Jamie Bogner

With back-to-back GABF gold medals in festbier—as well as a GABF silver and a CB&B 99 score for helles—this long-running brewpub has found ways to work past their technical limitations and build characterful precision in small-scale lagers.

• Podcast

Tonya Cornett and Ian Larkin have been brewing medal-winning beers together, apart, and together again through three different breweries, but they’re constantly reinventing their pathways to success, just as they’re consistently tweaking their medal-winning beers.

• Podcast
• Brewing for Competition
• Berliner Weisse

How do you take an existing yeast variety that has grown up in a particular environment for a century or more and make it better for styles brewers are brewing, the hops they’re brewing with, and the cellars they ferment in today? In this episode, Chris White of White Labs, Richard Preiss of Escarpment Labs, and Justin Clouthier of Willibald Brewing share the methods at play and the work behind developing then learning and optimizing the new Suava strain.

• Podcast

Headquartered just outside of Bend, Oregon, this production brewery and multi-location brewpub has quietly grown into a powerhouse in a region that’s full of them. And refinement is the name of their game, whether they’re brewing Alpha King–winning double IPA or rice lager with basil, cucumber, and yuzu.

• Podcast

Forget last year’s hot side versus cold side social media debate. The real issue, says Trap Door head brewer Jake Watt, is the seasonal creep that’s pushing out fresh-hopped beers before the most compelling hops are even ready to be harvested. But ask him which methods he uses to hop these beers dubbed “fresh,” and he’ll answer, “all of the above, and more.”

• Podcast

Through a series of projects and papers, these two respected researchers are shedding new light on how hops age, how variety impacts that aging, how conditions such as temperature and oxygen affect hops, and more. An important takeaway: There’s more life in two-, three-, or four-year-old hop lots than we may have previously thought.

• Podcast

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, nothing seems more fitting than to take a look back at the earliest days of American brewing in the revolutionary era, guided by two brewers who’ve done the historical work and found ways to make that history relevant in our modern beer context.

• Podcast

Delicious fried chicken and an artful take on comfort food may be the primary draws for this Colorado restaurant chain, but the award-winning beer is no afterthought. With six top-flight medals over the past six years, they’re proving that smaller beers designed to be enjoyed with food have an enduring place in craft brewing.

• Podcast

For this Bay Area California brewer, the keys to better helles and West Coast IPA unlocked as he stripped away burdensome processes and ingredients and simplified recipes and techniques to their core essentials.

• Podcast

The cofounders of this small central California brewery have intentionally limited their scope to lager—but that doesn’t mean they sacrifice breadth or experimentation, as they tinker with everything from traditional styles to hazy pale lager.

• Podcast
• Lager
• Hazy Lager

Harnessing data from disparate brewery systems is easier now than ever before, and predictive tools and AI-powered systems are within reach even for small breweries. In this episode, we explore how breweries can use this data effectively to avoid costly downtime.

• Podcast
• Brightly26

While many brewers in North America have leaned into saisons with dialed-up flavors—with more acidity, plentiful phenolics, and big Brett—this small and focused brewery in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood tones it down and shapes it up to make lighter, drier beers that drink full, glass after glass.

• Podcast