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The New Zealand Beer Awards’ reigning champion microbrewer punches above his weight class, with medal-winning lagers produced unconventionally in a small brewpub where time definitely equals money. But he’s also pushing boundaries with localized takes—as with a tart, sparkling harvest ale that combines country’s signature white-wine grape with its signature hop.

• Podcast

Draft, can, growler, or bomber? From our Best in Beer 2024 Readers’ Choice Survey—and compared to recent years—here’s how you answered the question, “How do you prefer to buy your favorite craft beers?”

• Best in Beer
• Packaging
• Infographic

In this clip from their webinar, Berkeley Yeast VP of product strategy Anthony Bledsoe gets into ways to adjust the mouthfeel of nonalcoholic beers, as well as the importance of benchtop testing and experimenting with downstream adjustments.

• Video
• Video Tip
• Sponsored

One of the most industrialized parts of Germany has a surprising farmhouse brewing tradition, but information about it is scarce. Based on interviews with surviving farmhouse brewers, conducted in the 1950s by the Folklore Commission of Westphalia, here’s our attempt at a recipe. We also include some variations in the notes below.

• Beer Recipe
• Farmhouse Ale
• Smoked Beer

Farmhouse brewing was once common across much of Europe, though documentation can be scarce. Here’s what we know about a surprising and little-known rural brewing tradition in northwest Germany.

• Style School
• Farmhouse Ale
• Traditional Ale

From our Love Handles files on the world’s great beer bars: This shop and tasting room in Brooklyn, New York, offers deep knowledge and a place to chill while exploring the magic of great beer.

• Love Handles
• New York City

Brewers outside New Zealand tend to associate its hops with IPA, but for more than 30 years, Kiwi brewers have been making their own kind of pilsner using the homegrown harvest. In this episode, the head brewer at Mount—home of the award-winning Mountie Pilsner—shares the keys to finding balance and drinkability in a cool-pooled, dry-hopped lager of 45 IBUs.

• Podcast

Flavor extracts and WONFs—additives “with other natural flavors”—could both have a place in the making of a great fruit beer, says Urban Artifact’s Bret Kollman Baker. But it helps to have a deft hand and clear communication with your supplier.

• Video
• Video Tip
• Fruit

From Josh Brengle and his team at Cervecera Hércules in Querétaro, Mexico, here’s a recipe for the export stout that won gold at the 2024 World Beer Cup—plus, a method for adding fresh wort at packaging for a beer that lives longer in the bottle, cask, or keg.

• Beer Recipe
• All Access Recipe
• Stout

From the team at Silver Reef in St. George, Utah, here’s a homebrew-scale recipe for the smoked lager that won gold at the 2024 World Beer Cup.

• Beer Recipe
• Rauchbier
• Smoked Beer

This fifth-generation hop farmer has watched craft beer pull New Zealand’s hop-growing industry back from the brink, and today he and his team are using experience, data, and more sophisticated tools to optimize their varieties for the different types of brewers who use them.

• Podcast

Hops, like people, are incredibly diverse. Countless breweries have successfully combined high-alpha hops to craft excellent beers, yet an untapped group of low-alpha hops has yet to be explored. To satisfy a broad consumer palate and to broaden the reach of craft, is it time for a new IPA paradigm?

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