Good Beer Hunting

Like so many other breweries, the team at Aslin Beer Company is new to the industry, part of roughly 500 breweries that opened in 2015 and more than 3,000 that have appeared in the last five years.  Alongside many contemporaries, the rise of Aslin can be seen through the lens of what online beer enthusiast communities can do for a small business. In less than two years, Aslin has become a hot commodity on the trading circuit and an unsurprising presence on top beer lists among some of the most popular rating websites. It should come as no surprise, really, when that attention is spurred by creating one beloved New England IPA brand after another. The rotating collection of hazy, hoppy beers coming from Aslin has helped push the brewery to its production limits. Of all places to have met co-founder Kai Leszkowicz, in a strange way, it felt fitting we crossed paths in another country. I met him while visiting Reykjavik, Iceland, when both of us were in town as part of the annual Icelandic Beer Festival. As a former homebrewer who has quickly made a name for himself and his brewery, it oddly didn’t feel too out of place to first meet him a world away from our home region of the Mid-Atlantic. If there was any time in the history of the beer industry, now would be it when a brewery making 2,000 barrels of beer a year would be on the radar of Scandinavian beer lovers. That’s the power of the internet. Which is why I found Kai’s perspective as the part-owner of a young business so interesting. The excitement and hardships, the new ideas and challenges he faces, are ones taken on by so many other breweries who have to learn to balance growth with word of mouth fame.

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.  This first episode is devoted to Victory Brewing Company's Prima Pils.

Today’s episode is our annual hangover party podcast, an event we host here at the studio in the wake of Upper & Downers, our coffee beer festival. People have started traveling from all over the world—in some cases, as far away as Japan!—to attend this insane mashup of coffee and beer culture we put together with our friend Stephen Morrissey (a world barista champion and works at the Specialty Coffee Association). And this hangover party, which we stupidly (brilliantly?) throw the morning after the big event, has become a bit like a brunch after a wedding. We get to sit down with the out-of-towners, drink even more coffee and beer, and for those brewers who want to celebrate coffee beers with us, but can’t make the fest, they send us bottles and cans of their latest experiments just for the party. We get some biscuits from Bang Bang, while some friends and roasters operate the La Marzocco espresso machine—in some cases getting a personal training session from people on the Acaia scales. Beyond that, we lounge. We also use that time as a chance to revisit the festival, talk about our favorite things, and interview some of the brewers and roasters that participated. We invited Jordan Michelman of Sprudge.com to sit in with us again, which is always super fun for me because I get to hear from someone who sort of does what GBH does, but for coffee. Plus, he’s been at it a lot longer than I have, and it shows.  This is a long one with a lot of different, shorter interviews just stacked end-to-end. So settle in, go for a drive, get in a run, whatever you gotta do. Hope you enjoy it.  Photo by Nick Kohout of Acaia

I’ve got something a little new for you this time around. This is an episode devoted to the GBH Collective, thats the writers and photographers we have around the world who bring you the amazing stories and interviews you see on Good Beer Hunting.  As our network has grown, it’s occurred to me that like you, so much of what I experience in beer world comes through the eyes and ears of these fantastic people, and in addition to their compelling stories on the site, there’s so much more to talk about behind the scenes. So periodically, I’m going to be Skyping them in to the studio here in Chicago, and having a chat with them to learn more about a recent story they filed, or a trip they just got back from, and paint an even broader picture of what’s happening with the GBH team out in the world. With well over a dozen storytellers, there’s a lot of action.  So today, you’re going to hear from Bryan Roth who just got back from Iceland, Kyle Kastranec on his recent travels to Berlin and Copenhagen, Blake Tyers, who’s actually a brewer at Creature Comforts in addition to writing and shooting for GBH, and Mark Spence who’s local to Chicago, who’s been pretty active in our b-Roll section of the site after filing his first GBH story of a trip through Vietnam.

Today’s guest is one of those serendipitous run-ins I sometimes have with a fellow writer, in this case someone I’ve followed for some time, but never had the chance to meet in person. Pete Brown, who lives in London, has written numerous books over the years, including Three Sheets To The Wind: One Man's Quest For The Meaning Of Beer. And lately his writing has taken him into both the history and contemporary culture of cider making in the UK. And that’s what brought him to Chicago, which was the host of CiderCon this year.  I met up with Pete at the Map Room over some Alpha Kings where he quickly got sucked into some roiling debate about cask ales with the locals (at their behest, not his) and after calling it a night, we met up at GBH Studio the next morning to record a conversation about English craft beer, cider, and Pete’s larger realm of work, which much like mine stretches across beer writing as well as consulting with breweries, as he stitches together a career using the skills he has as a former advertising writer and a beer expert.  He’s chock full of insight and a joy to chat with.  Thanks to Matthew Curtis for the portrait.

At Rate Beer Best, it became clear that this was the year the British breweries would assert themselves among the best in the world. Many of the best British breweries have followed in the footsteps of their American counterparts and are now evolving at a similar pace — but what really made this the year of the Brits was the shift in Rate Beer’s own audience. According to Joe Tucker, founder of RateBeer.com, London is now the largest metropolitan market for Rate Beer’s user base.  Two of the more prominent breweries in the U.K. scene are Beavertown in London and Cloudwater in Manchester, both taking home multiple awards from the festival this year. While it’s a welcome recognition for Beavertown who were early-in in 2011, for Cloudwater, now in their second year, it’s nearly a coup won with hazy IPAs.  Both gentlemen were happy to sit down together and discuss some of the factors at work in the UK market, and how their generations of craft brewing are playing out relative to the US zeitgeist.

In the tradition of American Wild Ales, a name like American Solera might sound fundamental—but it’s a relative newcomer for brewer/founder Chase Healey. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, far from the hotspots and critical masses of drinkers for such delicacies, Healey has carved out a life and a living that's far different than the way he entered brewing. His first venture, Prairie Artisan Ales, in which he still plays a small supporting role, is quickly growing from one state to the next. And it was his come-to-Jesus moment with the vast potential for Prairie that helped him understand his more personal goals as a brewer. Through that shift in focus, and his curiosity surrounding Wild Ales, an entirely new, unproven chapter of his life opened. But for all the anxiety of venturing into unknown territory, it's his obsession with simplicity that seems to keep him keeled.  I caught up with Healey at RateBeer Best in Santa Rosa this year, fresh off his second place win for best new brewery in the world with American Solera, in addition to his legacy wins for top beer and top brewer in Oklahoma for Prairie in 2017.

Craft beer drinkers are finding better and better beers available in more places than ever before. And a big reason for that is large-format stores like Target, Costco, and, here in Chicago, Jewel-Osco. These big stores are looking for ways to connect with their customers on premium and locally-sourced products. The whole food and beverage industry is shifting local, not just craft beer.  But for some longtime craft beer fans, that’s an uncomfortable development. I’ve heard smaller retailers lamenting the competition and criticizing these larger stores as greedy opportunists. I’ve seen drinkers describe the craft beer they see at the grocery store as corporate sellouts, boldly claiming they won’t support breweries they see on those shelves. But let’s not kid ourselves: every culture has its self-inflicted know-nothings. For the rest of us, being able to grab a six pack of a super-fresh local beer when we’re swinging through for milk and eggs is a godsend.  More importantly, the people behind the decisions of who does—and does not—get on those shelves have their own perspective on what’s exciting in beer. In this case, it’s Sandy Vox, who’s been at it for 15 years. And she’d never trade in the current chaos of craft beer proliferation for anything.

This week’s conversation is potentially one of the most enjoyable and insightful conversations I’ve had since I started working in beer. I spend a lot of my time chatting to brewers and bar owners, but never have I taken the time to pose questions to someone who works in the world of beer distribution. I’ve known Pete Brissenden from back when he worked for London’s Meantime brewery, way before SAB Miller and subsequently Asahi bought it out. Pete’s worked for a range of breweries over the years, from the very traditional Hopdaemon in Kent to Camden Town Brewery in its formative years.  These days he works for The Bottle Shop, a London based distributor and retailer that specializes in wholesaling craft beer. What differentiates The Bottle Shop from other British beer distributors is that 50% of its business is based on imports. In the UK The Bottle Shop is working with cutting edge breweries such as Beavertown and Cloudwater. While at the same time bringing in beers to the UK from the likes of Green Flash, Crooked Stave, Alpine and many more.  During this discussion Pete and I cover topics ranging from pricing, to the viability of imports in a post-Brexit UK economy to the health of the cask ale market here in the UK. We also dig into his history at Camden and Meantime a little, including Pete’s reaction to the latters sale to SAB Miller while he was still working there.

BJ Pichman is the head brewer at Forbidden Root brewpub, Chicago’s “botanic beer” producer. As a homebrewer, he found a niche brewing pilot batches for recipe development consultants, and that eventually that got him a gig brewing the earliest batches of Forbidden Root’s first trials for their namesake root beer-inspired concoction designed by Randy Mosher and Robert Finkel.  Eventually that concept would develop into a full-fledged craft beer brand and brewpub, and while botanics are still at the heart of the operation, BJ has also developed a strong portfolio of hoppy beers, most recently of the New England variety. And they’re really good.  This week, he also launched his collaboration with Fernet-Branca, a bitter, herbal liquor that posed a perfect challenge for the team. The result, called Frenetic, might be the beer that finally puts this crew on the national map.