Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

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126: Ben Edmunds of Breakside Brewery on Optimizing for “Pleasantness” Mar 13, 2020

Show notes

For Portland, Oregon’s Breakside Brewery, beer should offer maximum enjoyment without losing its character and sense of identity. Dual core IPAs Wanderlust and Breakside IPA scratch different hoppy itches, Salted Caramel Stout satisfies those with a sweet tooth, Pilsner offers a slightly less “austere” drinkable option, and the sour and wild beer program gives brewers the chance to play and discover. In this episode, Cofounder and Brewmaster Ben Edmunds discusses the inception and development of their now-classic IPAs, how gravity adjustments impact hops flavors, the “je ne se quoi” of award-winning beers, designing hoppy beers to hit their sweet spot in the time frame when consumers will drink them, hops with greater shelf life, anchoring hops blends with familiar flavors, the vast differences between the core West Coast-style and evolving hazy IPAs that Breakside brews, and more.

“The thing I like about competition is… the beers that win, are the beers that are the most pleasant,” says Edmunds. “They’re the most pleasant to a most discriminating group of judges. If you can shave your beers in ways that are optimizing for the most pleasant, you’re going to do well.”

Beyond hoppy beers, Edmunds discusses brewing lagers like their year-round Pilsner, their sour process, the challenges brewers face in naming and describing beers for consumers, and the need for brewers to take risks while honoring tradition.

“When we put 60 barrels of Marzen out into the trade, we’re taking a withdrawal from our customers, asking them to trust us. But I think that’s how you move the needle. You have to have breweries (who have the brand equity) be willing to spend a little of that [equity] to push the needle with consumers to see if things work. They don’t always work, but if no one is doing that and we’re just giving people more IPA and more IPA, it may be better business, but to me it’s a lot less interesting and I don’t know that it’s good business over the long haul.”

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125: Brad Clark of Private Press Discusses Intention, Quality, and Expression in Brewing and Blending Barrel-Aged Stouts and Barleywines Mar 06, 2020

Show notes

Leaving a senior-level job (overseeing brewing operations for a 14,000 barrel per year brewery) to launch a small startup brewery with a tightly focused approach to brewing and an extremely limited sales model, is a big risk. But it’s one that Brad Clark has embraced. Private Press Brewing launches early summer and will release only barrel-aged stouts and barleywines, sold only through a membership program. It’s a focused approach to making tightly edited, bespoke beers for discerning customers, but it’s only possible thanks to the reputation he built making such beers for more than a decade at the Athens, Ohio stalwart.

In this episode, Clark discusses the challenge of moving from big to small, the gravity arms race in imperial-strength beers, choices for building body in big beers, designing component recipes for blending stock, how to use dark malts to guide oxidation in favorable directions, building a language to describe flavors and sensations while blending, defining the “pocket” for a blended beer, discovering emotion in exceptional barrels, being present and focused while tasting, and brewing and packaging lessons learned the hard way.

“Happy accidents don’t happen anymore,” says Clark. “There’s intent, there’s vision, there’s palate, there’s this drive behind them. It’s not just an afterthought. It’s not a couple barrels in the corner. This is identity. Avoid happy accidents. Don’t even use that word. Think about what you’re doing and set it up for success.”

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124: Tony Lawrence of Boneyard on Balance, Hops Selection, and Resisting Consumer Whims to Stick with What Works Feb 28, 2020

Show notes

Tony Lawrence, founder and brewer at Boneyard Beer in Bend, Oregon, has had a distinguished career—from his start at early-days Deschutes to the cobbled-together brewery he launched in 2010. Even in the past decade since Boneyard opened, the industry and market have swollen and mutated, but Lawrence and his team have stuck with what they know and like, eschewing the idea that they need to keep growing, being content at their size and trusting in their tried-and-true methods.

In this podcast, Lawrence discusses the Boneyard approach to brewing, including prizing clean and balanced flavor, and not necessarily chasing the shifting winds of consumer tastes. Citing their highly regarded flagship, RPM IPA, he talks about carefully balancing malt sweetness with dryness and hop-bitterness, selecting hops for aroma and to buffer for changes in the crop from year to year, experimenting with different hop formats, and their approach to dry hopping (and double dry hopping). He also talks about assembling their award-winning, labor-of-love, foeder-aged and blended lambic-style and Flemish-style beers.

“It’s been fun the whole time, but it’s even becoming more fun for us right now,” Lawrence says. “This may not be the most wise thing to say on the radio, but I feel like I’m being more of a brewer right now than I have been in years.”

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123: Blake Tyers of Creature Comforts on Wood-Aging Beer Feb 21, 2020

Show notes

It takes a huge leap of faith to abandon a linear production model to embrace the chaos and uncertainty of a blending-focused wood cellar. But Athens, Georgia’s Creature Comforts Brewing is unburdened by the past and unafraid when it comes to turning typical brewing practice on its head. Their process of continuous improvement is reflected in a number of other shifts to the way they operate, like jettisoning their negative approach to blending (eliminating bad barrels and blending the rest) and replacing it with a positive one (building a blend that accomplishes a specific flavor goal). In this episode, Wood Cellar and Mixed Fermentation Director Blake Tyers walks through that and more. He discusses how they construct different blending stock recipes to provide contrasts in the blending process, when to adjunct ingredients, preparing barrel-aged beers for the journey of time, designing “loud” beers that are nonetheless balanced, creating locally relevant approaches to popular styles, structuring a program that nudges customers toward more complex and time-consuming wood-aged beers, low-temp fruit maceration for tightly controlled flavor expression, and much more.

“There’s the old adage, ‘Brew what’s for yourself and sell whatever you’ve got left over,’ and I think that doesn’t necessarily always work,” says Tyers. “There’s a fine line there. The integrity and the fun comes from the pursuit of excellence within the framework that may be palatable or accessible to your consumer. You don’t have to love every single thing to the max that you make. But you should find joy, and pride, and excitement, in what you are making.”

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122: Jeff Bagby of Bagby Beer on a Historical Approach to Brewing for the Future Feb 14, 2020

Show notes

“Innovation” is a beer-world buzzword, as more and more drinkers seek out new breweries, beers, experiences, and flavors. But for Southern California brewing stalwart Jeff Bagby of Bagby Beer, that constant focus on the new is more dangerous than his traditional approach.

“I’m more scared of… making beers that are flash-in-the-pan styles,” Bagby says. “These things can leave just as fast as they came, and if you don’t have something to fall back on—you can’t make a core beer, you can’t make something that someone wants to come into your place and have three glasses of—what are you going to do? There are only so many flashy new toys that you’re going to be able to come up with.”

Bagby's long and award-filled journey took him from Stone to Pizza Port to Oggi's before he launched his own brewery. After two decades of brewing professionally he took the plunge, launching his eponymous brewpub in 2014 in Oceanside. In this episode, Bagby recounts lessons learned during that storied career—engaging in the brewing feedback loop, the importance of experience on brewing expression, learning the ins and outs of the brewhouse, evaluating inspirational beers, and more. Along the way, he discusses everything from brewing Czech-style dark lager, to pilsner, to the beers he’s most well-known for—West coast IPAs.

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121: Transient Artisan Ales Founder Chris Betts Talks Dry Hazy IPAs, Michigan Hops, and Spontaneous Fermentation Feb 07, 2020

Show notes

To hear Chris Betts tell it, the founding concept of Transient Artisan Ales is rooted in change. It’s in the name of the brewery and that responsive, adaptive approach to making beer that’s of its place. It's a core principle that runs through everything they brew—from hazy and hoppy styles through their mixed-fermentation farmhouse beers and, of course, their spontaneously fermented beers. This conversation delves into that principle, from what they’ve learned over the years of brewing and blending spontaneous beer (homogenization, blending, hopping rates, consistency, and more) to their relatively dry approach to hazy and juicy IPAs (balancing base malts, employing oats and wheat, blending yeast strains for better results, and employing local Michigan hops for unexpected flavors). While inspired by broader brewing traditions, Betts is hellbent on putting his own locally relevant spin on everything. This episode explores both why and how he does it.

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120: Urban Chestnut's Florian Kuplent on Brewing Lagers, Selecting Ingredients, and the Importance of Fermentation Feb 01, 2020

Show notes

Florian Kuplent, brewmaster and cofounder of Urban Chestnut Brewing Company in St. Louis, Missouri, got his start brewing helles and weissbier at a small, traditional brewery in Bavaria. In this podcast, he talks about what he learned from that experience and the other stops in his career, including Meantime in London and Anheuser-Busch. Founded in 2011, Urban Chestnut has stuck to its approach of showcasing both Old World traditional beers—its Reverence series—and more experimental, New World playthings—its Revolution series. Since then it's grown to three breweries in St. Louis, including one with a beer hall of Munich-like proportions, and a fourth brewery in the Hallertau region of Bavaria. Kuplent also talks about the URB—Urban Research Brewery—which features a "consumer research bar" where visitors can evaluate pilot beers and provide feedback, and about how that concept has informed their recipes at Urban Chestnut.

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119: Bell's Brewery's John Mallett on Ingredient Quality, Understanding Malt, and Designing Brewing Workflows Jan 24, 2020

Show notes

“We’re yeast farmers. We’re trying to set up a party that our guests are just going to rage at,” says John Mallett, VP of operations for Bell’s Brewery. Of course, the reality is far more complex than that, but his flippant tone belies the deep knowledge that this longtime brewing veteran brings to the industry. Mallett joined Bell’s in 2001 after stints as a brewer and brewery design consultant, back when Bell’s produced a now-relatively-modest 30,000 barrels of beer. He’s helped the brewery grow in phases to their current production of about a half million barrels per year, by taking a thoughtful approach to everything from ingredient selection and sourcing to designing the brewhouse for expansion. In this episode, Mallett covers a wide range of subjects, from evaluating hops and controlling the pelletizing process to inspecting malt houses, evaluating barley varieties, reading between the lines on malt spec sheets, understanding what numbers like Kolbach index mean in practical terms, the fundamentals of haze stability in beer, sourcing and evaluating the incredible amount of Centennial hops used in their flagship IPA Two Hearted, and designing and engineering production workflows and brewhouses for future expansion. It’s a thorough, technical conversation packed with the sense of humor for which he’s known.

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118: The Ale Apothecary's Paul Arney on Brewing Naturally and Artfully Jan 17, 2020

Show notes

Most brewers launch a brewery with the goal of producing specific types of beers. For Paul Arney of The Ale Apothecary, the founding principle was different—he knew how he wanted to make beer, and the style of beers he would make flowed from that focus on specific process. The result, of course, was “wild” beer with an acid component, but that was less important to Arney than brewing as close to nature as he could. Local ingredients, overnight mashes, no chemical cleaners or sanitizers, and wood vessels wherever possible, are some of the signatures of Arney’s production process that serve his goal of making “Locally-sourced, barrel-aged, natural beer.”
For Arney, the concept of “natural” isn’t a broad excuse for lazy practices. To the contrary, he’s built a time- and work-intensive process to take what he learned from a decade of large-scale production brewing and apply it to this brewing business. Learning from the process has been key for Arney and The Ale Apothecary, and here he discusses everything from the flavor and texture impact of his overnight mash process, corralling wild cultures and staggering pitches to achieve intentional results, the challenges of single-stream brewing in this style and achieving great results without blending, finding joy and success in “mistakes,” working with nature in a push and pull to create good-tasting natural beer, and the changing dynamics in the market for wild and sour beer.

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117: 3 Sons Brewing's Corey Artanis on Maximum Impact from Flavor Ingredients Jan 10, 2020

Show notes

3 Sons Brewing was a proof of concept a long time coming. They started slowly and deliberately, brewing one barrel at a time at a licensed commercial brewery, while focusing on honing recipes, ingredients, and process along the way. The early praise—best beer and best brewery awards at Cigar City Hunahpu's Day festival—convinced founder Corey Artanis that the brewing business had legs, but rather than rushing in, he took his time and finally opened their production brewery and brewpub in Dania Beach, Florida in 2018. The unassuming warehouse exterior houses a gorgeous and airy modern brewery and restaurant with pizza kitchen, and the tap list delivers on the styles their fans expect—culinary ingredient-laden stouts, but balances those with a deliberate lineup of traditional German-style lagers.
In this episode, Artanis walks through their award-winning approach to big and flavorful beers, from creating a canvas that lets ingredients shine, to specific ingredient selection and process.

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