The Big Friendly in Oklahoma City has won nine Great American Beer Festival medals for its beers over the past four years, including six gold medals. Key to that success has been the team’s thoughtful, patient approach to dry-hopped, oak-aged, mixed-culture saisons.
This honey ESB makes for a fun ride on the palate: Between the ample crystal malts, the honey flavors—buckwheat is rich and spicy—and yeast, you end up with a lot of candy, strawberry, earthy, spicy, and malty flavors.
Highly fermentable yet often quite flavorful, with many types available, honey is the queen bee of alternative sugars in the brewhouse. So, let’s ponder how it can shine in conjunction with a particular base style—in this case, an ESB.
In this 500th episode of the podcast, Henry Nguyen of Monkish, Sam Zermeño of Brujos, and Kelsey McNair of North Park join in a live discussion on hazy IPA recorded at our recent Brewer’s Retreat.
This is Part II of a two-part series on the hottest tech trends in brewing. If you haven’t done so already, read Part I for our take on why breweries thriving in 2027 won’t necessarily brew the best IPA or win the most medals. Then read on for more tech trends in brewing.
Brewers who dry hop their beers today need to be aware of hop creep and its tendency to produce diacetyl and related off-flavors. Here, cofounder and brewer Brian Hutchinson explains how Cannonball Creek circumvents it in their pale ales and IPAs.
The next popular tastes can be difficult to predict, but there are ideas out there aplenty—and, in choosing, it helps to understand the longer arc of craft beer and our wider cultural context.
Sam Richardson discovered the beers that would inspire him most before he became a brewer, and he did so across the country from where he would later cofound Other Half in Brooklyn, New York. These often were intense and flavorful beers that defied easy categorization, and they marked enjoyable times of discovery with good friends. As told to Jamie Bogner.
This session-strength, English-inspired porter won a gold medal and Best American Beer at the 2024 Brussels Beer Challenge.
This extra pale ale is a crowd favorite at Craft Coast Beer & Tacos in San Diego’s North County. It’s also found success at the highest levels of competition, winning two straight World Beer Cup medals—bronze in 2024, then silver in 2025, in the Australian-Style Pale Ale category.
This growing New Hampshire brewery in the epicenter of hazy IPA, just across the border from Massachusetts, pushes malt and boundaries to achieve vivid results in hop-forward beers and tight balance in Mexican-style lager.
Breweries thriving in 2027 won’t necessarily brew the best IPA or win the most medals. They’ll make the smartest decisions—faster, with better data, and more connected systems.
Denver’s River North is winning international awards and a strong reputation for its deep, dark, malt-forward beers. Here, owner Matt Hess and head brewer Matt Malloy share the thinking and process behind them. As told to Ryan Pachmayer.
“The aim here is to make a ripping XPA that combines plenty of saturated modern hop characters—thanks in part to the multiple small kettle-hop additions—with a lean but structured malt base,” says Scotty Hargrave, the progenitor of modern XPA.
Lean, dry, and highly drinkable—but with the full-spectrum hop punch of an IPA—the extra pale ale is engineered for volume, for warm weather… and for thirsty brewers ready to hone their technique.
How do you make modern iterations of pilsner that still taste like pilsner? For this small-pub brewer in the mountains of California, the answer is using the right hops at the right time throughout the process.
Cannonball Creek cofounder and brewer Brian Hutchinson explains why they’re looking for the leanest, palest base malts for their award-winning West Coast–Style IPAs—and how hop creep plays an intentional role in their low finishing gravities.
We based this recipe on parameters shared by Gianriccardo Corbo, the brewer who wrote the BJCP guidelines for Italian grape ale (IGA).
Every new hop variety must prove itself in both the field and the brewhouse. Learn how breeders are developing stronger, more resilient hops and why brewer adoption is essential to bringing the next generation of varieties to market.
Learn the ins and outs of harvesting and repitching yeast and why the practice pays off.
Great lagers reward patience, and in our Fall 2026 issue, we explore the techniques, science, and traditions that make them some of the world's most compelling beers.
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