Beervana Podcast
268 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 137 ratingsAuthor Jeff Alworth (The Beer Bible, The Secrets of Master Brewers) and Oregon State Economics professor Patrick Emerson host this engaging podcast about the culture, economics, history, and business of beer and brewing.
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Episodes
Show 193: Polish Brewer Marek Kamiński on Grodziskie
February 28, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBAt this year’s Central European Brewers Festival, Polish brewer Marek Kamiński gave a presentation on the briefly extinct style of Grodziskie that has been making a comeback in its homeland. Jeff and Marek later sat down to discuss this fascinating style, its history, and how it’s doing today. We have that interview, along with the news and mailbag and a Croatian beer tasting.
Show 192: Czechia and Central Europe
February 14, 2024 23:49 - 1 hour - 67.2 MBToday we’re going to go to Prague and Budapest, where Jeff recently spent ten days. He was there to speak at the Central European Brewers Conference, and had a chance to get caught up on the beer scenes in the region. The countries there have very diverse brewing backgrounds, from the Czechia, with local intact traditions dating back centuries, to countries like Croatia, where craft brewing dates back only a decade. He’s going to tell us what he found. Beer Tastings: Varionica Pale, Zmajska ...
Show 191: Is the Era of “Next Big Thing” Over?
December 07, 2023 18:48 - 1 hour - 62.2 MBNot long ago, we received a very interesting email in the mailbag. It came from Pete Hoppins of Portland’s British-influenced brewery, Away Days. It was the length of a short article and came with a color-coded graph. The essence of the email boiled down to a pithy question he posed about the viability of small breweries today. Pete asked: “Do you think we could ever see another brewery as successful as say Breakside or 10 Barrel (in Portland area)?” The email was far to detailed and meaty fo...
Audioblog: Singha Beer, Don't Ask No Questions
December 01, 2023 18:52 - 8 minutes - 7.45 MBAudioblog: Singha Beer, Don't Ask No Questions by Jeff Alworth & Patrick Emerson
Show 190: Ryan Wagner and Megan Schwarz of Guinness Chicago
November 22, 2023 20:15 - 56 minutes - 64.5 MBIn September, Dublin's Guinness Brewery opened its second American site, this time in Chicago. Jeff went to the Windy City to check it out and while he was there, sat down with Ryan Wagner, who helped see the project over the finish line, and brewer Megan Schwarz.
Show 189: The Problem With Style
November 09, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 66.9 MBWhen we think of different beers, our minds almost immediately frame them in terms of “style.” IPAs and witbiers and Czech dark lagers: this is how we’ve come to understand beer. Today we get philosophical and ask the question: what if styles aren’t the only way to think about beer? What if, rather than illuminating something essential about beer, styles actually deceive us?
Show 188: The Business of Hops with Max Coleman
October 26, 2023 21:52 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBToday we are joined by hop grower Max Coleman for a special edition of Beeronomics. Hops are a very unusual crop, sold only to a single industry for one purpose. How does this business relationship work? We’re going to ask Max how he knows which hops to grow and how many, and how the market for hops works. Photo: Max enveloped by a field of Mosaic hops.
Audioblog: Pumpkin Ales Are Fun — And They’re Making a Quiet Return
October 18, 2023 16:37 - 5 minutes - 4.75 MBSeveral years ago, beer experienced its “tulip mania” moment in the form of a pumpkin ale bubble. Many of those were bad—but that was the breweries’ fault, not the style’s. These should function like fun autumnal rituals. The new crop may bring you back.
Show 187: Autumnal Beeronomics
October 11, 2023 19:44 - 1 hour - 41.2 MBToday we are pulling out our green eyeshades and squinting at some data—it’s another episode of Beeronomics. Our intrepid economist is going to walk us through some numbers. Inflation, draft numbers, taprooms—we’re digging deep so you don’t have to. Cover photo: Midjourney (prompt: beer economics) Beer Tasting: Buoy Festbier
Show 186: The Hop Harvest
September 27, 2023 18:26 - 56 minutes - 69.5 MBFor the second year in a row, we have decamped to Loyal Legion, a local pub that reliably has one of the best selections of fresh hop beers in town. As we sit here and turn our tongues green, we’re going to discuss the hop harvest. Patrick and Jeff went down to Coleman Farms a few weeks back to witness it, and we’re going to walk you through the process that takes 20-foot tall bines sunning themselves in the field and turns them into the T-90 pellets breweries use to make beer.
Audioblog: Fresh Hop Beer Report
September 22, 2023 18:16 - 7 minutes - 6.5 MBAfter screwing around on the margins for a while, this week I really plunged into the fresh hop marketplace. What I've discovered has been both unusual and enlightening. Here's an early-season report.
Podcast Extra: Special, "We're Not Dead" Announcement
September 19, 2023 23:59 - 1 minute - 1.02 MBWe're not dead and neither is the podcast. Bear with us, kind and forgiving listeners.
Show 185: Austria – More Märzen, Less Vienna Lager
August 17, 2023 16:00 - 1 hour - 39.2 MBAs everyone knows, the three great lager-brewing regions are Bavaria, Bohemia, and Austria. Wait, Austria? Sure it was famous in the last century for Vienna lager, but what has it done lately? We have Franz Hofer on the show today to answer this very question. Franz splits his year between Oklahoma and Vienna and writes about the lager-lands on his website, Tempest in a Tankard. Austria is, no kidding, a truly special place where one of the world’s major styles whets the whistles of a nation—...
Pod Extra! Fireside Chat: Fireside Chat: How to Succeed in Beer Without Selling IPAs
August 11, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 71.8 MBIn their latest Fireside Chat, Breakside Brewery's Ben Edmunds and Beervana's Jeff Alworth speak with three brewers whose breweries do not make hoppy ales. We wanted to hear why they chose this path, and what it entails. Because IPAs are overwhelmingly popular among craft beer drinkers, these breweries have had to create interest in other types of beer. How did they do that? And how does the future look for these breweries? Guests in this show: • Bill Arnott, Founder and Brewer of Seattle’s ...
Show 184: What We Did on our Summer Vacations
August 03, 2023 15:00 - 1 hour - 34.2 MBWe have an unusual transcontinental edition of the Beervana Show for you today. We thought it would be fun to compare and contrast our summer vacation destinations. I’ve been in Maine for a couple weeks and Jeff took a trip to Oklahoma. We both visited breweries, drank some beer, and we will give our full report.
Show 183: Special Slimmed-down Vacation Mailbag Episode, aka Bratvana
July 20, 2023 17:18 - 48 minutes - 22.8 MBBoth Jeff and I are about to go on excursions out of the state and away from our microphones, so today we’re doing the one, time-sensitive task left to us: addressing your mailbag comments and questions. Illustration courtesy Midjourney. Prompt: drinking beer on holiday in the sunshine
Show 182: Making of a Classic - Pliny the Elder
July 07, 2023 22:20 - 1 hour - 68.1 MBNearly a quarter century ago, veteran brewer Vinnie Cilurzo brewed a one-off double IPA at Russian River Brewing for a local festival. It would become a regular, bearing the somewhat obscure name of a Roman naturalist—Pliny the Elder. Pliny pretty soon became a cult phenomenon and ultimately the brewery’s calling card. But what makes it special—what makes it a classic—is how Vinnie anticipated the future of hoppy American ales and brewed the first truly modern IPA all those years ago. PHOTO:...
Show 181: The Judgment of Lents (Lager Tasting Finals!)
June 22, 2023 16:00 - 1 hour - 70.6 MBIn 1976, a blind tasting of Chardonnays known as the Judgment of Paris changed the wine world forever. Today, in this podcast, we offer you no less an earth-shattering blind tasting, the Judgment of Lents. That’s right, it’s part two of our mass market lager blind tasting, held in a luxurious conference room at Zoiglhaus in the Lents neighborhood of SE Portland. Together, Zoiglhaus’s brewmaster Alan Taylor, Jeff, and Patrick sat down to taste the final six lagers and determine which deserved ...
Pod Extra: Setting the Record Straight on How IPAs Came to Be
June 15, 2023 17:15 - 1 hour - 81.8 MBA Breakside-Beervana Fireside Chat. How did the American IPA tradition start? Are West Coast beers just about the bitter? Did hazies change everything? What did West Coast breweries take from the east—and how much did East Coast breweries crib from the west? Are there actually two different traditions? Just one? Dozens? American brewers, in reinventing IPAs, have changed the way the world makes beer. But how accurately do we understand our own story? We will get to the bottom of this once a...
Show 180: The Great Mass Market Lager Taste-off (Part 1)
June 08, 2023 16:00 - 1 hour - 66.4 MBToday we have a very special show, along with a special guest. In Show 180, we kick off a two-part taste off of … are you ready? … mass market lagers! While connoisseurs eschew these beers because they have slight and occasionally objectionable flavor profiles, they constitute the vast majority of beers sold in the world. We have an international line-up, and to help us taste them, we invited friend-of-the-pod Alan Taylor to join us. Alan is the German-trained master brewer at Zoiglhaus, and ...
Show 179: Where Have All The Belgians Gone?
May 25, 2023 17:55 - 1 hour - 79.1 MBIn our last show, we delved into the strange, wonderful tale of Belgian witbier. But that story was really just the first chapter in a wave of Belgian-inspired beers and breweries that got going thanks to witbier’s success. For more than a decade and a half, Belgian beer seemed to be growing in popularity, but then it cratered. Now it’s very difficult to find a Belgian style on a taplist—even witbier. We thought we’d try to figure out what happened. Tasting: Block 15, Garden Path
Show 178: Witbier
May 11, 2023 22:25 - 59 minutes - 34.4 MBWe’re less than a month away from the summer, and that means shifting down from big, boozy beers to lighter thirst-quenchers. We thought it would be a great opportunity to do one of our studies in style and look at that perfect Belgian summer ale, the witbier. If you think that sounds like a tame topic, stay tuned, because we’re going to get into the deep history of the style and describe a beer that bears no resemblance to Blue Moon. Tasting: Hoegaarden, Breakside Belgian White
Show 177: Jeff and Patrick Catch Up
April 28, 2023 22:41 - 1 hour - 39.3 MB[Note: Dodgy audio! Our field mic may be on the fritz! Apologies!] It’s been a minute since our last show. In the weeks since we last spoke, various events have transpired. Patrick has been to London and back. Jeff has been to Tillamook. The King of England was fêted by BrewDog—and then unfêted. The Belgians expressed displeasure with the Champagne of Beers. Portland lost an icon. Lots of stuff to talk about, so for this show, we thought we’d head to a pub and do a proper catch-up over beers.
Show 176: Portland’s Showcase for Women: SheBrew
March 17, 2023 21:02 - 58 minutes - 31.4 MBA couple of weeks back, Portland enjoyed the return of one of its most unusual events—the 8th edition of SheBrew. As the name suggests, the event celebrates women, and includes two components: a national female-only homebrew competition, and a one-day festival of beer made by women at professional breweries. We’re going to learn about SheBrew from one of the organizers, Jenn McPoland, and hear how it has accelerated the integration of women into brewing. PHOTO: SheBrew
Show 175: Talking Malt with Campbell Morrissy
March 03, 2023 23:07 - 1 hour - 92.1 MBIn Show 175, we are delighted to be joined by pFriem’s Campbell Morrissy. Campbell is currently the Head Brewer at pFriem, and recently crafted the recipe and formulation for a collaboration pFriem is doing with Jeff. In designing the beer, a pub-strength pilsner, Campbell used a California-grown floor malt. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to have him on the show and dig into malting. It’s a subject that can get technical pretty fast, but it’s critically important in making beer taste th...
Show 174: Gigantic Reflects on the Beer Industry in 2023
December 31, 2022 23:53 - 1 hour - 66.1 MBIn part two of our conversation, we talk to Ben Love and Van Havig about some of the challenges facing breweries as the year nears its end.
Show 173: Gigantic's Ben Love and Van Havig
December 20, 2022 23:53 - 1 hour - 62.8 MBToday we join you from the industrial tract in Southeast Portland that Ben Love and Van Havig selected ten years ago when they founded Gigantic Brewing. At the time, they expected it would blend in with its surroundings, and they devoted little attention to the tiny taproom space they called the Champagne Lounge. To their surprise, it has become a success, encouraging them to open a second taproom during Covid and, last month, a third. In today’s pod, we’re going to ask them about the new pla...
Show 172: Winter Warmers
November 23, 2022 17:50 - 59 minutes - 48.7 MBThe cold weather seems to come fast. Through October, crisp mornings often give way to sunny afternoons. After Halloween, however, the days grow short and the sun disappears behind gray clouds. Once we fall back after daylight savings end, darkness starts arriving at the end of the workday and the sun makes a slow, sleepy return. Winter is coming, and bringing the cold and wet with it. On today’s show we offer a tonic that’s at least a thousand years old—the winter warmer, a beer to heat body...
Show 171: Craft Beer & Brewing's Jamie Bogner on Modern Media
November 11, 2022 20:12 - 1 hour - 39.7 MBA few weeks back, Jeff’s editor at Craft Beer & Brewing wrote to explain that the magazine was shifting to its original quarterly format. The reason wasn’t declining revenues, but efficiencies—it’s less expensive and simpler to put out four issues a year than six. That got us thinking: how do magazines work? How has Craft Beer & Brewing survived when so many other magazines folded? How do the internet, social media, and newer delivery systems like podcasting impact print media--should we be t...
Show 170: Making of a Classic - Anchor Steam
October 27, 2022 21:09 - 1 hour - 60.6 MBFor most of the 20th century, if you wanted to point to an actual American style of beer, you had to face San Francisco. Steam beer, a frontier concoction brewed fast for thirsty gold miners, became a signature of the city. Many breweries made it in the latter half of the 19th century, but they all died out, save one: the Anchor Brewery, which was rescued from bankruptcy in 1965 and helped jump-start craft brewing in America.
Show 169: Fresh Hop Ales!
October 13, 2022 14:51 - 59 minutes - 58.8 MBWe join you from the best place on the planet for Show 169—a pub, smack dab in the middle of fresh-hop season. We recorded this show on-site at Portland’s Loyal Legion, which is reliably stocked with these little gems throughout the season. While we sipped on them, we discussed hops, the harvest, and the seasonal, regional delight that are fresh hop ales.
Pod Exra: Derek Prentice, Ron Pattinson, and Mike Siegel
October 03, 2022 23:39 - 56 minutes - 51.1 MB[Warning: raw audio of spotty quality] In this Pod Extra, Jeff interviews legendary London brewer Derek Prentice, beer historian Ron Pattinson, and Goose Island Innovation Brewer Mike Siegel. They teamed up on a special project to recreate a 1960s barley wine made by London's now-defunct Truman brewery--where Derek started brewing in 1968, Double Eagle combines a wood-aged barley wine inoculated with wild yeast (Brett C), blended with fresh barley wine. In the interview, Jeff learns about th...
Show 168 - Headwinds
September 14, 2022 17:59 - 1 hour - 92.3 MBIt’s hard out there for a brewer. Heat, drought, supply-chain issues, metal shortages, war, and inflation—all these things seem to be conspiring against them. On today’s show we’ll have a look at these headwinds, assess how bad they are, and how soon brewers might see some relief.
Show 167: New Scottish Ales Made the Old Way
August 31, 2022 20:18 - 1 hour - 56.9 MBThough many Americans may not realize it, Scotland is one of the world’s great old brewing countries. Even if you have heard of 80 shilling ales and wee heavies, however, you may not be familiar with the vat-aging tradition Gareth Young mines at Epochal Ales in Glasgow. Drawing on archival records, Young is bringing attention to beers like stock ale and Glasgow porter. In Show 167, we get on the horn with Glasgow and have a fascinating chat with Gareth.
Show 166: Lifecycle of a Brewery
August 18, 2022 17:18 - 1 hour - 98.2 MBWhen Stone Brewing launched in the mid-90s, its aggro “you’re not worthy!” vibe captured the counter-culture zeitgeist of craft brewing. It was able to build a brand on the rising popularity of IPAs—one that took it to Virginia and ultimately Berlin. Yet all that reversed itself in recent years and Stone found itself flailing in a new world that didn’t admire aggro anymore. It got us thinking about how breweries go through a familiar life cycle, one that would make a worthy topic. Beers tast...
Show 165: Washington State Breweries Sue Oregon
August 09, 2022 16:31 - 1 hour - 69.9 MBIf a Portland brewery wants to drive a keg of beer across the river to Vancouver, WA and they have filed the proper paperwork with the state, they’re allowed to. The State of Oregon, however, forbids Washington breweries from doing the same. This rankled Justin Leigh, owner of Dwinell Country Ales in Goldendale, WA. He’s a lawyer, and he was pretty sure that didn’t pass legal muster. A few weeks ago, three breweries sued Oregon for the right to self-distribute South of the Columbia. Today we ...
Show 164: Biere de Garde, France's Signature Style
July 27, 2022 21:30 - 57 minutes - 84.4 MBIt has been a while since we did a classic style dissection, but thanks to a listener request, we have a lovely, overlooked tradition to present today: bière de garde, France’s signature style. It has a history dating back to the 19th century, but the current examples look a lot different. In today’s show, we’ll discuss that transformation, what caused it, and what you can expect from this elegant, unexpected style. Note: We had trouble with Zencastr again--and this will be the last time we ...
Show 163: Portland's Best Breweries
July 06, 2022 22:36 - 1 hour - 52 MBPortland has many breweries. Old breweries, new breweries, big breweries, small breweries. But which, among this dense thicket, are the best? For visitors to Portland, that’s an important question, and we’re here to help! This past week, Jeff posted his annual Best Portland Breweries list, and we go through it and discuss the breweries he chose—and whether his choices are correct.
Audioblog: An Overview of Portland
June 27, 2022 18:31 - 12 minutes - 11.7 MBToday's post kicks off Portland Travel Week. To get things started, I’ll offer an overview of the Rose City, a bit of beer-centric history, and some of the key features of the local drinking culture. Craft breweries follow a familiar model, and if you just go from one to the next, you might miss some of the character behind all that steel.
Show 162: Away Days Brewing
June 08, 2022 23:05 - 56 minutes - 42.1 MBOn June 11th, Portland’s English-themed, pro-cask Away Days Brewery hosts a cask ale festival with several regional breweries. As you know, Jeff and I love cask ale and have been promoting it for over a decade—all to little apparent effect. Something changed in the past few years, though, and now several Portland-area breweries have regular cask offerings (we toured a chunk of them on a podcast extra between Shows 155 and 156). That something may very well be Away Days, which has shown the ki...
Audioblog: Losing the Old Breweries; Heineken to Close Caledonian
June 06, 2022 17:56 - 3 minutes - 3.45 MBOld breweries compact time and preserve it. The hands of old brewers are evident in every dent and scuff. Their habits are preserved in the movements of the brewers they trained. When I stepped into Caledonian’s brewhouse, wort steaming and foaming in weird bespoke coppers, it might have well been 1869.
Show 161: Farmhouse Brewing In Voss, Norway
June 03, 2022 18:08 - 1 hour - 81.3 MBOn today's show we hear from Kjetil Dale, one of two dozen or so farmhouse brewers practicing an ancient craft in the western Norwegian valley of Voss. Brewing here is knitted into the culture of the region, beginning in the classic eldhus, or "firehouse," common on farms here. As the fire crackles nearby, Kjetil describes this tradition and some of his background. Beer tasting: Kings and Daughters / https://kingsanddaughters.com/
Show 160: Norwegian Beer
May 24, 2022 17:47 - 1 hour - 50 MBIf you’ve been following us on social media, you’ve probably seen some photos Jeff posted from his recent visit to Norway. He was invited to participate at the Oslo Craft Beer Festival. We’ll hear about that and what he learned of the Norwegian beer scene. Craft beer is only about twenty years old, but the brewing tradition goes back centuries—and perhaps millennia. While he was in Norway, Jeff visited three breweries that melded the old and new traditions. Beer tasting: Juice Jr. from Grea...
Show 159: Rosenstadt Brewing
April 28, 2022 22:36 - 1 hour - 96.7 MBOn Show 159, we are joined by Tobias Hahn and Nick Greiner, founders of the Rosenstadt Brewery. They tell us about their unusual approach to the business, what it’s like to focus on German beer in the American Northwest, and how gemütlichkeit fits into all this.
Show 158: Monastic Beers Revisited
April 20, 2022 23:32 - 1 hour - 55.8 MBWay, way back in Pod 16, Jeff and I tackled the Trappist beers of Belgium. In the time since that program aired, four new monastic breweries have opened, and in all a baker’s dozen have started in the past decade. We thought it would be fun to revisit monastic brewing, discuss whether abbey ales are more or less a style with their arrivals, and taste a couple of the new ones.
Audioblog: Making of a Classic - Saison Dupont
April 08, 2022 23:55 - 10 minutes - 9.69 MBAmong living beer styles, rare is the is the case where a single beer accounts for the survival of a whole tradition, but it’s mostly true in the case of saison. Well, a single beer, an English writer, and an American importer.
Show 157: Inflation and the Price of a Pint
April 01, 2022 17:43 - 1 hour - 53.2 MBThe Labor Department recently reported that inflation was up 7.9% over the past year, sending the stock markets down, and causing the Federal Reserve to begin raising interest rates. This news landed amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the biggest grain producers in the world. Add to that the rising costs of aluminum, a historically bad year for barley, and high gas prices, and it’s clear that the cost of your pint of beer is almost certainly likely to rise. We thought it would be a ...
Show 156: On the Farm with Wheatland Spring
March 15, 2022 00:39 - 1 hour - 58.3 MBThroughout most of the past ten thousand years, brewing was a farmhouse chore, one of the many ways people preserved their harvest throughout the year. In more recent times it has become a commercial and industrial activity. Yet in a verdant pocket of Loudoun County, Virginia about an hour NW of Washington DC, the husband and wife team of Bonnie and John Branding are conducting an ambitious experiment. They’ve revived farmhouse brewing, growing their own barley, using wild yeast from the land...
Podcast Extra: Jeff and Patrick Drink Cask Ales
March 07, 2022 20:07 - 27 minutes - 25 MBOur Friday: a two-mile, four-pub crawl (with a short tram ride) where we stopped in and had our choice of two cask beers at each location. We encountered three milds along the walk. The crawl happened in Portland, Oregon. Because we're podcast professionals, we recorded our thoughts at each stop. Have a listen and learn about this remarkable development.
Audioblog: Trappists Rochefort Have a New Beer—And Brewery
March 02, 2022 20:29 - 8 minutes - 7.86 MBMany American breweries make sixty beers a year. Rochefort hasn’t offered a single new release in sixty years. Because monks don’t do anything without considering the long view, the abbey also built a new brewery to handle the increased production.