Jamie Bogner is the cofounder and editorial director of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®. Email him at [email protected].
The cofounder and brewing director of New Zealand’s 2024 champion large brewery loves finding exactly the right places for domestic and imported hops, but he often uses them in ways you wouldn’t expect.
The New Zealand Beer Awards’ reigning champion microbrewer punches above his weight class, with medal-winning lagers produced unconventionally in a small brewpub where time definitely equals money. But he’s also pushing boundaries with localized takes—as with a tart, sparkling harvest ale that combines country’s signature white-wine grape with its signature hop.
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In this clip from their webinar, Berkeley Yeast VP of product strategy Anthony Bledsoe gets into ways to adjust the mouthfeel of nonalcoholic beers, as well as the importance of benchtop testing and experimenting with downstream adjustments.
Brewers outside New Zealand tend to associate its hops with IPA, but for more than 30 years, Kiwi brewers have been making their own kind of pilsner using the homegrown harvest. In this episode, the head brewer at Mount—home of the award-winning Mountie Pilsner—shares the keys to finding balance and drinkability in a cool-pooled, dry-hopped lager of 45 IBUs.
This fifth-generation hop farmer has watched craft beer pull New Zealand’s hop-growing industry back from the brink, and today he and his team are using experience, data, and more sophisticated tools to optimize their varieties for the different types of brewers who use them.
The molecular biologist and head of R&D for New Zealand’s Garage Project has spent his career studying yeast and coaxing them to work in more effective ways. Today, he’s working on everything from refined thiol expression to better mouthfeel and malt expression in nonalcoholic beers.
Is it the hop variety that matters most? Or when it’s picked? The soil it’s grown in? How it’s fertilized and irrigated throughout a season? Or something else? These two preeminent researchers—one from the States, one from New Zealand—debate the relative impacts of various factors on hop flavor and aroma.
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In this clip from their webinar, Breakside brewmaster Ben Edmunds and experts from Berkeley Yeast discuss how the fermentation flavors from maltose-negative yeast strains help make nonalcoholic beers that don’t taste like NA.
The founder and head brewer for Garage Project in Wellington, New Zealand, is tackling more than just brewing these days. Garage Project’s team is breaking the fourth wall, investing in the Hāpi Research partnership with hop grower Freestyle—all for the sake of deeper hop flavor.
Earlier this week, Brewing Industry Guide All Access subscribers received Kate’s latest article about how commonly shared economic and sales data for beer may not be painting an accurate picture. On this episode, she shares perspectives behind that story and insights into how craft brewers are bucking some prevailing trends.