The podcast for those who make and drink great beer.
With a name like Benchtop, you’d expect experimentation backed by quantitative evaluation, and that’s exactly how founder Eric Tennant approaches brewing passion projects such as foeder lager and barrel-aged barleywine.
From interviews recorded at 3 Sons Lumberjack Day in Dania Beach, Florida, these two brewers from different corners of Europe cover a range of topics, from using a mash press filter for imperial stouts to riffing on grodziskie with mixed cultures and fruit.
Making sweet dessert meads isn’t particularly difficult in and of itself, but building drinkability and balance into big flavors and high finishing gravities poses challenging flavor questions. Florida’s Brewlihan answers them with beautifully structured meads that find balance through the flavor triangle.
Lager is anything but a minimalist pursuit for the head brewer of Philadelphia lager stalwarts Human Robot. Flavor and character are primary focuses, and the brewery achieves those with all the tools in the toolbox—interesting ingredients, customized approaches to decoction and other processes, and a variety of fermentation profiles that maximize different types of expressions.
These leading brewers and great friends from Brooklyn Brewery and Russian River share what they’ve learned from brewing new beers with the African grain fonio.
This Pittsburgh brewery’s initial journeys into fruit had lanes both classic and modern, with mixed-culture foeder creations as well as juicier, acid-forward American fruit beers. Now, however—as the team deepens its repertoire in food and flavor science—Cinderlands is remixing the program with fruited riffs on their most popular and sessionable styles.
The brewmaster and the co-CEO of this Midwestern stalwart respect their brewery’s three and a half decades of tradition—but they also test assumptions while tackling new beers that reflect today’s trends.
This Cleveland brewery takes an intentionally small and sustainable approach to making creatively fulfilling beers, and it all starts with the flexibility of their 10-barrel brewhouse.
Since their start in 2009, Matt Cole and Fat Head’s have cleaned up in the major competitions with their German-style wheat beers, American-style IPAs, and closely related styles. In this episode, Cole pulls back the veil and shares some of the process and ingredient choices that set their beers apart.
As an unabashed lover of hazy IPA, Murphy Johnson doesn’t apologize for focusing a huge portion of BlackStack’s brewing program on the hop-laden crowd pleasers. His latest obsession, meanwhile, is maximizing flavor without breaking the bank, using traditional American hops in some very untraditional ways.