all be more informed, more ethical, and more responsible consumers. He defines what “bean-to-bar” really means, and how his personal interest in beer dovetailed into exploring the world of chocolate. He also discusses how the chocolate industry was literally built on the backs of enslaved people, how those human rights abuses continue today, and how a small group of global producers are shaping the future of the industry in response to that. And in addition to those in-depth topics, we’ll hear David talk about what makes him happy, and how the shared flavors of chocolate and beer can spark the imagination.

I first heard about Keyatta Mincey-Parker from Donnie, a wine buyer at my local bottle shop. As Donnie rang up my purchases, she told me how Keyatta had created a community garden for bartenders during the summer of 2020, aptly named A Sip of Paradise Garden. The garden’s mission is to provide a healthy and safe space for bartenders to recharge, and during the height of the pandemic, the space quickly became popular.

My interest was piqued, and I found myself diving into Keyatta’s story. I learned that she fled Liberia with her family when she was 12 years old, and how she adapted to her new home in the U.S. while holding her culture close to her heart. I was impressed by how Keyatta wove her love of family into her work, and how her desire to improve her community shined through all her accomplishments, whether it was giving bartenders a space for a respite during an incredibly tough year or providing young women in Liberia with alternatives to sex work.

In this episode, we discuss Keyatta’s love for family, and the incredible strength her mother showed as they fled Liberia in the ’90s. We also talk about the complicated feelings of receiving recognition and accomplishments as a Black woman. She shares how she came up with the idea for A Sip of Paradise Garden and how everything came together magically in the midst of a pandemic. But if there’s one thing you need to know about Keyatta, it’s that she’s committed to thriving no matter what life throws at her.

Over the past couple of decades, brewers and beer historians have recreated a growing number of formerly lost beer styles, like Grodziskie, Merseburger, Horner Bier, and others. Many of those styles come from the traditional brewing regions in Europe. But almost any country with any brewing history at all has its own lost beer styles. Sometimes, those recipes are completely indigenous. Sometimes they were imported from other places and subsequently modified in the new country, becoming their own unique types of beer.

Today I’m talking to Michael Stein, the author of a recent piece from our Source Material series, “A Lager Darkly — In Search of Culmbacher, One of America’s Great, Extinct Beers,” published on March 17, 2021. In his story, Michael explores the largely forgotten Culmbacher beer, originally from what is now the German state of Bavaria, but which grew in popularity in the United States in the 19th century, apparently changing substantially in the New World. 

As we discuss, Culmbacher was once very common in America, though it disappeared almost completely during Prohibition, and never regained its previous status. But as we hear in this episode, a recipe discovered in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has been re-brewed, allowing modern beer lovers to taste something that has been extinct for most of a century.

If you follow news in the beer world, May 2021 became synonymous with the word “reckoning” as a wave of stories about sexual harassment, assault, and inappropriate behavior toward women were shared from across the country and world. Massachusetts brewer Brienne Allan was the catalyst for this, first sharing her own experiences on Instagram, then asking other women for their own stories, and amplifying their voices. This started on social media, but quickly became national news for industry publications, newspapers like the Boston Globe, NPR affiliates around the country, and beyond.

Two of the writers who have extensively covered this story and its fallout are my colleagues at Good Beer Hunting, Beth Demmon and Kate Bernot. In this episode of our collective series, we’ll hear from both of them about what it means to report on these kinds of stories, how to tell them fairly and accurately, and the toll it takes as someone who has to synthesize all of these traumas and relay them to readers in a journalistic way.

You can read numerous stories by Beth and Kate right now on Good Beer Hunting, and there will be more in the future as reverberations continue to impact the industry and the way people and businesses seek to do better to protect others.

What does it take to succeed in one of the country’s most competitive markets for craft beer? That’s at the core of this conversation with Sam Pecoraro and Tom Cook of Portland, Oregon’s Von Ebert Brewing. As founder of the brewery, Tom has become acutely aware of changes necessary for his business, which has included a rush to get beer into cans, and then get those cans into grocery stores as more drinkers have shifted purchase behavior to chain retail due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sam, head brewer for the company, has a lot to live up to—and that’s from his own doing and the skill of his team. Von Ebert has been recognized numerous times in the last two years for their innovation and specific beers, including a medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their Nothing Noble IPA, a challenging feat in the most-entered category at the annual competition.

All of these things come into play for how Sam and Tom see their business now and in the future, and in our conversation you’ll learn how they’re using the things that they’re learning now to make sure they can continue to be a mainstay in Portland. And as you stick around, you’ll hear us banter about whether that future includes a comeback for English Mild, a malt-forward, low-ABV beer that is far more at home in the drinking culture of the U.K. than with the hop-mad IPA drinkers of the U.S.

How can a business compete in a beer-loving city? What’s the next style we could be drinking in bars and taprooms? Answers are coming.

Today, lager beers represent the comfort zone for most American beer drinkers…and a stereotyped monolith for many craft breweries to rebel against. But 170 years ago, lagers were both the outsider and the trendsetter. Their arrival caused ongoing debates over what beer was, what it should be, and the role alcohol ought to play in American social life, to take a sharp turn. This debate was anchored in beliefs about beer and public health that were simultaneously centuries old, and ever-evolving. Beer was at one time or another compared to poison, called to testify in court, and blamed for epidemics…and that’s just the beginning.

We’re kicking off the Source Material podcast with a 3-part series looking at some of the ways lager beer paired with questions of public health in 1800s America. We’ll begin with a basic question: can lager beer make a person drunk?

The answer may seem obvious today, but in the 1850s it seemed like that question could only be settled in court. Let’s explore why in Lager Beer, Governing Bodies Part 1: Overruled.

In times of crisis, people tend to turn to the comfort of familiarity, whether it be revisiting the family recipes they enjoyed as a kid or just attempting to relive some idealized version of the good old days. Over the past year, between quarantines, lockdowns, and political strife, nostalgia has made a big comeback, in everything from the music we’re listening to, to the very beers we drink. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been reaching for more of my tried-and-true favorites during the pandemic. If the world is crumbling around me, at least the last thing I’ll taste will be the predictable deliciousness of a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale with a soundtrack of glorious ’90s pop to accompany it. But there are more beers from the recent past to rediscover, and none more ripe for such examination than the humble Black IPA. Underappreciated by the masses but beloved by brewers from all over, the Black IPA has always been polarizing. Jonny Garrett dives deep into the history of the misunderstood style, its origins, evolution, and surprising (albeit small) comeback over the past year in his piece titled “Darkest Before the Dawn — The Unlikely Return of Black IPA,” which was published on Good Beer Hunting on April 6, 2021. By “comeback” I mostly mean people waxing poetic about the style, but there have also been a handful of enterprising masochists who refuse to let it go the way of the Brut IPA. Bless them for it. In this conversation, Jonny and I will discuss exactly who is asking for Black IPAs, how examining the style for this story sparked some surprising positivity for him personally, and what it was like talking to beer icons brewing at powerhouses like The Alchemist and Firestone Walker. We’ll also talk about how Hazies and Black IPAs were both born in the same small corner of Vermont, how their paths diverged so completely, and why it’s so important to relish the small joy found in a glass of good beer.

Tiffanie Barriere is the epitome of southern hospitality—warm, kind, and welcoming. She’s just the person you’d want as your drinking coach, which is fitting: The Drinking Coach is a moniker given to her by a friend, and it eventually became the name of the Instagram account where she shares stories of uncelebrated Black people throughout history, with a cocktail alongside. Tiffanie is more than an incredible bartender—she’s a teacher, a mentor, and a historian, using her platform to shed light on long-forgotten stories. Tiffanie started her journey at One Flew South, the first upscale restaurant in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. She worked as the beverage director at the restaurant for seven years, during the time when it was recognized as the “Best Airport Bar in the World” at Tales of the Cocktail. Now, as an independent bartender, Tiffanie is getting her own recognition for her contributions to the bartending and service world. Earlier this year, she was featured on the cover of Imbibe Magazine’s 75 People to Watch issue, and most recently announced her involvement in the Jubilee project, a venture by award-winning food and nutrition journalist Toni Tipton-Martin. In our conversation, Tiffanie and I talk about what sparked her interested in service and how it grew into a passion. She shares the difficulties of striking out on her own as an independent bartender, and also talks about inspiration, and why she is her ancestors' wildest dreams come true.

How does one survive in a place where temperatures regularly hit negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit, if not below that? A toasty Barleywine might hit the spot, but in the 49th state of the Union, residents are just as likely to pick up a classic IPA or Vienna Lager as they are an Imperial Stout. How, why, and when did Alaska, of all places, become a beer destination? In Bailey Berg’s first piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “Way Up North — Exploring the Growing Beer Scene in Fairbanks, Alaska,” which was published on April 27, 2021, the Anchorage resident explores the rise and embrace of local craft beer in one of the vastest frontiers on Earth. There are fewer than a million people across the entire state, but the amount of independent breweries continues to rise, thanks to a streak of independence, ingenuity, and adventure that tends to define those who call the severe, but beautiful, landscape their home. In our first podcast conversation together, Berg enlightens me to the spirit of entrepreneurship required to thrive in the burgeoning beer scene in Fairbanks, why being the first to accomplish something specific holds such sway when you’re on the edge of the world, how unique obstacles—like the mere access to ingredients like water—force brewers to squeeze every last bit of use out of what they have available, and why Alaskans are going to do what they like to do relatively free of outside influence. She’ll also tell me how much a pint of beer costs at the literal end of the road, and how common it is to see wild moose wandering around the streets. (It’s apparently a lot more common than I realized.) I strongly encourage listeners to scroll through her photographs within the article during this conversation: She captures snowpacks and sled dogs, the pints and the people, all framed beneath the mystical emerald serpent of the aurora borealis twinkling across the night sky. Let’s travel together to the Land of the Midnight Sun with Bailey Berg.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been countless stories of how individual people and businesses have adjusted, learned new things, and survived. At Good Beer Hunting we’ve had a collection of audio and written stories specifically asking what these transitions meant for state brewers guilds, the organizations that act as advocates and lobbyists for craft breweries across the country. In May 2020, we had a podcast that looked at survival for these groups in the moment, and in this episode, we get something of an update by way of a new organization to … help these organizations.

We’re chatting with Mary MacDonald and Rob Fullmer about the Association of Brewers Guild Professionals, a new group with the goal of providing networking, educational, and professional development opportunities to advance state brewers guild executive directors and their teams. Mary leads the state guild in Ohio and Rob in Arizona, and in this conversation you’ll learn about why this new super team-up was necessary, what issues are most pressing to advance legislation that can benefit craft breweries, and the forces making advocacy difficult in a legal and political landscape that has shifted dramatically during the pandemic.

What goes on in state capitals and behind closed doors doesn’t always sound as exciting as the latest Hazy IPA or other new release, but the anecdotes and insight you’ll hear from Mary and Rob showcase what’s happening right now that can support or even save your local breweries.

Italy is definitely not what anyone would consider part of Europe’s traditional brewing heartland: In terms of beverages, the Southern European country is mostly known for its amazing wines, which complement its world-class cuisine. But since the mid-90s, Italy has developed a relatively small but dynamic brewing scene, which originally started in the country’s north, before spreading throughout the Italian peninsula. Brewers like Agostino Arioli at Birrificio Italiano—not far from Lake Como, north of Milan—have inspired beer makers in the U.S. and the U.K. to make their own Italian-style Pilsners, after Birrificio Italiano’s Tipopils. Other Italian brewers have experimented with the country’s native wine grapes, resulting in Italian Grape Ale, one of Italy’s first “native” beer styles to gain international attention. In this episode, I talk to Maurizio Maestrelli, one of Italy’s leading drinks writers and the author of a recent article, “Grape News — How a New Generation of Italian Brewers Created Italian Grape Ale,” that ran in our Mother of Invention series, created in partnership with Guinness. We discuss the history of Italian Grape Ale and the origins of the Italian craft beer boom, including some of the leading figures of Italy’s beer renaissance, like Teo Musso at Birra Baladin and Nicola Perra at Birrificio Barley. We also talk about Italy’s other “indigenous” beer style, Chestnut Ale, and the rich relationship Italians have with food of all kinds. As Maurizio notes, Italians don’t just think of “citrus” as a flavor. Instead, they’ll say they’re identifying the aroma of lemon or chinotto, citron or bergamot. Italian brewers who make Italian Grape Ales will say that beers using the same type of grape can have very different grape flavors, if those grapes were merely grown on different parts of the same island. While recording this podcast, we did experience some technical difficulties with a bit of noise that comes in and out—we apologize for that. If you’re interested in how Italy has embraced good beer—and created several good beer styles of its own—I think you’ll find the discussion worth your while.

Jules Gray describes herself as “someone that likes to keep busy.” Not only is she the founder of Hop Hideout—one of the U.K.’s first drink-in bottle shops, which opened in Sheffield, northern England, back in 2013—she’s also the organizer of Sheffield Beer Week; the Indie Beer Feast beer festival; and Indie Beer Shop Day, a new initiative she launched during the pandemic to celebrate independent beer retailers across the country.

Initially a standalone retailer in the back of an antiques center in Sheffield’s Abbeydale neighborhood, Hop Hideout relocated in March 2019 to a brand-new food hall in the city center. Just one year later, Jules’ business had to evolve yet again, in response to COVID-19.

In a way, she was lucky: As Hop Hideout’s previous location was outside of the city center, Jules had begun offering mail orders and Sheffield home delivery years before, and she had all the systems in place (and a loyal local customer base) to help weather the pandemic. But despite the advantages of her new site in terms of location, footfall, and trade, not having her own brick-and-mortar space meant not qualifying for any initial government grants. As a result, she couldn’t control access to her own business, as she had to work within the hours set by the food hall.

Despite these challenges, she lights up when she talks about her local deliveries and how important they were, not only for her customers and their sense of social connection, but also for her own mental health. It’s clear that for Jules, her business is about a lot more than beer: It’s about connecting with her customers and celebrating not only the local beer industry, but the city more broadly.

Full of pride for Sheffield, her adopted home, Jules shares what she loves most about the city; what inspired her to start Sheffield Beer Week and its associated festival, Indie Beer Feast; and why it should be on all of our must-visit lists once lockdown lifts. She also reminds us of the importance of independent retailers to the broader beer ecosystem, and discusses how her new initiative, Indie Beer Shop Day, celebrates the positive role such outlets play as centers of guidance, education, and discovery.

Working in media today feels weirdly similar to trying to navigate the Fire Swamp in the classic 1987 film The Princess Bride. Success is possible, but the path is surrounded by quicksand, Rodents of Unusual Size, and numerous other obstacles along the way. It’s tenuous at the best of times, and damn near impossible under trying circumstances—like during a pandemic, for example. It requires ingenuity, a propensity for risk, and a bit of gut feeling.

Good Beer Hunting operates a little differently than many other media companies, in everything from the stories we tell to the revenue streams that support those stories. But if you’re looking for a complete history of GBH, this isn’t that podcast. In this conversation with Michael Kiser, co-founder and creative director, we focus on some of the meatier pieces GBH has published that, at first glance, fall outside most people’s expectations of beer media. Exploring subjects like non-disclosure agreements, concepts like hyperreality, historical deep-dives, and other topics far from the clickbait-esque model of contemporary media has positioned GBH as a … I’ll say unique figure in beer conversations.

Michael and I discuss who we think is reading GBH and why; how conversations and beer culture have changed over the years, and how they’ve also stayed the same; our role in media and the beer industry at large; why making people mad is inevitable, and why it’s sometimes important; how balancing heady—and crucial—topics like racism against more lighthearted narratives sparks surprising, and sometimes dangerous, responses from readers; what stories have surprised him; and the ones he still wants to tell.

You may have read or heard industry pros or journalists like me throw around these acronyms lately—FMBs and RTDs. They stand for flavored malt beverages—that’s the FMB—and ready-to-drink cocktails—the RTD. In layman terms, they’re the industry stand-in for what we all see on store shelves as hard seltzer, alcoholic tea, or canned cocktails from the likes of Cutwater Spirits or Fling Craft Cocktails. And most important, whether we’re talking about FMBs or RTDs, both categories are wildly successful, making boatloads of money, and are changing ideas and expectations in the beverage alcohol industry.

So in this episode of the podcast I’m chatting with fellow Sightlines reporters Kate Bernot and Jonny Garret to better understand the impact of these kinds of drinks in the U.S., where Kate is based, and the U.K., where Jonny will explain to us why hard seltzers haven’t yet become a world-changing thing like they have in the states. We’re talking data, research, and stories from both their reporting to give better and broader context on what has the potential to be one of the biggest industry stories of this summer in both countries.

This kind of analysis is part of the insights we share with Good Beer Hunting’s Sightlines Premium newsletter and expert community. Sightlines Premium is an extension of our newsy Sightlines coverage, which has a goal of combining objective data and real-world anecdotes to help industry pros make informed decisions about managing a portfolio, how and where they should focus their access to market, and more.

If you’re leading a company in the beer or alcohol space, Sightlines Premium is for you. And this will give you a sense of the kind of direct advice and consultation we offer in our weekly newsletter and online community. For more information, visit goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines-premium.

This is the GBH Sightlines team of myself, Kate Bernot, and Jonny Garrett. Listen in.

If you liked what you heard in this episode, consider learning more about Sightlines Premium and what we offer industry decision makers. You can find information about our weekly subscriber newsletter at goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines-premium.

In beer, even the heaviest intellectual conversations around topics like racism or worker exploitation tend to hit a natural barrier after a couple of pints. That slow fizzle doesn’t happen when you speak to A.J. Cox. In fact, her obvious passion for human rights only increases the longer the conversation goes on.

Cox is a brewer and pro-union academic with an affinity for Marxism and social justice. She’s worked in beer both in the United States as well as Ireland, where her tenure at Heaney Brewery was interrupted by the onset of COVID-19. Her research relating to social anthropology extends across the globe, focusing on the history of labor, how today’s inequities have evolved from said foundations, and how that all relates to the beer industry.

Our conversation for this podcast touches on many of her points of passion and expertise. We discuss how low pay exacerbates inequality and contributes to a continued lack of diversity within the craft beer industry, how consent differentiates between sexuality and sexism (and how they relate to influencer culture), and the ways that neoliberalism contributes to the economic stranglehold of capitalism. We’ll also touch on how the perceived value of certain jobs in beer can create disparities of access, how non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) can harm efforts to reduce sexual harassment or discrimination, what Marxism really means, and what to expect if you follow her on social media. (Don’t worry—it’s mostly dogs and beer.)

Have you ever dreamed a dream so perfect, so grand, so utopian that it seems impossible to turn into reality? Katie Mather has—but unlike most people, she transformed her vision into something tangible.

The pastoral landscape of Clitheroe, a village in northwestern England, provided an ideal backdrop for Mather’s dream to crystallize. Despite the copious amounts of lemons the pandemic dealt out, Mather and her husband, Tom, decided to make lemonade in the form of a Lilliputian shop and bar-in-progress that focuses on simple, high-quality drinks and small bites. They dubbed it Corto: a hat tip to a Spanish beer tradition that encourages a midday sip and snack, because doesn’t everyone deserve a small respite from reality? In her first piece for Good Beer Hunting, titled “The Bar at the End of the World,” published on March 24, 2021, Mather shares how, when, and why the two decided to create a space for community, camaraderie, and craft beer, even as she grappled with a positive COVID diagnosis last fall. (Don’t worry—she’s better now.)

Just a quick note for listeners: There are a few moments of brief audio breaks while Mather is talking. Do not change the channel—it’s us, not you. (It turns out Wi-Fi in the middle of nowhere can be a bit spotty.) But I promise, small hiccups aside, this conversation has the potential to transport listeners to an idyllic land, full of promise and flavor. Throughout the discussion, she reveals the inspiration of the pair’s blossoming oasis, shares their goals (both during and post-pandemic), the value they find in sourcing artisanal food and drink to share with their small community, and how opportunities disguised as dead ends can bring forth some of the sweetest outcomes.

Welcome to a Fervent Few episode of the Good Beer hunting Podcast

The Fervent Few is our subscriber community - made up of 100s of beer fans, professionals, and curious readers from around the world who directly support our editorial with their monthly contributions and help form a direct connection between our editorial and creative teams.

We share stories, meet up for special events, and create fun gear for beer fans.

You should join - visit goodbeerhunting.com/ferventfew to learn more and join the club.

Today’s guest is John Gross haling from Austin, Texas, and he leads our Fervent few movie channel. His background as a critic and content director for Alamo Drafthouse Cinema makes him a helluva curator.

While Rock Leopard is relatively new to the scene, Ayeh is not. He’s worked in the alcohol industry since 2002, when on a trip to Sweden he discovered Kopparberg cider. Seeing its potential he persuaded the company to let him be the UK agent, launching a brand that went on national prominence. Sadly larger distributors saw its potential too, and without an exclusivity agreement Ayeh was forced aside. That was the first of several setbacks that have come to plague Ayeh, but never define him.

After frustrating experiences at controversial start-ups like London Fields Brewery and Magic Spells, he finally struck out on his own, determined to have complete control over his career. He founded Rock Leopard back in 2017 but spent years learning to brew himself, refining his recipes and getting feedback from the industry. Unfortunately, many retailers were resistant to buying his first few commercial contract-brewed beers and Ayeh suspects it had little to do with the liquid.

In this episode we talk through his early career before exploring the possible ageism and racism that made opening Rock Leopard so hard, and how cornering Paul Jones of Cloudwater Brew Co at a tap takeover changed everything for the brewery. We also look at how Ayeh’s experiences have led him to add a strong equal rights campaign element to his brand, something he admits to being much more passionate about than the excellent beers he now produces.

The way we find and tell stories of beer is changing, and in recent years, what was once relegated to magazines, websites, and podcasts is becoming more common in film. As craft beer’s trajectory has gone more mainstream, the awareness of the industry and its collection of people and stories has made a longer form, visual format another powerful path to explore the many ways a pint connects to different aspects of our lives and culture.

In this episode, we’re exploring what that means, and two people from in front of and behind the camera. Tinu Diver has a background in writing, law, and documentary film, and her new project is “This Belongs To Us,” a documentary that follows the journey of Black women brewers in the U.S. South to explore how a craft and tradition that began in Africa became synonymous with white, male, blue-collar identity in the United States. You’ll also hear from Brianna Brake, who came to brewing with an education in computer science and law, and is now brewer and founder of North Carolina’s Spaceway Brewery and one of the featured women in Tinu’s film.

This conversation covers similar themes explored in This Belongs To Us, which was recently featured at the Sundance Film Festival. Tinu and Bri share their experiences and perspective of being Black, entrepreneurial women, the ways they’ve come to view the U.S. beer industry, and the many kinds of stories that are weaved between beverage alcohol, history, culture, and more. You’ll hear about all kinds of historical, systemic, and current barriers faced by Black-owned breweries and Black people, like those challenge Bri faced when she tried to secure funding for her brewery.

As production of This Belongs To Us enters its final act, there’s much Tinu and Bri are still wrestling with, and you’ll get a taste of what you can expect from the documentary in this conversation.

As a total percentage of the beverage alcohol industry, cider hasn’t really changed much in recent years. It amounts to about 1% and has been successfully static. I know a lack of growth doesn’t really sound like a success, and 1% doesn’t sound like a lot, but trust me on this one.

Or, rather, trust Michelle McGrath. She’s the executive director of the American Cider Association and while it’s certainly her job to speak highly of the category and the success of her members, she’s bringing the data to back it up in this conversation about a category that often gets overlooked in a country more interested in narratives of hard seltzers, ready-to-drink, canned cocktails, spirits, or Hazy IPAs. But the maturation of cider as a category and industry is fascinating, especially as a drink that’s holding its own as so many other options have entered the market. Again, that 1% doesn’t sound thrilling, but wait until we put it in context of how hard things are for beer right now.

Aside from the story of cider as a pure agricultural product, there’s also another area worth our attention, and that’s the outsized role that small cider producers are playing. The largest, national brands are lagging, and these small and independent businesses have picked up the slack—which might sound familiar to the stories of the beer world we hear so often. 1% is a small number, but it feels a bit bigger when you learn about how it’s maintained.

When Michelle and I recently spoke, she just finished hosting the industry’s annual conference, CiderCon, so a lot of these things were fresh on our minds, and her’s was full of stories to give context to a category that may be just 1%, but according to Nielsen, has grown 10 times its size over the last decade.

Every brewery has a story, and along with the beer they brew, their narrative is what helps to set them apart. A great story can captivate and connect with consumers, and help build brand loyalty—something any business owner would love to have.

And when a couple opens a brewery together, there’s a good chance their love story will become a foundational part of the business’s identity. That was certainly true for Sara and Sam Kazmer, owners of Elsewhere Brewing Co. in Atlanta’s Grant Park neighborhood.

Their incredible, Lifetime-esque love story starts across the world, in a bar in Italy. Before they started out on their brewery venture, Sara suggested the couple travel the world, collecting experiences and knowledge that would later build out the story of Elsewhere, and influence their beer program, food menu, and the vibe of their brewery.

In our conversation, we’ll talk about how intentional Sara was with creating the story of Elsewhere. Sara shares how she wanted Elsewhere to stray away from the traditional industrial feel of other breweries to create a space that felt inviting to women and men alike. We’ll discuss the amount of detail that went into designing Elsewhere, from the handmade tiling to the plants decorating the space.

We’ll also cover the difficulties of opening and operating a brewery in the middle of a pandemic, how Sara’s experience working in taprooms helped prepare her for it, and insights into the craft beer scene in Atlanta. Keep an ear out, too, as Sara shares her plans for the brewery’s future post pandemic.

Beer history has blossomed in recent years, as a new generation of researchers and writers have uncovered fascinating stories from the murky early days of brewing. Some of those discoveries have taken us to exotic locales, while others have illuminated overlooked stories right in our own backyards. And beer history is not just a field for enthusiastic amateurs. Academics and other professionals have been been digging through the archives to tell hitherto unknown tales from the world of beer and brewing.

In this episode, I talk to Jennifer Jordan, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the author of a recent piece on the historic hop industry in Wisconsin that ran in our “From Barons to Barrels” series. We discuss her research into hop farming in Wisconsin, as well as some the characters who helped create the industry, like Jesse Cottington, originally born in England, who went on to become the leading man of the profitable hop business in Wisconsin’s Sauk County in the 1860s. Professor Jordan’s research has also identified less prominent characters, like Ella Seymour, a young woman who recorded her observations about hop picking and other chores in a diary at the time.

If that sounds ephemeral, it is: by the 1880s, the once-massive Wisconsin hop trade disappeared completely. But as we discover in this episode, the evidence for it — in terms of archival evidence, the changed landscape, and even the plants themselves — still exist today… if you know where to look.

Have you heard the phrase “stick to beer”? It’s a version of an oft-cited phrase that people tell each other when one is veering away from their subject expertise. If you brew beer or write about the industry, you don’t need to share insight about other areas of life … let someone else who’s an expert do that. Stick to beer.

In this episode, we aren’t venturing far away from beer, but Ben Self’s background lends itself to it. He’s our guest as co-founder of Kentucky’s West Sixth Brewing, but what came before and even recent years is of interest, too. Ben recently completed a run as chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party and began a political career years ago by co-founding a progressive tech firm that led him to work with Howard Dean and the Democratic National Committee.

This is relevant because while we don’t wade into hot button issues of politics, we do talk about what it means to win and lose and fight an uphill battle to turn a very red state blue. It may not be obvious right away, but you’ll hear me ask about how running a business can be similar when you’re trying to build trust with people you don’t know and convert customers to your brand in the same way a politician may want to find another vote.

So trust me when I say we do “stick to beer,” but there’s a host of other things that have influenced Ben’s worldview, and that overlap can be fascinating.

Lately, the world has felt joyless. Even the weekends, which once offered a reprieve from the obligation of work, feel bland and gray when you’re stuck at home all the time. Saturday gives way to Sunday, and time melts into hours of couch-sitting, Instagram-scrolling, beer-drinking, and the occasional debate on what to eat for lunch. I long for a trip away from the mundane cycle my life has become.

Against this backdrop, reading Beth Demmon’s latest piece on Good Beer Hunting, “Riding the Party Wave — Pizza Port Brewing Company’s Swami’s IPA,” felt like the rare vacation from day-to-day life. It invites the reader to the sunny shores of San Diego, where Beth poses—and then answers—the question: What is the most San Diego beer? In the article, she makes a compelling case for Swami’s, a West Coast IPA created by Pizza Port Brewing Company in 1992.

Through interviews with legends in the California craft beer scene, Beth shows us how the legacy of Swami’s IPA still influences the beers we drink today—even if we’ve never personally traveled to San Diego. The article feels light and refreshing, offering a break from the heaviness of this moment in time.

In our conversation, Beth and I talk about why she posed this question in the first place, how she settled on Swami’s as the beer that best encompasses San Diego, and why it’s not Stone IPA. Throughout this interview, you’ll hear Beth express her love for San Diego—her adopted home—and her joy as she looks back on the many memories she’s had at Pizza Port Brewing Company over the years.

Women currently make up less than a quarter of all craft brewery owners in the United States, according to the Brewers Association’s survey on demographics within the industry. While conversations around the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity continue to spark important change within beer, sometimes it can feel like it’s just that—talk. But pioneers within the industry who talk the talk and walk the walk do exist, and in San Diego, the women behind Mujeres Brew House are two of those trailblazers.

Carmen Favela and Esthela Davila launched Mujeres Brew Club in 2019 in an effort to empower women through beer education. Staggered by the immediate and overwhelming level of interest and participation in the events, these two knew they had stumbled on a large, underserved audience when monthly meetings regularly reached capacity. But when COVID-19 hit, their ability to provide that in-person community was challenged. When the pair had the unexpected opportunity to acquire a brewhouse of their own in San Diego’s largely Latinx Barrio Logan neighborhood, they jumped at the chance, thanks to the financial (and emotional) support of Carmen’s husband and business partner, David Favela of Border X Brewing.

Even with COVID-related delays and restrictions still in place, the accelerated timeline for Mujeres Brew House was largely due to the tight-knit community of women in the group, who eagerly volunteered to sweep, dust, paint, and pitch in in any way they could to make their new home as welcoming as possible. In our conversation, Esthela and Carmen walk me through the group’s origin, their trajectory and mission, and the importance of being a part of the Barrio Logan community (as well as the wider craft beer community). They also address how it feels to be recognized by outlets like Good Beer Hunting’s Signifiers and Imbibe’s 75, and who they look to for inspiration, even as they provide inspiration to so many others. Mujeres Brew House is women-led and women-centric, yes. But their doors are open to anyone willing to come, listen, learn, and drink some great beer.

We are well beyond the days of “Dry January,” but the conversation around the success and long term impact of non-alcoholic beer continues. The month long effort at the start of the year is meant to give people a break from alcohol intake, and non-alcoholic substitutes often play a big role. But what Kate Bernot and I have come to recognize in the past several months is that the narrative of booze-free beer is even bigger.

And that’s what we’re talking about in this episode as part of the conversations and insights we’ve been sharing as part of Good Beer Hunting’s Sightlines Premium newsletter and expert community. Sightlines Premium is an extension of our newsy Sightlines coverage, anchored by Kate and myself, with the goal of combining objective data and real-world anecdotes to help industry pros make informed decisions about managing a portfolio, how and where they should focus their access to market, and more.

So while Sightlines Premium runs the gamut of topics, Kate and I are laser-focused in this conversation, where we share findings from our own reporting about the non-alcoholic beer segment, and what we think it means for the industry moving forward. For example, our Sightlines Premium coverage of non-alc beer used data to explain its boom in 2020, and insight from experts like economist Lester Jones to give a full understanding of the category’s place and rise of the last couple years.

If you’re leading a company in the beer or alcohol space, Sightlines Premium is for you. And this will give you a sense of the kind of direct advice and consultation we offer in our weekly newsletter and online community. For more information, visit goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines-premium.

In today’s episode I’m talking to James Calder, Chief Executive of the UK’s Society of Independent Brewers.

SIBA, as it’s more commonly known, plays a similar role to the American Brewer’s Association, representing the interests of around 800 small British brewers who vote on how the organisation supports the industry and lobbies the government at its annual conference and trade show, BeerX.

Founded in 1980, its greatest victory came in 2002, when alongside CAMRA it successfully campaigned for the introduction of Small Brewers Relief, granting brewers of less than 5,000hl a year a 50% reduction on Britain’s notoriously high alcohol duty. It was well timed, coming a few years before the craft beer revolution took off, and since the policy came into effect more than 2,000 breweries have opened from a base of barely 400.

Despite this, and over forty years of fighting for the interests of small business, SIBA doesn’t have a very good reputation. Brewers are mostly split between ambivalence and active dislike of the organisation. Some saw it as a puppet for mid-sized breweries with different issues and very different agendas to small brewers, while others took exception to SIBA’s commercial side – a wholesaling business called Beerflex. While it was founded to give small breweries better access to large pub chains, it also meant the body was actively competing with those not part of the scheme.

When Calder was promoted from head of public affairs to chief executive in 2019 he was all too aware of SIBA’s issues, as well as the fact that SIBA membership was shrinking as a result. But before he could test, finalise, and enact his plan to revitalise the organisation he was hit by a triple whammy to crises – the prospect of a no deal Brexit, COVID-19 and finally, a part-reversal on SIBA’s finest hour – Small Brewers Relief.

Instead of turning the ship around, Calder has spent the last 18 months fighting fires that refuse to go out. But during this time he’s made sure that SIBA is more transparent in its dealings – regularly updating people outside its membership about the work being done. As a result, its day-to-day work in fighting for more freedom and financial support during lockdown has impressed many in the industry of late.

There’s a lot of work for Calder and his team still to do in building SIBA’s reputation and supporting its members through Brexit, SBR reform and COVID – but in this wide ranging conversation he’s keen to point out that there’s a bigger vision yet to come.

This week’s guest is a duo from Chicago who this past year, despite a pandemic, launched one of the city’s most exciting Mexican-inspired brewery concepts: Casa Humilde Cervenceria.

Chicago is perhaps uniquely focused on Mexican culture when it comes to beer. We’re the city that launched 5 Rabbit Cerveceria—the first Latin-inspired craft brewery in the U.S. who despite many early, and seemingly ongoing challenges, is still in operation on the far Southwest side. Cruz Blanca, a brewpub on Randolph Street originally launched in collaboration with Rick Bayless , the famous chef from Frontera, coco, and Topolobampo and others is known for it’s incredible food, cocktails, and increasingly getting the recognition it deserves for its beers, especially their wild and barrel-aged offerings.

But even in a mix like that, Casa Humilde has a unique point of view of what it means to be Mexican-inspired, and indeed Mexican, in craft beer in 2021.

They make fantastic lagers, both a corn lager and an amber. As well as beers that feature Mexican coffees, chocolate, and of course, the beers Javier and Jose themselves came of age with in the context of in Chicago, like haze pale ales and double IPAs.

Javier and Jose Lopez are two young founders focused on the intersection between the American craft scene they grew up in, and their culinary experiences stemming from an early age in Mexican families from which they take so much of their inspiration to explore beer, and far beyond.

There’s a big, winding conversation going on in the food world right now about what is, and isn’t considered “authentic” when it comes to the cuisine we would previously have called “ethnic” — and part of the conversation focuses on who benefits from, and who is held back by this idea of “authenticity.” Does the demand for authenticity protect those who have the primary experience with a cuisine? Or does it place an unfair burden on them as innovators, entrepreneurs, and ultimately box them in while white people are more free to explore ideas free of the tyranny of this so-called authenticity?

What Javier and Jose are doing with Casa Humilde highlights this tension for me—and the answers they’re producing in terms of their beers, where and how they’re sold, even a Micheleda, speak volumes for me about what’s at stake.

They’re also just really charming, ambitious, hard-working, and true to their name, humble brewers who represent the city of Chicago exceptionally well.

Stephanie Grant has an infectious positivity. You can’t help but enjoy watching her cook amazing meals on her Instagram stories; or celebrating Black women in beer in her newsletter, The Share; or scrolling through her vibrant photographs. Her projects and pursuits all seem to radiate joy. But Stephanie’s not afraid of getting real—far from it.

In her latest story for Good Beer Hunting titled “Beyond the Beer — Colorism, Black Pride, and the Black Is Beautiful Initiative”, which was published on January 27, 2021, she weaves together her personal experiences as a Black woman with the history and evolution of the Black is Beautiful movement. The result is a deeply affecting, personal, and informative story that readers of any background can appreciate.

As Stephanie points out in her piece, however, no white person will ever be able to fully understand the gravity of the phrase “Black is Beautiful,” and what it represents. So in this conversation, Stephanie tells us in her own words what that phrase means to her as a Black woman. She wants people to understand just how deeply racism is embedded in American culture, how early messages of racist inequality start for children, and how the concept of colorism continues to divide communities from within as a holdover from slavery. Despite the heavy nature of the conversation, she still relishes the strength she can draw upon from other Black women, and how she’s been able to find joy, even during a tumultuous year and while writing this raw account of her own journey to self-love.

During this conversation, we talk about the evolution and importance of language, how accountability is everyone’s responsibility, and why Black is Beautiful is so much more than just beer. Stephanie is optimistic, yet realistic. But above all, she’s ready to keep doing the work.

This week’s guest invented one of the most impactful things in American beer history —but it’s not a beer style, or a recipe, or a festival, or a piece of equipment—it’s an app.

Untappd grew from a side project for Greg Avola and his partner Tim Mather—one that they moonlighted for on weekends—to a leading social experience for beer geeks in a very short amount of time.

Basically you try a beer, you log the experience, and it keeps track of your history. You can share that experience with others, rate it, post pics, tag bars and breweries where you enjoyed it—each little interaction creates a massive web of crowd data over time.

Some producers find it fascinating and valuable. Others are haunted by it and think it’s ruining beer. Or maybe already has.

But it’s surely, like any software, largely what we make of it.

But what is Untappd itself made of?

This interview follows on co-founder Greg Avola’s recent exit from his role at the company—after it was acquired by Next Glass a few years ago, Greg’s role became less of a product engineer and tweaker, and more of a creative director, working across a lot of other roles, outlining new strategies, and integrating with the ecosystem of follow-on acquisitions like Beer Advocate, and most recently Hop Culture. With the intent to build a B2B and B2C ecosystem that enabled the rating, tracking, promotion and purchasing of the beers people find most interesting. Basically leveraging content to create a new sort of tier in the 3-tier system.

But it’s not without its challenges, both personal and professional.

In this conversation Greg talks a lot about what it’s like to be a founder of a small tech project that goes big. The burden that places on the individual, and how evolving in an acquisition environment is fraught with personal challenges.

But it also outlines how the scope of Untappd is shifting. Their numbers are down in the U.S. but growing rapidly abroad. Not unlike what happened with one of its predecessors, Ratebeer. And the other acquisitions, like Beer Advocate, haven’t really panned out the way it was imagined, leaving most of the creative and strategic onus on Untappd itself, a challenge it seems to have met with some renewed focus on content, events, and overall community-building in the past year.

In Greg’s open letter about his decision to step down, he was uncommonly transparent about his rationale, experiences, and hopes. And that’s the catalyst for us talking today—from one start-up founder to another. I think it’s critical that more people openly share the nature of the sacrifices people like Greg make to see their idea grow.

Kristen Foster has been a part of Good Beer Hunting’s Fervent Few community, as well as a contributor, since 2017. Since then, she’s written a number of pieces and published a lot of great photographs — especially her poignant and candid photos of people in and around beer.

Some of her recent Signifiers for Good Beer Hunting about Athletic Brewing Company and Notch Brewing also manage to capture that same candid honesty from people who’ve built two very different breweries. Athletic’s approach to non-alcoholic beer is literally redefining what beer is and what it can be, while Notch focuses on constantly perfecting classic styles that reach deep into European beer history.

In our conversation, Kristen talks about the differences between the two breweries and how she approached both stories, illuminating her process, personal experience, and how the beer industry itself continues to evolve.

We also talk about her first experience doing Dry January, what she foresees developing in the non-alcoholic beer scene, and what NA beers she liked during her month-long foray into intentional sobriety. (Hint: it’s Athletic.) Of course, as a seasoned travel writer and photographer as well, she shares her insight into what trips she had to put on hold due to COVID-19, how her local spots in Boston have weathered the last year, and where she wants to visit next. Finally, we talk cocktails — or at least, she does, while I try to keep up. Maybe if we’re lucky, one of these days we’ll be sipping tequila together in real life.

Depending on who you are and your connection to alcohol and storytelling, this interview can be different things to different people. It’s about a book, which is about bourbon (sort of), but also family and marketing and trying to find things that feel real. If you’re a beer enthusiast, you may connect with stories of people geeking out on bourbon and the niche communities that exist. If you work in beverage alcohol, there may be ideas of storytelling and branding that sound familiar. Or maybe you’d rather just listen as a complicated human like we all are, and follow along these threads and more, which trace the story of how Wright Thompson came to write a book about Pappy Van Winkle, the most desired bourbon on the planet.

Thompson is a familiar name if you’re a sports fan—he’s won awards for his coverage and written beloved profiles of Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan—but a common theme of many of the things he reports on is one of family and the depths of what that means in relation to history and culture.

We’re chatting because his new book, “Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last,” has brought all these things together to tell the story of Julian Van Winkle III and bourbon in America. You’ll hear us reference Julian often, and the important thing to know is that as a Van Winkle working in spirits, he’s on what Wright calls a quest to recapture the memories from his own past, of his family, and the bourbon they made. In the book and in this interview, these things get intertwined with ideas behind today’s bourbon, its marketing, and what it says about the human condition.

So, whoever you are, and however you find yourself connecting to bourbon, rare items like Pappy Van Winkle, Wright Thompson, or the deeper role booze can play in our lives, I hope there’s something that keeps you thinking about the memory quest we’re all on, just like Julian.

As someone who was born in the ’80s and thus is not a digital native, I’ve enjoyed making Internet friends since my parents first got a computer when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. I’ve spent countless hours in dial-up chat rooms, writing bad poetry on LiveJournal, carefully crafting my away messages on AOL Instant Messenger, and eventually networking on Twitter and Facebook, connecting with people from all over the world. 

When I first “met” Ruvani de Silva in 2019, it was online. In fact, despite having talked numerous times for stories, as writing colleagues, and as Instagram friends, we’ve never met in real life. But chatting with her about her first piece for Good Beer Hunting—titled “A Rare Gem or a Llama in a Suit? — South Asian Women on Navigating (and Advancing) the Craft Beer Industry”, which was published on January 20, 2021—was the first time our conversation focused solely on Ruvani’s experiences as a South Asian woman in craft beer. 

The idea to pursue this story coalesced for Ruvani during the pandemic, as it allowed her to finally have the time and space to ask the question: Where are all the other people in beer who look like me? As she took to social media to find other South Asian women who publicly enjoyed craft beer, she found that, although their numbers were small, their experiences in the industry united them in a way she’d never experienced before. 

In the piece, the women she meets share a palpable sense of relief at having found one another. The story feels like it’s following a community and a camaraderie as they form in real time, thanks to Ruvani’s quest. And even though the members might be far from one another, their shared experience now binds them together, and allows them to claim and relish in their own space in beer. 

In this interview, we discuss Ruvani’s upbringing in London and now, what it’s like being a Brown Brit in Texas. We talk about her entry into both beer and writing, as well as the catalyst for her piece. She also examines the difference between feeling overtly welcome in beer spaces and how that’s not necessarily the same thing as feeling unwelcome, and the challenges—and opportunities—she’s experienced as one of the only South Asian women in a given taproom. 

This piece is joyful. It’s optimistic, it’s full of surprises, and it’s illuminating. Most of all, it’s honest—an unflinching, open look at what it’s like to be her. 

The word “community” is often overused in our industry. There’s our local community, the communities we’ve created around ourselves on our favorite social media platforms, or the craft beer community as a whole. But, these days, the more I hear the word, the less meaning I find in it. Are we actually choosing to connect, or do we simply happen to be in the same place at the same time?

Lucy Do found herself asking that same question earlier this year.

The purpose of Lucy’s business is—in her own words—“community and human connection.” And she provided that in spades at her West London micropub, The Dodo. She beams as she recalls a typical Friday night at The Dodo, poetically describing the sense of electricity in the air as conversation bubbled, cask beers were consumed, and new friendships formed.

But when COVID-19 forced her to close her doors back in March, she wondered if the community she’d built would survive without her venue as its hub.

From her initial panic in March, Lucy talks us through how she redesigned the business by creating opportunities anywhere and everywhere—from offering takeaway and local delivery of cask beer to designing at-home beer-and-food pairing kits, launching her own gin brand, and even working with the local council to open a pop-up in a large outdoor venue nearby.

Beyond the visible changes to the business as a result of the pandemic, you’ll also hear Lucy discuss the struggles that are less visible: her concerns for staff and customer safety, the challenge of navigating her team through such uncertainty, and above all, the mental health impact of these last few months.

Ever open and honest, Lucy’s desire to create meaningful connections with others has kept her going through these trying times. And, as you’ll hear, her community is stronger than ever.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Will Hawkes, a London-based journalist who’s been writing about beer since 2010. Over the past decade, Will has regularly contributed to publications like The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph, but it was only last year when he wrote his first piece for Good Beer Hunting. Part of our Mother of Invention series, made in partnership with Guinness, “On the Wagon — The Innovations Behind the Non-Alcoholic Renaissance in British Brewing,” was published on our website on October 22, 2020.

Although this is his first time writing for the site, Will previously featured as a guest on the Good Beer Hunting podcast way back in 2017. For those of you who may have missed that episode, we start our conversation with a brief discussion of Will’s background in journalism, before turning our attention to his article.

Initially a skeptic of non-alcoholic beer, Will talks about how—when he pushed past his own prejudice and tried these beers—he noted a vast improvement in their quality in a very short period of time. That ultimately led him to write this piece on how they’re produced, detailing the three most common production methods used in no- and low-alcohol brewing in Britain today.

In our conversation, we discuss how these different production methods can impact the flavor of no- and low-alcohol beer, whether this sort of production information is of interest to consumers, and how accessible this information is—or isn’t—from each brewer. We also explore the expectations around these products, from things like pricing and availability to who’s consuming them now and who’s likely to in the future. Here’s Will.

Have we said “pivot” enough lately? What about “omnichannel,” or “innovation”? These words were all thrown around with abandon in 2020, as COVID-19 changed the way we interacted with and bought beer, and dramatically impacted how our favorite breweries did business.

In this conversation, we’re talking with Kelly Moritz about how Minnesota’s Indeed Brewing Company has done some version of all these things, and how it impacted her as she stepped into the role of chief operating officer amidst the pivoting and innovating that was demanded of so many of us last year. Kelly has been with the brewery since 2014 and spent most of her time there coordinating and managing Indeed’s marketing. She’s now overseeing something of an evolution for the company, which is exploring non-beer products like CBD seltzer and hard kombucha.

Starting a new job while your company is moving in different directions—and as you’re trying to figure out how to talk to new and old customers alike—feels like a rather 2020 storyline. But as 2021 unfolds, you’ll hear from Kelly about how she’s considering the successes of last year to help guide the Indeed team in the year to come. You’ll also hear about how her background as a writer and communicator is helping her through all of this.

What’s next for Indeed as it becomes as much a beverage company as a brewery? Let’s find out.

This is Kelly Moritz of Indeed Brewing Company. Listen in.

As a person who makes audio, I'm fascinated by the work that goes on behind the scenes. How does an interviewer ask questions? How do two people find a flow, establish trust, and ultimately uncover special moments and stories that might otherwise never get shared?

For me, doing audio work means leaning into my deeply curious side, and that's what's reflected in my interview with Natalya Watson. Natalya is a new addition to the GBH podcast team—she interviewed Miranda Hudson and Derek Bates from Duration Brewing, and you'll see more of her work on the podcast soon. Natalya has her own show, called Beer With Nat, where she interviews women in the beer industry about their careers. The goal is to demonstrate to others that there's a clear pathway into beer, and that anything they dream of doing is achievable.

The theme of accessibility runs through all of Natalya's work. She also hosts a Virtual Beer School, which helps folks prepare for their Cicerone exams. Many of the materials Natalya makes are free, and the cost for admission to her 12-week program is intentionally set so participants of any financial situation can still take part.

In this interview, we talk about all of these topics, but we also go one step further and examine why Natalya is drawn to the work that she does. She shares her own career history and how she developed a keen interest in communicating with others, and what this says about her as a person. I think towards the end we get a little meta, both reflecting on our interviewing styles—I admit, I am a person who likes to make big connections, and who tries to create ties between who we are and what we put out into the world. This conversation is both fun and fast-paced, vulnerable and reflective—in a way, it's reflective of everything I look for in an interviewing experience. Here's Natalya.

This is Beth Demmon, and you’re listening to the Good Beer Hunting podcast.

At the end of every year, it’s common for publications to put together roundups of notable people who’ve made their mark: who you should read, who you should listen to, who you should follow on social media, and so on. And every year, while those mentioned absolutely merit recognition for their work, some people also deserving of attention inevitably get missed. Any list covering the craft beer industry that doesn’t include Ren Navarro falls short (Good Beer Hunting’s end-of-year Signifiers included). The Canadian beer equity advocate is prominent in conversations on Twitter and Canadian outlets, and her tireless efforts to make beer a better place unquestionably deserve the support and attention of people everywhere.

As a queer Black woman who seeks to educate, enlighten, and engage, Navarro calls herself a “reluctant advocate” as one of the only people in her immediate area to consistently work towards a more equitable beer community. By calling for actions that incorporate intersectionality in diversity efforts and demanding accountability from peers in the craft beer space, she encourages individuals and breweries to embrace uncomfortable revelations that can drive improvement, despite the challenges and feelings these types of conversations may bring up. She mostly works alone, and while the pandemic has disrupted her ability to educate face-to-face, she’s grateful for the transparency and openness that virtual spaces allow for, giving people the opportunity to raise hard questions in a safe, judgment-free way.

In our conversation, we’ll talk about her role in craft beer, how Canada compares—and contrasts—with the United States when it comes to its beer scene, and how social justice movements took off last year and then stagnated. We’ll also discuss the importance of people speaking from within their communities rather than on behalf of a community, how one can earn the title of ally rather than bestow it upon themselves, how concepts like accessibility and inclusion remain closely related, and who she looks to as changemakers of the future. Keep an ear out for numerous new initiatives she has planned for 2021. Navarro knows that we can all do better and be better—now, it’s time to find out how. Listen in.

Over the past year, Good Beer Hunting has maintained an ongoing, weekly newsletter and expert community under our Sightlines Premium banner. As an extension of our newsy Sightlines coverage—anchored by Kate Bernot and myself, Bryan Roth—the goal of Sightlines Premium is to combine objective data and real-world anecdotes to help industry pros from across beer and beverage alcohol make informed decisions about managing a portfolio, how and where they should focus their access to market, and more.

In this episode, you’ll hear myself, editor of Sightlines and Sightlines Premium; GBH founder Michael Kiser; and Sightlines lead reporter Kate Bernot. In our roundtable discussion, we’re focusing on six key storylines from 2020 that we see as impactful in 2021. This kind of analysis is an example of the work we’re doing on Sightlines Premium, but our back-and-forth also hits on the kinds of discussions even casual fans of beer may have heard in the last 12 months.

If you’re leading a company in the beer or alcohol space, Sightlines Premium is for you. Listen out for the kind of direct advice and consultation we offer in our weekly newsletter and online community. For more information, visit goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines-premium.

This is the GBH Sightlines team of myself, Bryan Roth, Kate Bernot, and Michael Kiser. Listen in.

What does it mean to be an outlier? Who are the people in beer taking small steps and hoping to make big changes?  We're excited and thrilled to announce the relaunch of the AltBrau Podcast, now part of the Good Beer Hunting network of shows.

AltBrau is a show that explores the outliers in the world of beer. Join host and GBH contributor Tim Decker, a homebrewer and wild ale collaborator, as he talks with folks from various backgrounds who look at the food and beverage industry through a unique set of eyes. As an aspiring entrepreneur, Tim is always excited to explore various points of view and hopes you join along as he interviews people whose work and passions might indicate a more interesting future. Here's a sneak peek of the first episode with Mike Cruz of Tioga Sequoia Brewery. The AltBrau podcast will release new episodes every Tuesday starting January 12th! Find episodes of the AltBrau podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. 

Some of my favorite stories start small. Usually with a question, perhaps something you ponder passively before it takes you down a rabbit hole full of wild twists and turns, unexpected stories and delights.

David Neimanis had just such an inkling. He's a food and beverage writer, and wanted to know more about the surprising comeback of amaro, or bitter Italian liqueur, which, for decades, had fallen out of favor. Most of our parents probably didn't drink amaro, but our grandparents might well have. David decided to pull on the thread, and try to figure out why something like amaro would have skipped a generation.

A simple question ended up unfolding into an entire piece. David wrote about such generational drinking habits in his article, "The Rise of 'Grandpa Drinks' — Exploring the Old-Fashioned Roots of Modern Drinking Trends," published on our website on December 1, 2020. As part of the story, David delves into his own history with obscure, bitter, European liqueurs—recently, he found himself ordering Riga Black Balsam, which hails from Latvia, and which was a drink favored by his grandfather.

In this conversation, we talk about the nature of curiosity, and how simple questions often unfold in interesting and compelling ways. David didn't necessarily have a grandiose idea or theory about the new popularity of these drinks—he simply asked a question and followed the answers where they took them. His piece is highly inquisitive and honest, and isn't afraid to take a pit stop to explore an interesting tidbit along the way. The resulting story feels like following a winding road full of surprises. Here's David.

You've probably read some version of this article or headline over the past several months: "Here's a lesson we learned during the 1918 flu that we can apply to the current coronavirus pandemic!"

It makes sense that we want to look to history for answers to present-day problems—"history repeats itself" is an old chestnut for a reason. But for some, the inclination to look backwards extends well beyond the 20th century.

Courtney Iseman is a self-described history nerd, and noticed not just similarities between this current moment and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, but also the 14th-century bubonic plague, which killed over half of the European population. Just like now, medieval responses to the black death were largely dependent on social standing—there were those who couldn't afford to not work, those who never left their homes, and those who got the hell out of Dodge, abandoning their homes for less-populated areas.

It helps to look to data and science when dealing with such a unique and scary moment as our current crisis, but it's also helpful to look to stories. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in what is now known as Italy during the height of the plague. The book is a collection of stories that reflected what local life was like at the time, told from the perspective of a group of friends who had fled Florence to escape the disease's devastation. As Courtney points out, you could replace these characters with any number of celebrities or influencers who escaped to their country homes following the spread of COVID-19—just think of today's "private island, all tested negative" memes.

In this conversation, we talk about Courtney's investigation into the subject in her recent piece, "The Plague Mirror — Recognizing Ourselves in Black Death-Era Italy Through The Decameron." Courtney uses The Decameron to show that history presents certain inescapable themes—but that past lessons can also provide a helpful blueprint for navigating contemporary crises. We also talk a little about her background as a writer before jumping in, but then we get right into it, tunneling our way through Boccaccio's illuminating book and then asking each other: What happens when this is all over?"

News flash: 2020 has been a tough one. And yet despite the intense challenges, this year has seen several positive developments, even—and maybe especially—in the world of beer. For example, a couple of truly great books on brewing came out in 2020. The beer world has, slowly but surely, continued to address issues of equity, fairness, and representation. And, on a more personal note, quality Lager has continued its renaissance, despite the crucial issues of the past 11 months.

Andreas Krennmair is the author of one of the best beer books of the year, Vienna Lager, a fantastic history of the most famous beer style to originate in his home country of Austria. He also wrote an earlier book, Historic German and Austrian Beers for the Home Brewer, which introduced obscure, often extinct Old World beer styles like Mannheimer Braunbier, Merseburger Bier, and Horner Bier to English-speaking readers, along with recipes for how to brew them.

In this episode, I’m talking with Andreas about the history of Vienna Lager, which includes legendary names from European brewing like Gabriel Sedlmayr of the Spaten brewery in Munich, as well as Anton Dreher of the Klein-Schwechat brewery in Vienna, the inventor of Vienna Lager. (A side note: At one point I misidentify Andreas as being from Vienna himself, when he’s actually from Linz, Austria, as you’ll hear him explain. Apologies to Andreas for the mistake.) For this conversation I’m calling in from my home in Prague, Czech Republic, and Andreas is speaking from where he lives in Berlin, Germany.

Here’s Andreas Krennmair, author of Vienna Lager. Listen in.

COVID-19 has changed a lot in our lives, including when and how we choose to consume alcohol. But there continue to be misconceptions about our beer-buying habits this year—and the beer styles that we’ve been gravitating to.

Low-alcohol beer has been a hot topic recently, but does the narrative around those products—one of crescendoing interest and growth—translate to reality? Over the last couple years on Good Beer Hunting, we’ve explored how sales have changed for higher-ABV beers, too, and in this episode we’re going to dig a bit deeper into how the mixed fortunes of these market segments are playing out during the pandemic.

In this series of the GBH podcast, we ask members of our team to enter the realm of audio storytelling. Most of us are familiar with the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” right? But now, we're challenging our contributors to actually write down those words, and to create pictures of the world around them as told in their own voices. With that in mind, you’re about to hear different stories read aloud by members of our editorial team. Think of each brief narrative as a snapshot of a moment, like an audio version of the b-Roll series on our website.

In this installment of A Thousand Words, we wanted to talk about home. In some way, everyone’s definition of home has changed this year. We asked our writers to share their thoughts on what their new normal looks like—and how their relationship to the spaces they inhabit and the places they love has morphed. From total lockdowns to recent moves, from newfound stillness to a house full of dogs, home has no one definition, no one spot you can pinpoint on a map. Instead, home is a relationship between yourself and the places and people that have made you who you are.

Each storyteller will introduce themselves before jumping into their own anecdote. We hope you can visualize every vignette, and immerse yourself in the pictures they’re painting for you.

This is A Thousand Words, a collection of audio stories. Listen in.

Welcome to the Sightlines podcast. I’m Jonny Garrett.

On July 21, barely three weeks after the U.K.’s hospitality industry and pubs came out of lockdown, the government announced it would be raising the amount of alcohol tax paid by small breweries. The backlash was immediate and furious, but it wasn’t only against the government. The anger was also aimed at a group of larger breweries that had campaigned for the tax rise.

Let that sink in for a moment: A group of businesses successfully campaigned for higher taxes within their own industry, specifically for up-and-coming competitors. To work out how it came to this, we need to take a step back.

It starts with a bill known as Small Brewers Relief (SBR), which was put into law in 2002. The bill gives all U.K. breweries smaller than 5,000 hectoliters (about 4,300 U.S. barrels) of annual production a 50% reduction in their alcohol tax. Beyond that volume, as the brewery grows, that reduction tapers off to zero.

Almost since the bill’s inception, some owners of breweries above the 5,000hl threshold have claimed the system gives small brewers an unfair pricing advantage. Meanwhile, those below see SBR as a lifeline without which new breweries would be unable to survive and grow.

After around five years of campaigning for reform and a two-year research project by the U.K. Treasury, the larger breweries—under an alliance called the Small Brewers Duty Reform Coalition—have won. The new rules mean small breweries will pay more tax starting at 2,100hl, which would immediately increase alcohol duty payments for around 150 existing businesses—by as much as £50,000 ($67,500) a year.

The Coalition believes the move will increase the price they can charge wholesalers for their beer, but they also say that it will encourage more growth among small breweries. They reason that starting the tax taper at a lower threshold—at 2,100hl—will remove what campaigners call the “cliff-edge” at 5,000hl, when duty payments suddenly start to escalate and making profit becomes significantly tougher.

Those small breweries, however, believe lowering the threshold will just limit their growth earlier, and see the move as a land grab by powerful brewing companies worried about the growth of craft beer beneath them.

In the wake of the news, several industry commentators called for drinkers to boycott the companies leading the charge for reform, including national brands like Timothy Taylor’s Brewery, Harvey’s Brewery, Wye Valley Brewery, and Hogs Back Brewery.

Beer can be political, and Small Brewers Relief has brought divisions within the industry into sharp focus, asking fundamental questions of who needs and deserves financial support in these difficult times: the historical, traditional breweries, or the new startups? How much should the state prop up private businesses? Is growth always the goal? And how sustainable is pricing in the industry, particularly around cask beer?

In this episode, we’ll talk to brewery owners on both sides of the argument, and will get the views of the economist who cowrote the academic paper that helped Small Brewers Relief come into being in the first place. You’ll hear how both sides have valid points to make—and that neither Small Brewers Relief nor any reforms of it have much hope of solving the industry’s underlying problems.

This is the Sightlines podcast. Listen in.

This week’s guest is a long-time industry friend of mine from back when he and I worked tougher to help launch Stony Creek Brewery in Branford, Connecticut. He had just left his sales gig at Blue Point Brewing, and I was only a couple of years into launching Good Beer Hunting’s studio and strategy practice.

With his energy and insight, we became fast friends.

Jamal Robinson is the sales director for a fast-growing powerhouse called New England Brewing Co., or NEBCO as you’ll hear him call it. And despite all his previous his growth and success, this year turned out to be a year of radical transformation.

And today’s conversation is about that transformation—but also where it’s lead in a very short amount of time.

Stemming from the social unrest following the murder of George Floyd and many others, Jamal, himself a Black man, started looking both within and without at the community. He looked towards the Connecticut community, the Black community, and the brewing community. And he started to share what he saw.

That lead to a series of conversations and conversions. I’ll never forget the moment Jamal called me to tell me that he finally found the words he needed to lead a conversation within the brewery—a conversation not about politics or activism, things that terrify many small business owners afraid to jump into the fray, but about community. And he found those words in an article by Kate Bernot, called “Say It Out Loud — Who Do Breweries Talk About When They Talk About ‘Community’?”

When Jamal told me that story, and the profound reframe it helped him bring to his team, we both got a bit emotional. But that was just the beginning.

Now he’s kicking off a scholarship program, with the help of his employer and the Connecticut Brewers Guild lead by Phil Pappas, who is also on this episode. They worked with Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, to establish an endowment with the potential to fund a scholarship program that will outlive everyone involved.

In a year that saw some incredible new initiatives begin from powerful players like Dr. J Nikol Beckham of CraftxEDU and the Brewers Association, and Garret Oliver, the Brooklyn Brewmaster who started the Michael Jackson Foundation, in my mind, no one is punching above their weight quite as far as Jamal.

This is Jamal Robinson of New England Brewing Co. and Phil Pappasof the Connecticut Brewers Guild. Listen in.

We hear it all the time: Craft beer is a "community" where folks can come together to socialize, grab a beer, and let loose. But what happens when that "community" isn't as inclusive as it sounds—and when you're stuck watching the industry you love tout its openness while you encounter barrier after barrier to entry?

Holly Regan is a longtime writer, and in their first story for Good Beer Hunting—a critical, two-part piece called "All In the (Chosen) Family"—they ask the question: "Why are queer people continuously erased from craft beer—and how can that change?" Holly has a background in anthropology, and prior to writing this article series, they set to work developing a survey to collect data and stories from hundreds of respondents within the beer industry. The results illuminate the myriad struggles that queer folks experience in beer, and which the wider industry has failed to address.

The idea of erasure is key. It's easy to say something like, "All are welcome here," and proclaim a space to be inclusive. But Holly rejects that simplistic approach, and uses their survey's results to demonstrate that efforts to make beer a welcoming place must be continuous and proactive. In writing this story, Holly also recounts their own experiences with erasure, and how simply being well-intentioned is not enough.

Holly's piece is exhaustive and ambitious, as well as deeply personal. They cite the advice of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, as a source of inspiration: "Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us ... Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner."

This is Holly Regan. Listen in.

Note: At the end of the episode, Holly talks about a group they've started for queer folks in beer, The Rainbow Boots Interest Group, which you can learn more about here.

Julia Herz has been a notable figure in craft beer for nearly two decades. Much of that time was spent as the face of the Craft Beer Program at the Brewers Association. Her diminutive stature contrasts with her comparatively monumental influence in the industry: in that role, she was a familiar face at beer festivals and conferences like the Craft Brewers Conference and BeerNow Conference; she helped helm online publications like CraftBeer.com; and even wrote a 2015 book with Gwen Conley titled Beer Pairing: The Essential Guide from the Pairing Pros.

Like the rest of us, Herz was caught off guard by the arrival of COVID-19, and again when she and two dozen other BA employees were laid off in June. But rather than stagnate in what she calls “career, interrupted,” she hit the road to both coasts on a series of Vision Quests, visiting breweries across the United States in a safe (and socially distanced) way.

By navigating that unexpected hard left turn in her work, Herz embarked on a brand-new journey to consult, mentor, and educate through her new LLC, HerzMuses Enterprises. By leveraging her massive network of brewery owners and employees, she says her goal is to “teach and inspire,” as well as provide solutions to brands and causes that move her. From her behind-the-scenes perspective, she’s laying the foundation of her new venture with relationships in mind, and for the first time, on her own. I had the chance to sit down with Julia—masked, outside, and over a pint—at Second Chance Beer Company in San Diego to get the inside scoop on her state of mind before recording this podcast episode.

We talked about her past and future, her work as part of a national team and now as a solo artist, what it’s like to be on the ground during COVID, and how these Vision Quests have shaped her in surprising ways. I got to know what drives her, what changed her, and what she has planned next.

This is Julia Herz. Listen in.

Who are you without work? If you went to a party and introduced yourself to someone new, what would you talk about if you couldn't ask them about their job?

Work is a tricky subject. We find so much validation in—and center so much of our identities around—the jobs we hold, but what happens when those jobs go away? Good Beer Hunting staff writer Beth Demmon explored this question and more in her latest piece, "Work, Worth, and Wreckage — When Your Job Is Your Life, What Happens When You Lose It?" which was published on our website on November 18, 2020.

In this episode, I chat with Beth about what it meant to write this story. Sure, the problem of deriving our self-worth from our work feels especially timely right now, but Beth's article goes beyond the present. She asks not only how we got here, but also looks at who is getting left behind when we equate professional success with personal value—particularly within the context of the beer industry.

What's exceptionally poignant about interviewing Beth is that she's not immune to these feelings, either. Not to be glib, but 2020 was supposed to be her year. And as the pandemic crushed opportunities and erased pathways, Beth herself had to contend with her own changing course—and figure out why it made her feel so goddamn awful.

Just a quick note, there are perhaps more curse words in this episode than usual, so you may want to save this for a moment when younger listeners aren't around. 

I’m not making a radical statement here, as we enter the final weeks of 2020, when I say it’s been hard. Both for individuals and as a collective society. January always offers hopeful promises of new experiences and excitement, but by February of this year, things had already gone downhill thanks to COVID-19’s ill-fated arrival. That was before Americans had also rightfully turned their attention toward issues of social injustice this summer.

Time and time again, these themes and topics are addressed by telling the stories of the impacted people and businesses. That’s true in publications like Good Beer Hunting, all the way up to the mainest of mainstream media outlets, like CNN and USA Today.

But the reason these stories continue to get told—and why they still carry such meaning—are the humans behind the anecdotes. In this conversation, we’re going to hear about these topics and more in an oral history from Lucious Wilson. He first reflects on adjusting business plans during a pandemic, and then trying to process a season of protest after the killing of George Floyd.

Wilson is general manager for Wedge Brewing Company in Asheville, North Carolina, and he’s also a self-proclaimed “rebel” who likes to disc golf and skateboard. He’s spent a career in food and beverage that began well before Asheville was known as “Beer City, USA,” and he’s also a man inspired by the women in his life, like his wife and sister. Even when his employees and peers didn’t know what to do, or how to process all that 2020 changed in regards to doing business and interacting with the world, you’ll hear him talk about the importance of being a leader, and what it means to him to be able to inhabit a role like that.

As a brewery making about 1,000 barrels of beer a year, and primarily focused on its home market, Wedge Brewing is not a household name across the country. But my hope is that by joining me for this conversation with Lucious, you’ll have reason to celebrate one more person and business that’s worked hard to be their best in a shitty year. And maybe the stories you’re about to hear will offer you another human to root for, too.

This is Lucious Wilson of Wedge Brewing. Listen in.

Our Beer and a Shot series, made in partnership with Miller High Life, asks our contributors to get to know a city. Each piece brings together a bartender and a spirit to tell the story of a particular locale—and uses the relationship between the two to characterize residents' unique drinking styles and preferences. As a result, the reader gets to see into the heart of a place through an intimate lens—and discover a perspective that's otherwise the province of locals and longtime residents.

Freelance spirits, entertainment, and lifestyle writer Gabrielle Pharms contributed the latest entry to our Beer and a Shot series, and she brought together two things you might not necessarily associate with each other: Texas and whiskey.

Though whiskey is most commonly linked with states like Tennessee and Kentucky, the Lone Star State is becoming a key destination for the spirit—bourbon in particular.

For Gabrielle, who is a Houston native but now lives in Austin, this change is exciting. She’s a longtime whiskey fan, and was the person who, even in her early twenties, felt comfortable drinking bourbon neat. Her perspective reveals just as much about a state’s changing alcohol identity as it does the bartender and spirit she profiles—in this case, Kelsey Caudebec of The Tigress Pub and Milam & Greene Distillery.

Here’s Gabrielle.