Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Our annual issue on the very Best in Beer today hits subscribers alongside this special, once-per-year episode of the Craft Beer & Brewing podcast. Hosts Jamie Bogner and Joe Stange reveal results from our annual Readers’ Choice survey—including your favorite breweries, beers, bars, and destination cities—as well as our Best 20 Beers in 2024, decided through a year of blind judging, and finally culminating in careful consideration by our editorial team, including Stan Hieronymus and Kate Bernot.

It’s an episode filled with insight, experiences, trends, memories, and even a few hot takes, as we take a closer look at the absolute Best in Beer today.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

At the recent Brewer’s Retreat at Dogfish Head in Milton, Delaware, Steve Parker of Fidens (Albany, New York), Scott Janish of Sapwood Cellars (Columbia, Maryland), and Kelsey McNair of North Park (San Diego) answer questions about brewing hazy or New England–style IPA. In this episode, they discuss:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

In this special episode recorded at the recent Craft Beer & Brewing Brewer’s Retreat at Dogfish Head in Milton, Delaware, Khris Johnson of Green Bench (St. Petersburg, Florida), Doug Reiser of Burial (Asheville, North Carolina), and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River (Windsor, California) share their answers to attendees’ questions about brewing IPA—focusing on the American and West Coast styles.

Along the way, they discuss:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

As a trained food scientist with 20 years of experience in the field, Eric Tennant entered the brewing world with a bit more background than most. And that background has served him well, as he considers both ingredients and processes required to achieve the beer flavors he envisions. Over the past few years, he’s focused Benchtop around foeder-aged lagers, but the constraints of the small brewery have led to a number of innovative process solutions. The techniques that he applies are making award-winning beer, too—Benchtop just recently took home a silver medal in Zwickelbier or Kellerbier at GABF, and their barrel-aged barleywine, Old Wooden Ship, was one of Craft Beer & Brewing’s 20 best beers of 2023.

In this episode, Tennant discusses:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

This second of two episodes recorded live at 3 Sons Lumberjack Day in September includes two separate interviews. First up is Alex Lawes, cofounder of Dublin, Ireland’s Whiplash—a modern brewery known for progressive styles, but also one that focuses on making those styles in low-ABV form for repeat drinkability. Next up is Grzegorz Ziemian, cofounder of Stu Mostów, a decade-old brewery in Wrocław, Poland, and one of several in that country that helped usher in a new wave of excitement for craft beer.

Through the discussion, among other topics, Lawes touches on:

Meanwhile, Ziemian discusses:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

In Oakland Park, Florida, Brewlihan meadery sits in rarified air atop Untappd's list of top breweries in the world. Their rabid fan base has propelled them to No. 5—as of this recording—a ranking that founder John Hoolihan doesn't take for granted, as he continually applies science and chemistry to balance flavor, acidity, gravity, and tannin. In this episode, recorded live during the 3 Sons Lumberjack Day festival, Hoolihan discusses:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

As Andrew Foss of Human Robot says in this episode, “Perfection is pretty easy. To make something interesting is hard.”

Those are easy words to say and harder words to brew by, but the Philadelphia brewer strives for character over lager “cleanliness,” eschewing the “crispy” moniker while searching for something more substantial. To accomplish that goal, he uses every tool at their disposal—mash and decoction regimens, a direct-fire brewhouse, a number of different fermentation schedules, and more. Character, after all, requires intention and effort, and not just homogeneity or simplicity.

In this episode, Foss talks about:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

While Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River need little introduction, the grain they’ve grown fond of brewing with—an African millet known as fonio—may be unfamiliar to many brewers. In this episode, these two brewing legends discuss the grain’s background, as well as how and why they’ve used it in a series of new beers produced for the Brewing for Impact project. Along the way, Oliver and Cilurzo touch on:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Paul Schneider of Cinderlands is an optimist and a realist—but first and foremost he’s an analyst, studying the evolution of consumer trends and working tirelessly in the brewhouse to find creative and process solutions. He’s not afraid to use all the tools at his disposal—pulling solutions from food science, where necessary—while testing, honestly evaluating, and ensuring that everything they produce at Cinderlands meets the expectations of their drinkers.

The Pittsburgh brewery drastically overhauled its fruit beer program for 2024, moving away from sweeter, thicker fruit beers in favor of flavored light lagers and “beyond beer” beverages, but—as Schneider explains in this episode—that shift required significant research in the food-science space. He’s also been an avid adopter of modern hop products, and here he shares their approach to layering hops in a variety of formats to achieve a variety of goals—from value-engineering IPAs for wider distribution to maximizing intensity in brewery-only releases.

Over the course of the episode, Schneider riffs on:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Great Lakes in Cleveland is an American craft beer institution—a brewery that got its start in the late ’80s, when the concept of smaller breweries still seemed foreign to most drinkers. Now, 36 years later, the scale is much larger than it was in those early days on the seven-barrel pub system—yet some of those early brands persevere. While those beers inevitably evolve amid shifts in scale and tastes, the core ideas that inform them haven’t changed.

In this episode, longtime brewmaster Mark Hunger and co-CEO Steven Pauwels, the former brewmaster at Kansas City’s Boulevard, talk about that evolution as well as new developments in hop-forward beers. Along the way, they touch on:

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

Support Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast