Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast 192: Burke-Gilman Brewing is Your Friendly Neighborhood Alpha King Winner
“I’m anti-consistency,” says head brewer Phil Pesheck. “If you’re pro-consistency, you’re anti-advancement. I want to continuously improve the beer, batch after batch.”
Improve they have, and Seattle’s Burke-Gilman Brewing pulled off quite a feat in 2020 with a win at the Alpha King Challenge and a gold medal in the juicy/hazy IPA category at the Great American Beer Festival. It was a bold statement for a new brewery that had won no major awards before, but it wasn’t just luck—Pesheck was focused on winning, and the brewery supported his fanatical, R&D-driven approach.
In this episode of the podcast, cofounder Kenneth Trease, Pesheck, and brewer Julia Astrid Davis discuss the individual and collaborative ways this very small, taproom-focused brewery has made a big splash with hoppy beers:
- Going “full send” on competition entry beers
- Visualizing hop combinations, and exploring the small ways to drive maximum impact
- Optimizing the flavor of bitterness
- Maximizing yield despite excessive hop loads
- Fermenting and dry-hopping approaches for enticing aroma
- Hops that work as “stars,” and those that boost the performance of other hops
- Getting great results with spot hops
- Taking an iterative, taste-driven approach to dry hopping rather than following a set regimen
And more.
IPA isn’t the only thing Burke-Gilman brews, however. The tagline on their website reads, “IPA in the streets, lager in the sheets,” and the conversation concludes with discussion of their lager program and practices.
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