Good Beer Hunting

Welcome to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. Today’s episode is one of those great conversations you don’t want to end, when you’re talking with someone talented and uniquely good at what they do. You’ll see by the timestamp that there is, in fact, a stop time to my chat with Kate Bernot, but I can only hope you get the same kind of impression. Kate has a long background in journalism, but beer fans may recognize her byline from DRAFT magazine, where she served as associate editor and then beer editor over several years, or her current role as associate editor at The Takeout, a food and beverage site from the A.V. Club.  Kate’s approach to her writing brings a variety of humor and skilled nuance, depending on what she’s writing about that day, from dealing with frozen beers to daily topics impacting the beer industry. It just so happens that we both recently covered the idea of Flagship February, and you’ll hear a chunk of this conversation dissecting what that effort means and the story behind her story written for The Takeout asking if beer loyalty is dead. There’s plenty more, including her thoughts on drinking beer in her new home state of Montana. This is Kate Bernot, writer, reporter, and advocate for Big Sky Country’s flagship brands. Listen in.

On every home game day, tens of thousands of baseball fans filter into the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark. Many of them will buy beer, and thanks to Brian Carriveau, their options now include more than the predictable lineup of macro lagers. Last season, after convincing the eco-conscious ballpark managers to allow him to sell aluminum cans, baseball fans found they could buy 16 ounces of locally-made craft beer by nearby breweries — some of which weren’t available elsewhere in the city. Carriveau is the Director of Catering at Bon Appétit Management Company, which handles food and drink menus at Oracle Park — formerly known as AT&T Park — as well as the attached Public House restaurant and a posh, members-only bar inside the park called the Gotham Club. After beginning his career in hospitality at the famed Awahnee Hotel in Yosemite, he took to San Francisco. Now with Bon Appetit, he handles concessions for an average of 40 thousand people every home game during the baseball season. It’s a busy, exciting job, not just because the Giants have won three World Series titles since he began working at the park, but also because it gives Carriveau a major league platform to share his love of craft beer with a huge audience. That’s not without its challenges. Buying alcohol for a bar is one thing; buying beer for a literal stadium full of people is quite another — and it’s Carriveau’s job to do both. Can a ballpark cater to every kind of drinker? I don’t know, but Bon Appetit is sure going to try. This is Brian Carriveau, Director of Catering at Bon Appétit Management Company for the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park. Listen in.

What does it take to open a brewery these days? And what happens after you do? These questions are at the center of two conversations we have in this Sightlines addition of the podcast. First, we hear from Scott Janish and Michael Tonsmeire, co-owners of Maryland’s Sapwood Cellars. I sat down with the pair for episode #144 from October 2017, and have been tracking their progress since. Back then, they were working on recipes and trying to perfect an approach to New England IPA, all while finding the physical space for their business. They opened a year later, and when I caught up with them in January, we took some time to reflect on their first three months in operation. You’ll hear about challenges and triumphs and the changes that have occurred at the brewery and in their lives. After that, we check in with Scott Wood, who opened New Orleans’ Courtyard Brewery a little over four years ago, and also happened to be featured on Good Beer Hunting in the fall of 2017, just weeks before the guys from Sapwood. Scott just announced a second, larger production space for his brewery that aims to open in 2020, and even though he’s been in business for years, this is a big step for his business. It’s one that he admits in our conversation took a long time to get ready for personally and professionally. Here we have two breweries, years apart in experience, but still learning and changing. What does it take to operate a brewery in 2019? Let’s get an idea. This is Scott Janish and Michael Tonsmeire of Sapwood Cellars, then Scott Wood of Courtyard Brewery. Listen in.

Today’s guests represent a kind of brewery that lives, sometimes tenuously, in the spaces in between traditional brewery models in American craft brewing. They’s very small. They have an alternating proprietorship arrangement with another local brewery, which means they use another brewery’s system to brew their beer. But on that particular brew day, they technically own the license. They brew, package, and sell that beer via self-distribution. And their portfolio, for reasons both of constraint, personal interest, and identity, is hyper-focused on Hazy IPA, Double IPA, and adjunct Stouts.  While the growth in craft brewing slows, and 2019 looks to be a topsy-turvy year for many folks, a brewery like this could either be seen as exceptionally vulnerable, or crazy like a fox. They have low overhead, even if expenses are relatively high due to small volumes. They have a strong alt-prop relationship with a good local brewer, but that means they’re dependent on someone else’s business stability. And they have a great brand and profile in Chicago, but there’s always somebody new coming for their share of the pie. So, how do they balance all that uncertainty, while also finding the mental energy to be creative, connect with their fans, and explore the nerdier side of hoppy beers that seem to consistently delight those drinkers? Good question! This is Jude and Jeremiah from Hop Butcher for the World, a Beer Company. Listen in.

Welcome to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and journalist and media folks from within the beer industry on topics of writing, beer, and the stories you read and hear from GBH and others. In this episode, we’re going to catch up with Bryan Roth, our Sightlines editor. He’s in charge of the research and analysis GBH conducts into trends and business dealings in the beer industry, but also dives headlong into a variety of meaty topics in his feature stories. He’s been even more prolific than usual of late, covering everything from the death of Stouts (or lack thereof, as you’ll hear) to an investigation into breweries’ handlings of workplace issues like sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and other forms of exclusion.  But first, we’re going to jump back to the just before the holiday when he wrote about the 30-year history of one of beer’s most iconic advertisements. This is Bryan Roth. Listen in.

[photo by Jim Henkens] How do you become one of the largest breweries in one of the most beer-loving states in the country these days, and not sell a single drop to drink in your taproom? The incredible growth of Seattle's Georgetown Brewing Company, and the way they've done it, could leave a lot of beer lovers and business owners scratching their heads. And yet, Manny Chao and Roger Bialous have successfully zigged when everyone else has intentionally zagged. Bodhizafa IPA won gold at the Great American Beer Festival in the most-entered category, yet remains relatively unknown outside the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't even until 2017 that Georgetown beers were sold in anything other than kegs. At a time when beer enthusiasts decry the death of flagship beers, Manny's Pale Ale remains more than two-thirds of production for the 17-year old brewery. All this might seem odd, but there's more. Situated among other warehouses in an industrial section of Seattle, the taproom was still consistently busy when I visited this past fall. People waited to buy cans and growlers to go and as I sat down with Roger to talk about the brewery, I admittedly did not know the extent to how much what he'd say would surprise me. It's easy to get locked in on what's common and successful in today's beer industry, not so much to recognize just how special some histories and business plans can be. This is Roger Bialous, co-founder and owner of Georgetown Brewing. Listen in.

Welcome to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. In this episode, we’re leaving the confines of the U.S. to visit with Luke Robertson, a GBH contributor living in Melbourne, Australia. Originally from New Zealand, Luke built up his reputation and writing chops in his adopted home country through the Ale of a Time blog and podcast. He started writing for Good Beer Hunting in 2017, and has taken readers behind the scenes of Melbourne’s GABS Beer, Cider and Food Festival, and into the hearts and minds of peers and industry pros addressing mental health. If you live in America, you know the bounty of options available to you when it comes to beer. But it’s always exciting to turn our gaze elsewhere in the world to get a sense of what’s driving beer culture around the globe and how all that ingenuity we find at home resonates elsewhere. In this conversation, Luke talks about the parallel tracks of Australian beer drinkers, from Lager lovers to Haze Bois, and we go back to his important piece on mental health to dissect what it took to pull that kind of story together. This is Luke Robertson: podcaster, writer, and our mate from Down Under. Listen in.

San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood looked a bit different in 2013, when Cellarmaker Brewing Company opened here, on Howard Street. Tech companies were moving in, and the city’s new young and affluent workers moved into a part of San Francisco plagued by homelessness and drug use. It might have seemed difficult place to open a brewery, let alone any public-facing business, but Cellarmaker broke out, quickly gaining recognition as one of the city’s best breweries. In their five years in business, they made fast friends out of breweries like the Rare Barrel, Tired Hands, and Green Cheek, and boosted the city’s reputation as a world-class brewing destination. These days, its small taproom is bustling seemingly every night of the week, attracting IPA fanatics, devotees of their ever-rotating tap list lineup, and those who just appreciate the bartenders’ affinity for music by Dolly Parton and Carly Rae Jepsen. Now, with a barrel program in full force, they’re expanding their menu even wider. Fans irked by crowds at their taproom had long hoped that Cellarmaker would expand with a second location and in 2018, that wish came true. In the late summer, co-founder Connor Casey finally announced that the brewery had found an additional home in Bernal Heights, complete with an oven ready to pump out fluffy Detroit-style pizzas to complement their beers. It’s here in that space that I met Casey, co-founding brewer Tim Sciascia and Cellarmaker’s House of Pizza brew system manager Aaron Wittman as they taste tested some new pizza recipes being considered for the brewpub’s new menu. The new spot’s opening is just around the corner, and they clearly couldn’t be more excited. This is Connor Casey, Tim Sciascia, and Aaron Wittman of Cellarmaker Brewing Company. 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.

Welcome to the very first Sightlines episode of the Good Beer Hunting podcast. These episodes are where we dig in to a timely topic with experts from around the country, working to make you and us smarter about what’s going on in the beer industry right now. This week, brewers around the country are dealing with the ramifications of the government shutdown, which means that key agencies like the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau—often referred to as the TTB—are entirely unresponsive, and that means that almost nothing new can legally come to market until those agencies are re-opened and the backlog is cleared. The TTB is critical for brewers who need label and formation approvals for their beers in order to package and sell them. So what’s going to happen in an industry that survives almost exclusively off new releases? To catch us up to speed, we’re going to talk to Jared Treanor, Brand Manager of Brewery Ommegang in New York, and Ashley Brandt, a Chicago attorney who works with breweries of all sizes. (He’s also, incidentally, GBH’s attorney.) Thanks for listening. Sightlines is the news and analysis section of Good Beer Hunting, and it’s focused the evolution of the beer industry. We’re excited to turn it into an ongoing podcast series! Good Beer Hunting is supported in part by our underwriters, New Belgium Brewing Co. out of Fort Collins, Colorado, and Guinness, which is based in Dublin, and newly in Baltimore County, Maryland. And as always, we’re supported by the Fervent few, a community of subscribers. You can support GBH by joining.