Expert interviews, brewing insights, and industry trends.
From Beachwood to Riip and now under his own brand, Ism, Ian McCall has honed his West Coast IPA craft and racked up a bunch of medals along the way. The secret? He’s not afraid of bitterness, as long as it’s properly shaped and timed.
Over the past few decades, Victor Novak has earned his reputation as an award-winning brewer at breweries such as Dock Street, Taps, and Golden Road. Now, as innovation director at California’s Figueroa Mountain, he’s leaning into his love of classic lager styles as well as progressive fruit beers.
The secret to making consistently award-winning cider is, of course, great fruit married to thoughtful design and flawless execution, and for this multigenerational family of apple growers from Colorado’s Western slope, anything less than the best wouldn’t do justice to their beloved fruit.
The past few years have been challenging for brewers who depend on European hops, with concerns that the frequency of bad harvests could be accelerating. So, we asked two brewers who know a thing or two about getting the most from Noble hops to share how they maintain quality, from working with growers to developing novel workflows.
De Dolle Brouwers has a reputation for colorful branding and characterful, high-gravity beers that hold up beautifully in the cellar. Yet their process is intentionally laborious and layered, from the coolship and Baudelot cooler to the open copper fermentors and more in an old, classic Flemish brewhouse.
With characterful, medal-winning lagers and a decidedly West Coast approach to “foggy” IPA, Humble Sea is navigating craft beer’s choppy waters out of Santa Cruz, California, with quality as their North Star and an appetite for exploring new routes.
The West Flanders brewery, launched in 1946 to brew the beers for a nearby (and equally well-known) monastery, has adapted decade by decade as ingredients fluctuate and technology progresses. But their goal—to faithfully produce these abbey beers in a way that’s true to the original recipes—remains the same even as the tools change.
Brouwerij ’t Verzet infuses brash rock ‘n’ roll attitude and a penchant for experimentation into their studied, methodical approach to developing their own takes on traditional Flemish beers.
For the brewmaster of Timmermans—the three-century-old lambic brewery in Itterbeek, just west of Brussels—studying and understanding the dynamics of spontaneous fermentation and wood-aging is the key to making beer with captivating flavor.
This Minneapolis brewery keeps a separate, non-public production facility for its award-winning, spontaneously fermented beers while delivering crowd-pleasing classics such as Midwest (and West Coast–style) IPA from their sprawling production facility and beer hall.
Lagers are fine, but ask Tim Johnson of Minnesota’s Barrel Theory what he likes to drink most, and he’ll toast you with a hazy IPA. His love of the style drives an ongoing, methodical quest for constant improvement.
Despite opening in the throes of the pandemic in late 2020, Austin’s Meanwhile has bet big on a sprawling beer garden and well-appointed taproom, quenched by World Beer Cup and GABF medal–winning pilsner, helles, and San Diego–style IPA.
In his quest to understand the impact of every ingredient in their ever-widening family of hazy IPAs, no test is off-limits for Burlington Beer founder Joe Lemnah. From malts and adjuncts to the impact of yeast strains on surprisingly classic hop combos, the Burlington team haven’t stopped learning and tweaking in their pursuit of optimized flavor.
Lessons learned from many years of saison brewing have informed Freak Folk’s signature approach to brewing Vermont’s marquee style—hazy IPA.
In a fast-moving era, Switchback founder Bill Cherry bucks the trend by choosing slow growth and less-popular niche styles—such as smoked beer—that afford time to learn and focus through iterative brewing.
The von Trapp family history is well known thanks to the prominence of a certain Disney film, but their dogged approach to brewing lager, just down the hill from the family lodge in Stowe, Vermont, has earned them fans throughout the region and beyond.
In this final installment of our Las Vegas CBC preview episodes, Crafthaus head brewer Cameron Fisher shares his approach to making award-winning cold IPA with flaked maize, layered hop formats, and a characterful Czech lager yeast, as well as coffee beers and Scotch ale.
RipeLocker’s hypobaric chambers allow brewers to keep wet hops fresh for weeks or even months, opening up new possibilities for brewers who want to explore what’s possible in fresh-hop beers.
With 10 GABF medals (including four golds) and three World Beer Cup medals (two more golds) to their name, this Las Vegas brewery has cracked the competition code and figured out how to win big.
High-gravity brewing, extreme attenuation, pilsner malt, modern hop products, and non-diacetyl-producing yeast all figure into the ways that this Las Vegas brewery produces its compelling—and top-selling—West Coast–style IPA, Atomic Duck.
For years, Notch Brewing in Salem and Brighton, Massachusetts, has been spreading the lager gospel through refined yet characterful iterations of Czech- and German-inspired beers. His challenge to American brewers who want to follow that path: Ditch the 34/70, rethink your mash and fermentation schedules, decoct with intention, and embrace concise flavor over “crispness.”
The brewery that got its start as a mobile draft trailer and beer bus has now won back-to-back small Brewery of the Year honors at the Great American Beer Festival—but the Quinlan brothers won’t tell you there’s anything special to their winning ways.
Beer as a whole may be navigating rough seas in 2024, but New Belgium has found a map to growth with flavor-forward hazy IPAs in their Voodoo Ranger family. In this episode, lead R&D brewer Kelly McKnight sheds light on the team and process behind these industry-changing beers.
Creating compelling yet characterful hop blends in hazy IPA has become a persistent challenge for brewers swimming in a sea of Citra-Mosaic taste-alikes. The solution for Parish head brewer Ryan Speyrer: Dig into the library of hop classics to deploy blends that are as familiar as they are futuristic.