Good Beer Hunting

Welcome to the third episode of Into the Wild—part of our six-city tour across the U.S. this year with New Belgium Brewing. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and together with Good Beer Hunting’s creative director Michael Kiser and studio designer Cooper Foszcz, I recently headed to Austin, Texas, for three days of great food, hot days, and unique events celebrating the specialness of wild and sour beers. It was 100° Fahrenheit during the three days we were in Austin—and yet, everywhere we went, folks poured out onto patios, people ate and drank outside, and everyone was just as friendly as you’d imagine.  We partnered with some of the best restaurants, bars, and folks that make the Austin food and beverage scene unique. On the one hand, Austin features bars, institutions with storied pasts, and streets lined with neon signs that are reminiscent of a past era. On the other, owing to its the growing population, the city is relatively accessible for those who want to push new ideas. This straddling of old and new—which Austin seems to do effortlessly—made it the perfect place to pour wild and sour beers from New Belgium. It was a celebration of craft and tradition, and an homage to creativity and new ideas.  In the beginning of the show, you hear from New Belgium’s wood cellar director Lauren Limbach, who’s addressing attendees at a beer dinner. You also hear a little bit from the band Shotgun Friday, who played music and told wild stories—perhaps even wilder than the beers—throughout the event. Later, you’ll hear Lauren again. But let’s start with the very first event of the tour: a dinner called Sacred and Profane held at The Brewer’s Table, highlighting the power and possibility of fermentation. Come along as we walk you through our weekend of wild beers, sweltering days, and weird times. This is Good Beer Hunting’s Into the Wild podcast. Listen in.

Founders' All Day IPA. Firestone Walker's 805 Blonde Ale. Victory’s Golden Monkey Tripel. These are all examples of brands that have shaped bottom lines and shifted futures for some of the country’s biggest breweries. For most of them, that runaway success and influence came about serendipitously. These are business-altering beers that now steer the course of their respective companies—and there are plenty of other examples of similar players scattered across the country. In today’s podcast, we’re going to hear about one of those—and how in 2014, an IPA from a 9,000-barrel brewery in Charlotte, North Carolina, completely changed the trajectory of the personal and professional life of its head brewer, Chad Henderson. That beer is NoDa Brewing Company’s Hop, Drop 'n Roll, the 2014 World Beer Cup gold medal winner in the American-Style IPA category. It’s a West Coast IPA that continues to move fast to this day, even in an era of hazy, juicy counterparts. Five years ago, when some kind of monumental success at the bi-annual, global competition was the last thing Chad was expecting, his world got turned upside down. In this conversation, we follow this path of how a single beer changed so much for Chad, NoDa’s co-owners Todd and Suzie Ford, and the brewery itself. From sales, to quality control, to management of the NoDa beer portfolio, Hop, Drop 'n Roll is a continuous thread that runs through it all. It helped push the brewery to almost 16,000 BBLs' of production last year. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we’ll also mention a little about making hard seltzer, too. After all, if you’re talking IPA, you might as well hit on one of the other most important categories impacting beer and breweries in 2019. For now, let’s shift to hops. This is Chad Henderson, head brewer and co-owner of NoDa Brewing Company. Listen in.

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 Claire Bullen and I’m the Editor in Chief at Good Beer Hunting. I have an almost endless appetite—no pun intended—for stories about food and beer. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the fact that I wrote a cookbook on the subject, The Beer Lover’s Table, earlier this year. At risk of sounding like an evangelist, I think beer is such a natural at the table—so versatile, so flexible, so broad—that it feels like a real shame that we still ascribe dinner-party dominance to wine. That’s why Good Beer Hunting’s recently revived Provisions column fills me with such hope. Beyond one-to-one beer and food pairings, and recipes, our Provisions pieces celebrate the way that beer organically fits into a meal. Many of our writers and readers are as passionate about good food as they are good beer, and so the two frequently and naturally intersect in our lives. Provisions aims to capture these memorable moments of hospitality—the stories and travels and friendships that lead up to special, beer-centric meals along the way. And so, when Lily Waite, one of Good Beer Hunting’s London-based staff writers, recently pitched me a fantastical Provisions story featuring Cornish fishing trips and wild foraging sessions and multi-course beer-and-seafood feasts, I couldn’t wait to read the end result. Her final piece, and its accompanying photos, was as exquisite as expected—Lily is a true polymath. In addition to being an exceptional writer, photographer, artist, and cook, she’s also the visionary behind the Queer Brewing Project, a non-profit, collaborative brewing project that supports LGBTQ+ voices and visibility in the beer and brewing industries. In this conversation, we talk about how a brewery visit turned into an unplanned fishing trip, which in turn yielded an extraordinary meal. We also talk about Lily’s various creative endeavors, from pottery classes to brew days. Here’s Lily Waite. Listen in.

Even if you barely dip your toe in the shark-infested waters of Beer Twitter, there’s a chance you’ve heard of Pilot Beer. You don’t even have to follow the brewery for it to regularly hit your timeline, as its pithy, satirical, and self-deprecating posts are retweeted and liked hundreds of times. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that Pilot is much bigger than it is. It’s still a five-man operation and its Twitter account is more an extension of one of the founder’s personalities than any attempt at a social-media strategy. In fact, cofounder Patrick Jones is as surprised and delighted as anyone about the success they have found online by tweeting things like: “We're only stuck with this stupid brewery because of a typo when we tried selling a load of artisan bees.” The irony is the brewery still sells almost all of its beer in its hometown of Leith, a port suburb of Edinburgh. Despite being part of the inner Twitter bubble, its beer doesn’t reach many markets, and the dry, session styles it brews certainly don’t cater to them either. We caught up at the London Craft Beer Festival, an event Patrick freely admits he and Pilot wouldn’t have been invited to if it weren’t for their social presence. The party hasn’t started yet and they’re still setting up—so excuse the old bang or rumble—but it was heartening to see how Pilot’s session beers were loved by the public later on, despite their stall being opposite some of the buzzy American brewers. It turns out if you talk honestly and with humor, session beer and open conversation are all you really need. This is Patrick Jones of Pilot Beer. Listen in.

Welcome to the Sightlines podcast from Good Beer Hunting. I’m Bryan Roth.  If there were ever a defining slogan to sum up the past decade in American craft beer, “hops rule everything around me” may be a good fit. Pale Ales begat IPAs in all their bitter, then fruity, then juicy, then hazy glory, pushing sales and success for many businesses. IPAs, quite frankly, are driving key growth, but they’re also just one style—or collection of styles, depending on how you think about them—among so many other possibilities. So as beer lovers, industry professionals, or members of the media, we talk a lot about hops … but what about everything else? Other ingredients are just as essential in bringing a beer to life, and in a world of hoppiness, there are some who are trying to find ways to bring attention back to these lesser-appreciated pieces of the fermented puzzle. In this episode, we’re talking with two people who spend a lot of time thinking about “not hops.” They’re trying to redefine how drinkers may learn about beer, as well as bring new appreciation for the locality and specialness of the other ingredients that act as the backbone and soul of every pint. This is the Sightlines podcast. Listen in.

Coffee starts its life as the seed of a cherry. You wouldn’t think that when you look at a bag of beans, but there’s a whole process that coffee goes through before it gets to you. It’s picked, it’s washed, it’s milled, it’s shipped, it travels across the globe—and that’s all before it’s roasted, packaged, and brewed by your favorite barista. Somewhere in the middle of all that, coffee hangs out with a bunch of yeast. Lucia Solis is a coffee fermentation expert—probably not a job you dreamed about in school or even knew existed, but her job can make a coffee go from just OK to excellent. She started her career studying viticulture at the University of California, Davis, and was a winemaker before jumping into the world of coffee. She was able to use her training to explore a big gap in the coffee industry.   Solis is interested in “processing,” which refers to how the layers around a coffee seed are removed, and how the sugars and starches surrounding the bean interact with yeasts and other bacteria. She visits coffee farms around the world and helps producers control consistency and cup quality through understanding what’s happening on the micro level—and investigating how yeasts can transform the flavor of coffee. It’s a scary topic, thinking about yeasts in your coffee, but there are a lot of similarities between the role of yeasts in both beer and coffee. Solis was one of my main sources in an article I wrote for our Uppers and Downers series on lactic acid fermentation, a series that explores big topics relevant to both the beer and coffee industries, and her insights helped elucidate just how important microbiology is to the future of coffee. Solis is continuing to expand her scope, and recently gave a talk called “Worms and Germs,” which discussed how soil health can improve fermentation. We sat down to chat after one of these talks, and in our conversation, we dive deep into chemistry, the fundamentals of coffee farming, and how we’re constantly interacting with the microscopic world around us. This is Lucia Solis, coffee fermentation expert. Listen in. 

There are easy topics brewery owners love to talk about to promote themselves: interesting beer releases, charity work, GABF awards, or cheeky packaging.  And then there are other, much stickier issues most avoid addressing: gentrification, racism and sexism in the industry; labor; and a brewery’s moral responsibility to its community and the people within it.  Sam Gilbert, who co-founded Oakland’s Temescal Brewing about three years ago in the neighborhood with which it shares a name, doesn’t shy away from such difficult conversations. Oakland’s changing, and it’s well past time to talk about it.  Temescal Brewing came into existence in great part because of the community it now counts as patrons. A successful crowdfunding campaign helped the brewery get off the ground, and Gilbert hasn’t forgotten the significance of that. Since then, Temescal has prioritized hiring hyperlocal residents, hosting regular LGBT-focused bashes, and proactively reaching out to communities less frequently seen in your standard brewery taproom. But the vibes aren’t always positive. Sometimes, being a good neighbor can be much less fun, as when AB InBev announced an intention to open a Golden Road taproom not far from Temescal’s brewhouse. Gilbert, like others in the Oakland craft beer scene, was outspoken against the idea. Ultimately, the plan was quashed, and some believe it was in large part due to vocal critics like Gilbert, and to Oakland’s anti-corporate ideologies. All of this is to say nothing of the beer. Temescal is frequently cited as one of Bay Area drinkers’ favorite breweries, and its focus on soft, nuanced, and low-ABV styles (and in particular Pilsners) has made fans out of the pickiest consumers. It’s becoming increasingly common to see the brewery’s brightly colored cans in fridges around the Bay. There’s a reason Temescal’s reputation is as colorful as its approachable, pastel-splashed taproom. It aims for inclusion. And it lives by the motto: “No jerks.” This is Sam Gilbert of Temescal Brewing. Listen in.

One of my favorite things about industries like ours (beer, wine, food and drink) is the sense of community that springs up around them. People find others who want to talk about what excites them—and one of those communities is The Fervent Few.  Initially a group of beer enthusiasts, The Fervent Few has transformed into a lively corner of the internet that explores the world of beer in a way that’s nuanced, considered, and honest. The Fervent Few is a paid-membership community, with its own Slack channel (if you’re unfamiliar, think of Slack as the modern-day version of a chatroom, where people talk and share ideas), and we’re always surprised by the conversations that happen there. People aren’t just talking about beer: they’re sharing the passions and hobbies that shape their lives.  One of the Slack channels that gets a lot of traffic is the photography section. Folks take pictures of beers, taprooms, and anything else they find interesting, and we’ve found a lot of new GBH contributors through this channel. One of those people who recently made the jump from Fervent Few member to contributor is Sean McEmerson, originally from Scotland and now residing in East London. As someone who made a not-so-dissimilar jump from podcaster to GBH writer and producer, I wanted to talk to Sean about how he got into beer and what fueled his interest to learn more and join a community like The Fervent Few. Sean recently published his first piece with us—it’s part of our b-Roll series, where we showcase photos of everyday life from members of our team—and I learned that, even once you get your work published somewhere, it’s still hard to make the jump that you’ve done it: you’re a photographer now.  This conversation was pretty straightforward, and you don’t need to have read any articles or know anything ahead of time to understand what we’re talking about. Instead, you’ll hear two folks talking about their beginnings in beer, a little bit about street photography, and how passion and interest can take you down new and exciting pathways. Here’s Sean McEmerson. Listen in.

Today, we bring you an episode of Good Beer Hunting’s newest show, Electing to Drink. Hosted by author and professor David Faris and produced by GBH, Electing to Drink explores progressive politics, personalities and policies over a guest’s favorite beer. This is Electing to Drink. Listen in. Subscribe to Electing to Drink on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. 

Welcome to the second episode of Into the Wild—part of our six-city tour across the U.S. with New Belgium Brewing this year.  This episode comes out of our experiences in the Bay Area, San Francisco and the East Bay, where we partnered with a few restaurants, bars, and special people therein to produce some of the best and most unique experiences I’ve ever had around food and beverages. And that’s the whole idea here—to put wild and sour beer into a context that’s either entirely unprecedented or, if it’s familiar (like a beer dinner), to take it to a level that’s rarely seen.  First, you’ll hear from New Belgium’s Lauren Limbach, who brings people together at City Beer Store in San Francisco for a sensory tasting—which we jokingly called a “sensory deprivation tasting”—because her goal was to expose how much precondition we bring to every sip we take.  In this podcast, we follow Lauren and other folks we met along the way, chronicling our weekend of eating, drinking, and learning. But first, I wanted to let you know about our next stop in Austin, Texas on August 14th through 16th, which will feature a fermentation-forward dinner, beer, and art experience at The Brewer’s Table called Sacred & Profane with Jason White (who’s formerly of the Noma Fermentation Lab in Copenhagen). Then we’re heading over to the Brew & Brew for a dance party with Wild Ale, so if you’re more interested in the fun side of things, that’s certainly for you. Finally, we’re bringing Wild Ale to the people with a food truck dinner at Draft House. It’s three days and three entirely unique events in Austin, and if you’re in the area or want to be, we hope you join us for that leg of the tour.  This is Good Beer Hunting’s Into the Wild podcast. Listen in.