Good Beer Hunting

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective Podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind the scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I'm Ashley Rodriguez, and I'm GBH's podcast producer. One of my jobs at Good Beer Hunting is to post all the articles that come through our website. Usually that means lots of cutting and pasting, checking links, setting up their website page, and figuring out where photos go. It also means I get real intimate with some of these articles—I'm working with them for hours at a time. One article that recently caught my attention was about Tilted Barn Brewery in Exeter, Rhode Island. And the reason it caught my attention wasn't because of the beer, but because of the way the author wrote about Tilted Barn. Kristen, whose day job involves working in people development (what we might traditionally know as human resources), illuminates the people she talks about. You don't just want to visit Tilted Barn, you want to engage with the owners, Kara and Matt Richardson—and their family. They live just 100 yards away from the brewery with their four kids, and Kristen's story captures the ups and downs of integrating your everyday life with your work. In this episode, we talk to Kristen about what it was like to visit and share the story of Tilted Barn, and what attracts her to the folks she depicts in her stories.

This week, we're bringing you a special episode from our Into the Wild tour with New Belgium Brewing. This is a tour focused on wild, sour, and otherwise aged and blended beers in the vein of what New Belgium Brewing has been making for longer and more continuously than any brewer in America. This tour is visiting at least a half a dozen cities this year and we kicked it off in Seattle with a series of sensory-driven events. We did a sour beer and cheese pairing at The Pine Box with chef Angelica Garza, featuring some funky and surprising cheeses alongside New Belgium's Wood Cellar beers. We held a smoked and fermented event at Central Smoke where they made a cocktail with a Transatlantique Kriek float. (It was delicious.) And we finished at The Masonry with chef Matt Storm, where we explored the relationship between acid and fat. It was a wild week. These two conversations you're about to hear came out of my experiences there. First up, we'll talk to Ian Roberts, one of the owners of The Pine Box, about the bar's role in the city's beer scene, and how customers have changed over time when it comes to sour beer. Then we'll catch up with Chef Matt to talk about The Masonry, pizza, and other things. And if you want more, we have a great little article on the website from chef Angelica Garza about how she constructed the cheese pairings and how you can think about that the next time you want to host some of your friends around cheese and sour beer. As specific as these flavors and aromas can be, there's some pretty good principles at play that will help you do it yourself.

The life of an American brewery feels like it exists on a scale like one of our pets. In the same way cat and dog years move at a factor faster than humans, the quick pace of the U.S. industry can make these businesses age rapidly in a variety of ways. If you're not new, or at least keeping up with the latest styles and trends, life can come at you fast. So when a brewery starts hitting milestones — not just its first few anniversaries, but long-tenured ones — it's kind of a big deal. That's what brought me to Asheville, North Carolina recently, where one of the state's largest and most important breweries hit its silver anniversary, marking 25 years in business. There's a bunch of special history for Highland Brewing Company. It was the first brewery to open in Asheville's city limits since Prohibition and third in the state. And if you want to get a good idea of how Highland came to be, check out my 2017 story on Good Beer Hunting. You'll hear several references to it in this interview with founder Oscar Wong and family owner and president Leah Wong Ashburn. It's not required reading to enjoy this conversation by any means, but you will get some fun, additional context. But let's get back to this talk. When I sat down with Oscar and Leah, the goal was to look across Highland's history. Past, present and future. There may be almost 7,500 breweries scattered across the country, but there aren't a lot with the kind of longevity and point of view of business like this one. After building its success in Old World styles like an English-inspired Pale Ale and Porter, the last few years have been about rapid evolution. This is an old company in beer years, but that doesn't mean the Highland team hasn't learned some new tricks. So let's hear it: how does a brewery last and change over a quarter-century? This is Oscar Wong and Leah Wong Ashburn of Highland Brewing. Listen in.

As of right now—May 2019—there are about 7,500 breweries in the United States. From 2016-2018, the Brewers Association counted about two new breweries opening every day, and in that time, the size, scope, and potential of what those businesses could become has quickly changed. Year-to-year volume growth for Brewers Association-defined craft beer dropped to 4% last year, a decline of 1% from 2017 and the lowest growth rate in a decade. Industry conversations now focus on going a "mile deep," not a "mile wide." In other words, staying small and local—while embracing close-to-home and taproom sales—is becoming a safer and more secure way to grow, albeit slower and with greater intent. As the beer category slows and more companies focus on staying small and local, the idea of "growth" as a business concept is changing. To better get a sense of what this change means, GBH connected with Bart Watson, the economist from the Brewers Association, and Tom Madden, co-founder of Lone Pine Brewing Company in Portland, Maine. With a mix of industry stats and real-life case study, we hope to get to the bottom of what growth looks like in a slowing beer industry. Listen in.

Our resident composer for the podcast and our commercial video work, Andrew Thiboldeaux, is writing original scores devoted to beers he finds fascinating. These are interpretations of the experience of drinking them. But they're also just great tunes.

There's a big problem in coffee—we're not paying enough for it. With every clickbait article talking about how much you can save by cutting out your daily latte habit, you might be wondering how that's possible. But coffee, much like other agricultural products like sugar or bananas, has relied on colonialist structures to survive—meaning that while we can buy and sell coffee in consuming countries for $3.00 a cup, most of the folks who actually farm and grow coffee see less than a dollar per pound for the coffee they produce. Coffee is in a crisis—because coffee is traded as a commodity, its price depends on the market, which means that, right now, many farmers are forced to sell their coffee for less than what it cost to produce. Farmers are actively losing money when they produce coffee, and many have been forced to lay off workers, sell their farms, and encourage their children to abandon the farm and look for more lucrative work elsewhere. So what are we doing about this? Ric Rhinehart is the head of the Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative, and the former head of the Specialty Coffee Association. In this episode, we talk about how the crisis began, and what his group is looking to do to change the trajectory of coffee farming and selling. The price crisis isn't simply a dip in the marketplace or a momentary blip, but is reflective of the colonialist way we have traded coffee for centuries—depending on the labor of folks from one country to serve the tastes and trends of another. It is inherently exploitative, and you might question if it is ethical to buy coffee at all. Obviously, these are big questions—and that's why I turned to the person in charge for answers. Along with speaking tangibly about the price crisis, Ric also explores how meaning is created, who are the value adders of any supply stream, and how we can shift an entire industry model to provide equity to all actors. This is a hugely important topic, so we're airing this on both the Good Beer Hunting podcast and on my show, Boss Barista! If you're familiar with one, you should check out the other—both cover big ideas surrounding the things we like to eat and drink. This is Ric Rhinehart of the Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative. Listen in.

In food and drink we often talk about the supply chain—the line we draw between the farm and the glass. The truth is, it's far more complicated, and far more protracted than that. The beer world is a web containing thousands of people who work to get beer in your hands, and only a few of them brew it, still they influence which beers are brewed, how they are packaged, how they get to the bar and how they are served. Even a small scale beer scene like Britain's is full of people you have never heard of, but who influence what you drink on a daily basis. Few of them have had as much influence as Colin Gilhespy, managing director of speciality beer importer Cave Direct. [Disclosure: I worked at Cave Direct from 2013 to 2018.] He has been in the distribution business since the early 80s, when he and his dad were among the first to bring Belgian beers across the Channel. Not just any beers either, but niche, expensive beers Trappists, Lambics and Flemish reds. At the same time that some Californian homebrewers were just waking America up to adventurous beer, Gilhespy and his family were doing the same in the U.K. I'll leave the stories to him, but over the last 40 years he has had a huge hand in the growth of the British craft beer industry as it grew from the ashes of 1970s consolidation to one of the world's most diverse and exciting scenes. From growing the Belgian beer category to helping new British brewers on the way up, he has laid a path for huge change and over the last decade has seen phenomenal growth. Cave Direct is now the U.K.'s only national direct-delivery beer wholesaler, and Colin's services to the Belgian beer industry has even won him awards from the country's brewing guilds. Even so, it's difficult times to be an importer with Brexit on the horizon, huge competition from macro-breweries buying taps and pushing prices down, and several buyouts of breweries that Cave had built their business on. There's still a long way to go. I joined him and sales director Neil Kitching at the Beer Merchants Tap, Cave Direct's bar in East London where they have just taken delivery of their first batch of spontaneous wort for a blendery project, and where in June they will host their 40th birthday party with the breweries and friends that helped them come this far. This is Colin Gilhespy and Neil Kitching of Cave direct. Listen in.

On this GBH Sightlines episode, we're visiting with several people to get their perspectives and experiences following what some are calling beer's own Fyre Festival. That event, a luxury-music-festival-turned-disaster that spawned two separate documentaries showcasing its incredible collapse, may be on another level than the inaugural Untappd Beer Festival, but it didn't stop some angry beer fans from making that connection on May 4. We're talking with two festival-goers, a vendor pouring for a brewery, and one of the event's organizers. The goal? To better understand what it was like on the ground and whether or not those dire comparisons are actually warranted. Listen in.

Welcome to another Fervent Few episode of the Good Beer Hunting podcast where myself, Jim Plachy, and GBH's strategic director, Michael Kiser, catch up. We'll talk about the topics and discussions that took place in our membership community in the last couple weeks. Our 500 or so subscribers are scattered all over the world. Sometimes we meet up with them when we're on the road, or they hang out with each other, but it all comes together in our community forum on Slack. If you value the content and experiences that GBH produces, you should join. Your monthly subscription gets you access to the community, special events, and exclusive gear deigned just for members. I joined, and now I manage it all. Plus, it's my favorite place on the Beer Internet. Visit goodbeerhunting.com/ferventfew to strike up a conversation in beer.

The world of beer is going through an identity crisis—it's changing the self-defined language of what's craft and what not seemingly every few years now, it's doing battle with wine and spirits, except when it's embracing them in the form of natural wine and barrel-aging, it's national, regional, local, and hyperlocal, it's taprooms and bars going to battle over the same customers, it's exploding cans and day-fresh distribution, and festivals are dying except when they're growing, and it's focused on diversity even as it undermines it's own goals by competing for the same 21-34-year-old white males in every market, it's IPAs except when it's Lagers, and increasingly it's juice bombs and hard seltzers and FMBs, and coffee roasting, distilling, and wine/beer hybrids. It's wild out there right now. For today's guest—I have a feeling all that seems a bit…charming. Predictable, maybe. And certainly ripe for exploitation from a manufacturing and marketing perspective. Because as much as we want to think people define themselves by what category of beverage they prefer (beer people, wine people, bourbon people), people like Jaisen Freeman of Phusion Projects has long understood drinkers as category agnostic—pursuing flavor, and brand, and functional benefits above all else. And generally preferring to have a little—sometimes too much—fun along the way. Phusion Projects is the maker of Four Loko, a notorious, exciting brand that has an unbelievable distribution footprint in the U.S. despite having its product formulation written out of the realm of legality by the federal government after they'd already built their empire. Despite massive lawsuits related to its potential for harm and or misuse. And despite taking a massing hit in the realm of $40 million during that traumatic period for the business. Within four years, it had climbed back to its former peak. And now, with that chasm behind them, Phusion Projects is expanding a portfolio of products geared towards finding the next big thing for drinkers. In the recent past, that's included another infamous product, at least in the small bubble of the craft beer world, with Not Your Father's Root Beer, a fermented malt beverage that got tried and true beer geeks worked up over its root beer flavor and, in some cases, its high ABV. But it attracted a massive mainstream audience as well as it expanded from a small garage into a national footprint. And now they're exploring the world of vodka, hard seltzer, a flavored FMB that looks like a fancy blended wine or sake, and Earthquake, which they pitch as the highest ABV Lager on the market. None of them come anywhere close to Four Loko's success. Like, by multiple orders of magnitude. But this is all pretty recent still as they climbed out of that crater that those four years of Four Loko left them in. And they got out of it, seemingly, all by themselves. It's a wild story, and for anyone struggling to understand what their next few years are going to look like in the what might be the beer businesses' most insane time period ever in this country, it's a story with a lot of lessons, both encouraging, and exceptionally hard. This is Jaisen Freeman of Phusion Projects. Listen in.