Jamie Bogner is the cofounder and editorial director of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®. Email him at jbogner@beerandbrewing.com.
In Pilsner Urquell’s experimental brewery, Lenka Straková is coloring outside the lines of modern craft styles and traditional Czech brewing.
In the first of several episodes recorded in Czechia, retired Pilsner Urquell brewmaster Václav Berka relates the history of the brewery—and therefore of pilsner itself—and shares his love of all the details that go into producing a highly drinkable beer.
The data suggest that while brewery closings have stayed fairly steady as a percentage of overall operating breweries, the rate of new openings in recent years has been declining at a relatively consistent pace.
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.