Wait for It! (Fall 2026)

Eric Toft, brewmaster at Private Landbrauerei Schönram in Upper Bavaria, shares these parameters for their Dunkel—a four-time gold winner at the European Beer Star competition, most recently in 2025.

A carefully added spice tincture and a splash of pomegranate juice bring festive flavor to this comforting ale perfect for the winter holidays.

An important underlying principle when using spices: Don’t throw in the kitchen sink. A winter beer should still taste like beer, and too many spices or too much alcohol can quickly hinder drinkability.

The cofounder of Chicago’s Hop Butcher for the World shares a sixer of liquids that blew open his views on what beer could be.

From Jean-Phillippe Lalonde, founder and brewer at Brasserie Silo in Montréal, here’s a recipe for the dunkel that scored a 99 with our blind-tasting panel, going on to be named one of our Best 20 Beers in 2025.

Bavaria’s original lager demands a balancing act that can make us all better brewers.

Whitney Burnside—cofounder and brewmaster at Grand Fir in Portland, Oregon—shares this recipe for the West Coast pils that won silver in the 2026 World Beer Cup.

Volatile, fleeting, and polarizing, sulfur compounds are as welcomed in certain forms as they are reviled in others. And with the rise of hop-forward lagers, brewers are targeting their presence or absence with increasing precision.

Used with care, quality sansho pepper can deliver potent citrus character with only the slightest Sichuan-like tingle. From Open Air Brewing in Kobe, Japan, this Sansho Gose won gold at the 2025 World Beer Cup.

Quality dried sansho might be a magic powder with magic powers, tingling our brains while boosting crowd-pleasing citrus flavors—but with great power comes great responsibility.

You have a lot of flexibility here with the specific ingredients, especially the hops—just about any Noble (or Noble-ish) variety should work well in either addition. Play around with it: Much like an American amber ale, the malty backbone is forgiving, and there are a lot of ways to get this right.

The “keeping beers” of French Flanders can be found in a spectrum running from blonde to brown—with corresponding shifts in the hops-malt balance—but *ambrée* is arguably the classic hue.

From cerebral reading to Espresso Herbtini, here are a few fresh suggestions from our editorial team.

Also known as the Osmička, or Eight, this is Unětický’s lighter summer seasonal checks in at about 3.4 percent ABV. Unusually for a Czech pale lager, it gets a step-infusion mash—not a decoction—and a hit of Citra hops in the whirlpool.

Smaller Czech breweries are embracing an emerging trend: lighter lagers of 7°P and 8°P, packed with hops and often brewed in ways that defy the country’s usual methods.