New Zealand’s Garage Project may not be a household name in North America, but between their work with local hop growers, Phantasm powder, and crowd-pleasing fest pours, they’ve built a reputation among peers for creativity and honest experimentation.
Scholars have long argued that alcohol is a way of “cheating” the brain’s pleasure circuits. But in his book, “Drunk,” Edward Slingerland synthesizes research that shows our success as a species is linked to our 14,000-year relationship with beer.
Through his career, Cohesion’s Eric Larkin has always gravitated to breweries with narrower style focuses. Now, with the Czech-style lager focus of his new endeavor, he’s exploring the creativity possible within the bounds of style expectations.
In the Chicago suburb of Lake Zurich, Illinois, Beth May and Lane Fearing of Roaring Table have built a small, unassuming brewery that's making waves with an impressive variety of styles.
The R&D director of the Chicago-based yeast purveyors combines her brewhouse experience with years of lab work in yeast genetics to help brewers understand how yeast does—and doesn’t—create stable haze.
Minnesota’s Surly Brewing has a reputation for brash and unapologetic beers, but head brewer Ben Smith is exploring ways to maximize flavor in IPAs by doing less, not more.
For Austin Jevne, cofounder of Forager in Rochester, Minnesota—and now owner and head brewer of the Humble Forager brand—creative flavors are the crux of brewing.
When the former head brewer of a prominent Texas brewery left the large-scale production world for his own small project, the reasons were as much systemic as they were creative. Now, his Costa Rican-based brand is poised to grow… and tell new stories.
Tilquin’s strategy for blending gueuze is one part romance, one part math, as the experience he’s developed with lambics from different Belgian brewers informs every piece of the blend—from age to technical performance and flavor.
Known for their high-gravity beers and irreverent attitude, the Struise Brouwers have injected fresh energy into Belgian beer over the past two decades. Yet the systems they’ve built to brew these big beers are as creative as the beers themselves.