December 07, 2019

112: Tim Matthews of Canarchy and Oskar Blues Dives Deep on Brewing With Malt and Hops

1 hour 8 minutes

An 11 year veteran of Oskar Blues, Tim Matthews now holds the lofty title of VP of Global Brewing for the Canarchy Craft Brewery Collective, where he's hyper focused on improving everything from product innovation to ingredient sourcing and grower/broker relationships. In this episode, he discusses their process of reinvention for popular beers, and what they've learned about the impacts of various ingredients and processes in the brewhouse.

From the four year process of retooling Mama's Little Yella Pils to protein content shifts in barley (“Don’t get romantically involved with barley varieties") to how flavors expressed in raw hops reflect in finished beers, Matthews gets technical and nuanced in discussing beer ingredients. Along the way, he touches on important cultural trends such as breweries pursuing exclusive hops (“What brewers should not look for is their own special hop. Don’t do that. It’s too much pressure on yourself. You want a hop that works for everybody, and that means the growers, the brokers, and the brewers. And that’s plural ‘brewers.’ Not just you, not just Canarchy, but all of craft beer. You want it to be proliferated across the entire industry so it’s sustainable.”)

He also discusses the way their yeast program is evolving, and offers up thoughts about next trends in beer (“Big, dark, and malty is next"). There's a lot to unpack in this information-dense episode, so grab a beer and listen in.

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