Jamie Bogner is the Cofounder and Editorial Director of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®. Email him at [email protected].
Welcoming flavor is the name of the game for Barn Town Brewing in West Des Moines, Iowa. Whether it’s their top-scoring hazy IPAs or their non-gluten fruited sour beers, they’re earning a reputation for building savvy balance into bold flavors.
After getting his start as a homebrewer, Kosmicki’s first pro brewing gig was on Founders’ 30-barrel brewhouse. Two decades in, he’s approaching innovation with a cautious eye for sustainability.
Michigan’s Old Nation didn’t set out to brew hazy IPA. Yet when they tackled the project, they did it with the analytical rigor one would expect from disciplined brewers trained to brew lagers.
The founder of Cedar Springs Brewing and president of the Michigan Brewer’s Guild asks a fundamental question: Why doesn’t weissbier get more love?
COVID gave this Grand Rapids brewery a chance to reset and become whatever its community needed it to become—and Collazo and his team are listening while continuing to chart a fresh path.
As Mike Saboe was embracing craft beer and homebrewing in the early ’00s, he sought far and wide for inspiration. Looking back now, as brewmaster at Toppling Goliath, he recounts six beers that had an outsized influence on his approach to everything from hop-forward beers to burly barrel-aged stouts.
After chasing larger volumes through distribution for the past 12 years, the pandemic led to reckoning and reconnection for these two breweries in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, they’re sizing down to let customers and brewers, rather than distributors, drive the creative narrative.
By adopting a dogmatic and precise approach to quality—from evaluating honey quality through bottling without stabilizers or preservatives—Schramm’s Mead is setting standards and exploring what’s possible at the forefront of honey and fruit fermentations.
From a beautifully shot lambic documentary to an exploration of alcohol’s role in human evolution, here are a few suggestions for your screen and your shelf.
Mary and Brian Rooney of Kansas City's BKS Artisan Ales discuss their approach to experimentation and iteration with soft and fluffy (but well-attenuated) hazy IPA.