Good Beer Hunting

This summer, I had the pleasure of visiting Atlanta, Georgia where one of GBH’s newest voices, Austin L. Ray, calls home. Whenever I bring on a new writer, I tend to fly out and spend some time with them, hitting their favorite spots, shooting breweries they want to tell stories about, and getting a real sense of the place through their eyes. And that’s because I don’t just want beer writers on GBH — I want people with a perspective and a connection to the beer in their backyard. Austin was a wonderful host, and his love of Atlanta’s unique past and present comes through in the way he writes about beer — but also music, local history, and other cultural threads he tends to explore. We spent the better part of Memorial Day weekend visiting some of the area’s oldest and newest breweries, one of them in their very first week of operation, bouncing between Athens, Decatur, and greater Atlanta. We spent time in bars, restaurants, even at a backyard BBQ at the home of one of the area’s best chefs. I’ve never had a better, more personable guide to a city’s food and beverage culture. Along the way, we turned on the mics and had a conversation with these brewers and beer industry folks, trying to get at the heart of what makes beer in Georgia tick. At the end I sat down with Austin himself to reflect on it all. And I’m excited about the stories he’ll be sharing on GBH in the months following.

Khris Johnson is the founding brewer of Green Bench Brewing in St Petersburg Florida. I met Khris at Cigar City’s Hunahpu's Day this year and the beer he shared with me was spectacular. Lots of funky, tart, wine barrel aged beers. Beautifully nuanced, low abv, these were some of the most refined beers I had all day. Now his beers are being distributed by Shelton Brothers into cities like Denver, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Depending on your market, It’s hard to sell these kinds of beers. Just ask Ron Jeffries, the founder of Jolly Pumpkin in Dexter, Michigan. He’s had to ship his amazing wild ales all over the world to find their niche audience. For the rest of us, that’s a good thing, and I was excited to have Khris in the studio with some of his best stuff. He’s a great guy, he speaks candidly, and his enthusiasm is addictive.

Jeremy Danner is one of the many brewers at Boulevard brewing in Kansas City. While he may be a small part of a big team down there, for many beer geeks and professionals, he’s the face and voice of the brewery due to his voluminous use of Twitter. He answers questions, picks fights, trolls with the best of them, and gets trolled right back, and this all adds up to Boulevard having one of the most visible and compelling voices in beer, which is saying something for a brewery that otherwise plays it pretty straight. Danner has taken on some of the biggest issues in beer, seemingly trying to convince one drinker at a time that mergers and acquisitions can be a good thing after Duvel Moortgat bought the brewery a few years ago. We get in to that discussion during this episode of course. But here’s something worth noting. This interview took place about 3 hours before the announcement that Duvel also bought Firestone Walker last week. We don’t mention that on the air of course — it hadn’t happened yet, at least officially, and Danner couldn’t reveal. But suffice it to say that he was well aware at the time that the deal was going down, and many of his comments are informed by that reality.

Kevin Lemp of 4 Hands Brewery in St Louis drove up to Chicago and bought some of his very best. His Prussia Berlinerweisse, Superflare brett IPA, and Cuvee Ange, the wine barrel aged wild ale. We had an amazing night tasting through these beers, and digging in to his back story during a live audience recording. Kevin is regarded as one of the smartest guys in the business by anyone who knows him. He came from the wine world, specifically on the sales side, and when he decided to open his own brewery, he put all that experience to work in a town that had yet to see its full renaissance. A few short years later, and he’s about to ramp up in a number of ways. A rapidly expanding barrel program, adding new capacity, a tasting room refresh, a lab, and a new second space in the city for his creative team. He’s got a lot going on, and you’re going to hear about a whole lot more in this chat.

Patrick Rue has been making some of the most ambitious beers in the US for years, and he’s inspired any number of breweries since to try the Belgian thing, which remains a long haul in a country that’s obsessed with pale malt hoppy beers with zero yeast character. He didn’t have a lot of models to learn from when he took the leap into small batch brewing, and now so many are following in his footsteps. Alongside him today is John Barley of Solemn Oath Brewery in Naperville, Illinois, who is one of those breweries. When John was starting up, he collected business plans from anyone who would share them, he hired a brewer who wanted to play with Belgian yeast and hops, and rallied his family around him to join the start-up brewery game. Three years in and he’s a growing production brewery, perpetually on the cusp of compelling a major expansion. These two coulnd’t be more different, and their breweries have little in common other than their inspiration point. But they were attracted to each other — Patrick came to town so they could make a beer together, and after this conversation they went to The Hopleaf and shared in a pretty wonderful beer dinner together. It was a pretty productive visit all around.

I was invited to visit Vermont this time around by Matt Canning. Matt is a bit of a local beer expert. He’s also a concierge and operations manager at Hotel Vermont in Burlington. He’s one of those guys that’s running around making sure every guest has everything they need, and then working furiously behind the scenes to hook up the state’s beer tourists with some pretty incredible experiences. Brewer tours, tastings, educational outings. He’s putting together something pretty special at the hotel — and it’s all built around beer. So when he offered to put me up for a few days and help me get to know Vermont beer through his eyes, I was certainly happy to oblige. Most of my travels are similarly ambitious. But I had no idea that it was Matt that would be putting me through the ringer. You’ll hear from: Matt Canning of Hotel Vermont Shaun Hill of Hill Famstead Jamie Griffith and Allen Van Anda of Lost Nation Brewing Matt Wilson of Zero Gravity Craft Brewery Maegan Gorton of Switchback Brewing Co. Paul Hale of Queen City Brewery Kris Nelson and Bryan Holmes of Citizen Cider Brian Eckert of Four Quarters Brewing

So while new breweries are popping up all over the world and converting cultures, the import market in the US remains complex. But in addition to strong European favorites from the UK, Belgium, and France, we’re now seeing American-inspired beers coming back to us from around the globe. It’s a strange reversal of the tide. Today we’re going to hear from one of those importers, Austin Clar, of Sublime Imports. They specialize in beers from two regions, Spain and Israel. Both represent emerging craft beer markets, heavily influenced by the US, but in the case of Spain in particular, that American influence is integrating with a deep culinary heritage, wine making, and areas famous for their ciders. We got together at the GBH studio in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood for a conversation, and a tasting, and we invited about 20 of our readers to join us. And we drank a bunch of fantastic beers from Spain and Israel. And Austin will help us all understand why.

Sam Calagione has been in Chicago for a long time. Long before he was in over 30 states and had a national slice of craft beer’s mindshare, Sam was a fledgling brand out of Delaware making his way from one bar to the next in the windy city. Sam has grown up to play a number of roles for craft beer. He became a board member at the brewers association, the host of an inspiring if ill-fated TV show called Brewmasters, and he’s sort of adopted the unofficial role of ambassador for all of craft. That gets you a certain amount of unassailable respect in this industry - and it gets you some criticism as well. Craft brewers are a sort of iconoclastic bunch that way. There’s no royal blood in this industry. But whether Sam’s being applauded or criticized, he handles it all with an aplomb that tells you he takes the issues of craft brewers very very seriously, but never himself. Unannounced, Sam was in town again recently and swung by the studio to share a new beer and catch up. I couldn’t have been happier to see his shining face and show him around the new digs here in Logan Square. Of course, I flipped the switch on the mics, and had ourselves a podcast.

Randy doesn’t know this, but the first time I saw him I was sitting at the bar at Goose Island’s Clybourn brewpub when a white-haired man walked in and sat down across from me and ordered a beer. I flipped back to the cover of the book I was reading, Tasting Beer, and there he was in miniature. That’s when I discovered that Randy Mosher lived in my new hometown of Chicago, and yeah, we drank beer at the same place. It was one of my nerdier fanboy moments in beer, and I was hooked. Eight years later, I would have the opportunity to work alongside Randy Mosher, helping develop new beer brands like Forbidden Root and 5 Rabbit, putting my brand strategy experience to work behind his creative abilities. It’s been rewarding to find my niche in the beer world, or rather niches plural, and the more I got to know Randy over the years, the more I realized that his career in beer was similarly diverse. He’s an author, a homebrewer, a recipe consultant, and a graphic artist. Randy has two new books coming out, Beer for All Seasons, which is a sort of 101 on what and when to drink certain styles. and Mastering Homebrew, a beautifully designed, encyclopedic approach to the flavors, ingredients, and recipes of brewing on a personal scale. So I asked Randy to visit the studio, open a few beers he's helped develop, and have a conversation about his life in beer, which is the stuff of legend for us Chicagoans. And I’m excited to share him with you all. But mostly, I want to ask him, "why didn’t you start a brewery?" Let’s find out.

We’ve all been hearing about how competitive craft beer is getting, how hard it is to get tap handles and retail space, especially in a market like Chicago that’s flooded with breweries from both costs, plenty of European imports, not to mention our own booming production environment with everything from start-up nanos, to Goose Island, to rapidly developing suburban breweries with plenty of space to grow. Theres few markets as jam-packed as Chicago right now. But what does that really mean on the sales side? What’s it like to deal with so many new brands and new pressures, to perform. It’s partly an embarrassment of riches for retailers right now. But with that comes the hidden pressure to be loyal, or sometimes the explicit pressure to play favorites. And sometimes, it also means that retailers are gatekeeper to a huge market, and breweries and distributors are happy to pay for the the chance to play on your stage. Today we’re going to talk to a relatively fresh face in Chicagoland’s retail scene. Way out in Elgin, IL Alan and Breanne Moreno started a taproom unlike anything the area had ever seen. It’s a beer desert out there, and they appear like a mirage on a small country road serving some of the area’s best beer. Sometimes that means he gets anything he wants, and sometimes that means he’s a target for manipulation as a premier account. Who wins? Well, it’s not always clear who wins. And today he’s here in the studio to talk to us about the many ups and downs of selling beer in such a tumultuous environment.