Master Brewers Podcast

Can chemical analytics be used to predict what a sensory panel will taste? Can machine learning be used to improve a beer?Special Guests: Kevin Verstrepen and Michiel Schreurs.

Specialty malt freshness, roaster technology, flavor development & complexity in specialty malts, and more.Special Guests: Aaron MacLeod, Chris Schooley, and Jeff Bloem.

A unique study of California malting barley and its practical takeaways for brewers.Special Guest: Maany Ramanan.

Three people who know a lot about malting talk about base malt flavor development and the variables driving a lot of creativity in brewing.Special Guests: Aaron MacLeod, Curtis Davenport, and Sebastian Wolfrum.

What is green chemistry? How and why should you apply it in your brewery?Special Guest: Dana Garves.

Beer consumption per capita in the US has declined steadily since 1980; meanwhile, consumption of wine, cider, and spirits has increased. Keith Armstrong joins us to talk about why, as well as what brewers should be doing about it.Special Guest: Keith Armstrong.

Brewing process and quality tips related to barley lipidsSpecial Guest: Aaron Golston.

Understanding a particular beer's fermentability—and how it changes over time—is a prerequisite to managing in-package conditioning. It’s not uncommon to observe some level of over-attenuation during refermentation, similar to how forced-fermentation tests frequently finish at a lower gravity than production fermentations. In order to reduce the risk of over-pressurization in package, it’s important for brewers to quantify the expected over-attenuation for each brand. Typically, and ideally, the over-attenuation is consistent and can be accurately accounted for within priming sugar calculations. However, this is not always the case—especially with dry-hopped beers. At Allagash Brewing Company, we created a model for our Sixteen Counties brand in order to predict and more accurately account for variable levels of over-attenuation in package due to hop creep.Special Guest: Heather Muzzy Caron.

How a brewer who didn’t know the cost of his flagship beer, implemented a unit economic process that transformed the brewery from dry hopping to high gravity brewing.Special Guest: Teddy Gowan.

The Guinness brewery was founded in 1759 by Arthur Guinness. The Guinness brewery group were early exponents of the advancements in microbiology, and particularly yeast husbandry that took place in Europe at the end of the 19th Century. This led Guinness to establish the Watling laboratory in 1901 and subsequent St James’s Gate yeast Library. 16 Guinness yeast isolates were taken from the St James’s Gate yeast library and sequenced using next generation whole genome sequencing. Using Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) analysis, the genetic lineage of the Guinness yeast were established, with the Guinness yeast forming a monophyletic group (all descendants of a common ancestor). Previous yeast studies have attributed geographical location to domestication; using this information the Guinness yeast were placed with yeast domesticated in the United Kingdom and the United States. Within the 300+ yeast stored in the St James’s Gate yeast Library there are yeast from historical Irish Brewers. Using the same methods that established the genetic lineage of the Guinness yeast, 8 Irish brewing yeast were similarly assessed. In addition to the genotypic analysis of the Guinness and Irish yeast, the phenotype of the different yeasts were determined. In this paper we present an understanding of the Guinness and Irish yeast from a genotypic and phenotypic perspective. This analysis established that despite the different brewing attributes of these Irish yeast they all have a common genetic ancestry which is different to that of the United Kingdom yeast and the United States yeast. Consequently, we suggest that there is potential scope for an Irish brewing terroir concept based upon brewing with Irish yeast.Special Guest: Daniel Kerruish.

What is Kernza and does it belong in your next recipe?Special Guests: Alexandra Diemer , Harmonie Bettenhausen, Juan Medina Bielski, Tessa Peters, and Xiang Yin.

This is what happens when someone reaches out to suggest a great podcast topic. Becky Rudolf had questions about centrifuge operation so we mobilized a small army of Master Brewers members to provide answers.Special Guests: Andrew Conlon, Becky Rudolf, Christopher Clausen, Louwrens Wildschut, Marco Garcia, Morgan Harry, Steven Lyerly, and Zach Kelly.

We celebrate the first decade of craft malt by catching up with a few of its pioneers and talking about what craft malt can do for beer.Special Guests: Andrea Stanley, Brent Manning, and Todd Olander.

We take a deep dive into oak barrels. You'll hear about the properties of oak, the different types, and all about the complexities of seasoning and toast.Special Guests: Amy LaHue, Andrew Wiehebrink, and Noah Steingraeber.

A preview of the Olympics of brewing conferences, the WBC, which only occurs every 4 years and hasn’t been held in person since 2016 due to the pandemic.Special Guests: Lauren Torres and Sylvie Van Zandycke.

We go behind the scenes with the 3 moderators responsible for ensuring the highest possible quality content on the industry’s best technical brewing forum.Special Guests: Andy Tveekrem, Lars Larson, and Walter Heeb.

Does your brewery can or bottle? Do you pay close attention to your rinser or just assume it does what it's supposed to? This week on the show, we take a deep dive into water rinsers with a team of Master Brewers who collaborated to publish a Best Practices document you can use to get bottle and can rinsing done right.Special Guests: Ben Bailey, Dave Duff, Eric Samp, Heather Muzzy Caron, and Tim Lozen.

We thought we'd celebrate our 300th episode by giving John Bryce they day off...kind of.Special Guest: John Bryce.

We take a look at spirit barrel aging techniques from the perspective of Julian Shrago at Beachwood BrewingSpecial Guest: Julian Shrago.

A case study at New Belgium to understand the impact of can coatings on beer volatiles.Special Guests: Brooke Gushen and Nate Burns.

This week on the show, presenters from the Juicy Dry Hopping workshop in Calgary join us to talk about their quest to maximize flavor, aroma, and efficiency in heavily dry hopped beers.Special Guests: Ben Edmunds, Daniel Sharp, Evan Partridge, and Ryan Dunnavant.

Adjusting expectations and processes to navigate an increasingly delicate malt supply chain.Special Guests: Curtis Davenport, Harmonie Bettenhausen, and Xiang Yin.

Our friends at Goose Island talk about their journey reducing TPO on small scale canning lines. This episode was recorded live during the 2019 Master Brewers Conference.Special Guests: Brooke Bell and Mike Kania.

Different paths of evolution and answers to questions about the genetic identity of commercially available yeast strains.Special Guest: Fabio Faria-Oliveira.

Dry hop geyser survivors talk about their experiences and how you can avoid repeating their dangerous mistakes.Special Guests: Cody Green, Daniel Sharp, George de Piro, Jessica Young, Lee Lonnes, and Victor Rini.

Mechanisms and Strategies to Manage Temperature Stratification in Brewery VesselsSpecial Guest: Travis Audet.

To rinse or not to rinse - what's in your can? Our friends at Community Beer take us on a journey to eliminate microbes @ can filling.Special Guests: Jamie Fulton and Mark Bagazinski.

Real-world can seamer troubleshooting courtesy of Master Brewer's award-winning technical brewing forum.Special Guest: David Garab.

Jason Perkins talks about beer development at Allagash Brewing Co.Special Guest: Jason Perkins.

Frequent MBAA course lecturer, Gabriel Dominguez, offers tips to reduce your brewery's CO2 consumption.Special Guest: Gabriel Dominguez.

A simple engineering solution with complex implementation.Special Guest: Evan Meffert.

Maitreya Dunham and Tom Schmidlin talk about an exciting study that aims to better understand yeast mutations during serial repitching.Special Guests: Maitreya Dunham and Tom Schmidlin.

Author of Quality Management: Essential Planning for Breweries and founder of Top Note Tonic, Mary Pellettieri, discusses how innovation challenges quality systems.Special Guest: Mary Pellettieri.

Charlie Bamforth discusses authenticity vs technology in lager beer production.Special Guest: Charlie Bamforth.

Does dry hopping inoculate your beer with beer spoiling bacteria? Do the anti-microbial properties of hops offer enough protection? Can dry hopping fix a dirty beer? This week on the show, our friends from Shiner set out to better understand the microbiological impact of dry hopping.Special Guest: Laura Hill.

Master Brewers wants to fund your next innovation. Hear how the program works, as well as an overview of several projects that have already been funded.Special Guests: Doug Wilson, Kurt Driesner, Lauren Torres, Mark Jaeggi, Mike Billon, Molly Browning, Ryan Bross, and Tom Shellhammer.

The MBAA Brewery Safety Committee brings you the story of a real-life electrical accident in a brewery, as well as tips and other resources for keeping brewers safe.Special Guests: Brian Godfrey and David Gonzalez.

Catch up with Pat Hayes before he delivers the keynote address during the Master Brewers Conference in Seattle Oct 6. We discuss some exciting new releases coming just before Pat’s retirement, the OSU barley project, how Pat ended up becoming a barley breeder in the first place, and more.Special Guest: Patrick Hayes.

Has your brewery put off building a sensory program because it seems overwhelming? Lindsay Barr is here with the tips and baby steps you need to make immediate progress. We also take a peek under the hood of the ASBC Sensory Subcommittee and hear about some of the awesome new tools they've produced. Whether your brewery needs to start from scratch or already has a functional sensory program, this interview with Lindsay is sure to help you take things to the next level.Special Guest: Lindsay Barr.

The identification of the gene that determines whether or not a yeast strain is haze-positive.Special Guest: Laura Burns.

A discussion of flavors found in mixed fermentations.Special Guest: Jen Blair.

John Paul Maye discusses results from the analysis of haze in a dozen New England IPAs and how the haze traps non-polar hop compounds to create the unique flavors of this beer style. This work was recently presented at the 2018 Brewing Summit, where Dr. Maye was awarded best presentation.Special Guest: John Paul Maye.

How things work in a dedicated, certified gluten-free brewerySpecial Guest: Alan Windhausen.

Various principles in fluid dynamics with practical applications in the brewery (and a few puns).Special Guests: Allen Young and Ashton Lewis.

Marcus Cox talks ingredients, process, best practices, and authenticity.Special Guest: Marcus Cox.

Shelf-life, performance, and consistency of Active Dry Yeast (ADY) vs Freshly Propagated Yeast (FPY). We also explore the application of ADY for bottle conditioning and more.Special Guests: Kevin Lane and Marcelo Cerdan.

New insights into the question of whether bottles or cans will keep your beer fresh longer.Special Guest: Katie Fromuth.

During the 2016 World Brewing Congress, MBP host John Bryce met a couple of beer-brewing monks from Italy. Fr. Martin and Br. Augustine join us to talk about monastic brewing, their brewery, and their beers.Special Guest: Brewmonks of Norcia.

Hop Quality Group audits & things to look for during your next farm visitSpecial Guests: Ben Bailey and Patrick Chavanelle.

An incident at Goose Island that we can all learn from.Special Guests: Daryl Hoedtke and Gabe Capan.