Good Beer Hunting

About 20 miles outside downtown Austin, Texas, it’s easy to forget you’re a short car ride away from one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. Sitting partially hidden in the middle of spacious farmland is one the crown jewels of modern U.S. beer: Jester King Brewery. Enthusiasts make the pilgrimage from all over, waiting in line to try some of the most beloved wild, sour, and spontaneous beers being made today, every one of them with a purpose of time and place. It’s the brainchild of Jeff Stuffings, co-founder of the family-owned business and an advocate for all the ways making beer can be an intimate process. Plenty of wooden barrels and stainless steel tanks comprise a modestly sized brewhouse at the farm brewery, but it’s the ideas of what beer could and should be that have made Jester King such a popular brand among drinkers. And as you’ll find out in this conversation, the process of what's taken Stuffings and his team to this moment in time—not to mention what he hopes to achieve in years to come—is very much based on a connection to the land and people around him.

Welcome back to another episode of the GBH Collective, where we bring you the stories behind the stories from our writers and photographers all over the world, and from our studio team based here in Chicago.  This week we’ve got Kyle Kastranec from Ohio who was GBH’s first new voice back in 2014. We recently launch a sub blog of sorts where he explores his own perceptions of beer and the ever-evolving culture that surrounds it.  We also talk to Claire Bullen, a writer we recently brought on who is based in London, but originally hails from the States. Her recent profile of The Kernel is one of my favorite pierces we’ve ever published. She also recently made time to write about beer and cheesesteaks on a stop in Philly. Listen in.

I first met Miguel Rivas a few years ago when I was learning about the Brooklyn beer scene. He was an avid photographer, beer geek, and all-around welcoming guy who I’ve since followed on his journeys all over the world through Instagram. He travels regularly to Costa Rica, so today we talk a lot about that, what he’s been up to in Brooklyn these days, and the general state of being an influential beer geek. Listen in.

The UK brewing market is getting pretty crowded. It’s now home to more than 2,000 breweries, including nearly 110 in London alone, all crammed onto an island that’s roughly the size of Michigan. And when you consider the divide between modern and traditional breweries, constant debates over cask, keg, and the price of beer (to mention only a few of the oft-discussed topics), its no wonder conversations about British beer can maybe get a little…tetchy…these days. Despite it all, the UK’s most forward-thinking breweries, be they young or old, are still finding ways to thrive and expand. It’s almost as if all of this competition has become a driving force for the most eager and entrepreneurial beer makers out there. When U.S. expats Tom Palmer and Todd Matteson founded Mondo Brewing Company three years ago just a stone’s throw away from London’s iconic Battersea Power Station, it became London’s 81st brewery. Although they’ve dabbled with distributing throughout the capital and into some of the UK’s more buoyant beer markets such as Bristol or Manchester, their local market of South London is where they’ve really thrived. Through pubs and bars in boroughs such as Brixton and Clapham, as well as their own brewery taproom, they’ve quietly built up a reputation for producing a solid range of beers. They might not be as talked about as, say, Cloudwater or Beavertown, but having just undergone an expansion that will see Mondo increase capacity by 80%, and with plans to open their first London bar in 2018, this is certainly one London brewery that’s riding an ascending curve. The trick for smaller breweries like Mondo, of course, is to find the right balance between own-premise sales and through key accounts. For Palmer and Matteson, it’s all about building strong, personal relationships. An example of this is the relationship Mondo has with restaurant chain Dishoom, for whom Mondo brews the house beer. Keeping up with these relationships, while ensuring steady turnover at its own sites, will be key for this London brewery’s success in the long term. We talk about all that and more today. Listen in.

Welcome to another episode of The Fervent Few podcast. Every few weeks we present you with this bonus episode of the GBH podcast where we chat with members of our subscriber community, The Fervent Few. Members subscribe to GBH like a magazine, making a monthly contribution via Patreon. Members also join us in a forum to talk about a wide range of topics well beyond beer. Each week, we pick one of these topics and present the community’s answers to readers in the form of an article posted to Good Beer Hunting. Learn more at patreon.com/goodbeerhunting. On this episode, we talk to Quinn Thompson a Supply Chain Manager for the Craft Brew Alliance about beer packaging, recycling, and the meaning of the word “infinite.” But first, Michael and I chat about Uppers and Downers Chicago and the events surrounding it, the recent U&D Beer Dinner in Grand Rapids, and Bryan Roth being put in charge of charts at GBH.

This week's guest was recently part of an Uppers & Downers dinner we did in Grand Rapids at the Sovengard. It was spectacular. But more recently, I’ve gotten to know Nathan Walser from his latest project, which is his own brewery, Greyline. In a city like Grand Rapids, it’s easy to get carried away with thinking of it as Beer City, USA, and there’s good reason for that. There are a ton of breweries in this midwestern town. It’s partially defined by its breweries. And the national success of a place like Founders really sets the tone there. But I’ll be honest: I tend to go to the same few places every time I visit. That is, until recently, when I went out of my way to the far-north side of the city to visit Greyline. I’d heard it was a bit small and some people thought the service was a bit severe (at least according to Yelp), and all that made me want to go. I figured, if that’s what the locals liked, who are more accustomed to gigantic restaurants and malty, hoppy beers from the '90s, then this was probably my kind of place. And it was. I was really taken with the beer. And as I started asking questions of the bartender, they started making nervous eye contact with the guy to my right. “You work here?" I asked. “Yeah," he said with his head down. “You brew here?” “Yeah,” he said again. “You own the place, or what?” “Yeah, I do,” he said, and finally started opening up. That was all I needed to dive headlong into what made Greyline tick. Since then, I’ve had multiple run-ins with Nathan, talked about his beer to a level of detail rarely captured on the mics, and have been enamored ever since. And to top it all off, Nathan’s career as a journeyman Michigan brewer weaves its way through everything that makes Grand Rapids Beer City, USA—a title it sometimes deserves, and sometimes falls short of. We’ll talk about why that is, too.

Welcome back to another episode of the GBH Collective where we bring you the stories behind the stories from our writers and photographers all over the world, and from our studio team based here in Chicago. This week we’ve got Hillary Schuster, our Experience Director at GBH. Hillary is in charge of all the events we produce as Good Beer Hunting, and working with our clients around the world to develop their own concepts and engagements with their fans. Her background in innovation planning lends a unique perspective on these things, and how the beer world can think more broadly about the audiences they attract and the experiences they create for them around beer. Not only is she my business partner, but we’ve been married for more than six years. Listen in.

When it comes to beer, there is plenty on which we can disagree. Tastes, smells, brands, breweries—these are all things beer lovers embrace and debate on a regular basis. But one thing we can all agree on? We just want good beer. But even on that, there's plenty of subjectivity. Or is there? What makes a beer "good" or "bad" is often put into the context of our taste buds, not always with analysis through a literal and figurative microscope. This is where Kate Lee excels. She's a trained scientist who spent more than a decade working for Anheuser-Busch, a business famously known for its focus on consistency and quality from batch to batch. Since 2014, she's helped lead a quality program for Richmond, Virginia's Hardywood Park Craft Brewery, building on an existing foundation to take Hardywood's focus on quality to the next level. As director of quality assurance and director of operations, her job at the brewery has consistently evolved as production levels and brewer ambitions have grown. It's not just about running tests, but collaborating with staff to ensure the right ingredients are producing the right beer every step of the way. And as you'll hear, that's not always an easy decision.

As the growth of craft beer and its various offshoots continues to find its niche in smaller and smaller cities and towns, a remarkable thing is happening. Some of the most obscure styles of brewing are making their homes far from the urban centers where most of the drinkers they tend to attract actually live. Breweries like Jester King and Hill Farmstead have long embodied this anomaly. And increasingly, there’s a new gelatin of sorts that’s had experience working in these sought-after breweries who are venturing out on their own, a bit like settlers, as they return to a place they call home and set up shop. They’re not met with instant success very often—even as they take on the challenges of making beers inspired by the Lambic, Gueuze, and wild traditions, they’re also met with the challenge of finding their audience in these smaller, out-of-the-way markets. Speciation Artisan Ales is one of the newest of these in the midwest. After an immersive education experience brewing for Black Project in Denver, Mitch Ermatinger and his wife Whitney decided to return home to the Grand Rapids area of Michigan, find some cheap industrial space, and start making wild ales of their own. Having learned a good deal of the brewing, aging, and blending side of things, they had to learn how to run a business, create a selling strategy, and start attracting an audience for a region of the country that simply doesn’t have much exposure to these kinds of beers—not to mention the way in which they were going to be sold. Even with a brewery like Jolly Pumpkin in his backyard, and being named Beer City USA, this was still a novel idea in 2018 Michigan beer. Listen in as we talk through how it came to fruition.

In craft beer, so many of the conversations we lead are less about the beer we’re drinking and more about how we identify with it, or the person who made it, or who owns that company and how that reflects back on our own self-image. Craft beer is a foggy mirror that way. And we get caught up in so many contradictions, hypocrisies and, in some cases, some serious self-hatred as a culture.  Basically, we’re a consumer base and an industry ripe for satire. Today’s guest is one of the most effective in that regard, sometimes holding up that filthy mirror to the populace, other times to himself.  Don’t Drink Beer is a weird website that started on the fringes and worked its way to the middle using satire and self-reflection as a way to expose some of the more insane things we do as beer makers and drinkers. The trading circuit, the line-waiting, the valuations we put on certain bottles while ignoring others, and the oft-enraging debates that start in Facebook groups and forums.  Don’t Drink Beer is a persona that often catches its intended audience off guard. And sometimes plays straight into it. And after following it for years, the pattern reveals it for what it is—the evolution of a comedian.  Alex Kidd, the guy behind the site, is a professional comedian. He studied and practices law in California, and as you can tell from some of his more elaborate beer reviews, he's also a studied writer, reader, and music history sponge. And describing him this way, so earnestly, just feels so wrong. He was in Chicago this past week on tour with a comedy show about beer called Barley Wine is Live, for which we’ll talk about the inspiration in the interview. But we also talk about the long history of Don’t Drink Beer and its relationship with Chicago and the Midwest, as an antagonist of sorts from the West Coast. Oh, and where all this is going, if it is, indeed, going anywhere.