Master Brewers Podcast

From a consumer safety standpoint, glass shards from broken bottles present one of the most serious risks that a brewery may encounter. In order to mitigate the considerable risk to consumers, any brewery that runs a glass bottle filler should develop and implement a formal burst bottle mitigation procedure for their packaging department. Members of the Craft Brewers Glass Quality Group describe the basic outline of such a procedure and resources to enable breweries to develop their own burst bottle mitigation program.Special Guests: Ben Bailey, Shawn Theriot, and Tim Lozen.

Mitch Steele has advice for craft brewers who want to produce non-alcoholic products.Special Guest: Mitch Steele.

Boston Beer determines how to accurately measure sessionability before releasing a new brand. Special Guest: Micaela Kraft.

What happens when an allergen is grown on the farm next door?Special Guest: Wade Begrow.

Sierra Nevada studies the impact of dry hopping at different stages of fermentation.Special Guests: Maria Moutsoglou and Will Cayler.

This week on the show, Gene editing for brewers... and where things might be headed for barley & hops.Special Guests: Steve Strauss and Tom Shellhammer.

What's the actual shelf life of the hops in your cooler, and what happens if you keep them there for a few more years?Special Guest: Mark Zunkel.

Is your brewery just doing things the way they've always been done, or is someone like Paige optimizing processes to uncover new efficiencies and tremendous savings?Special Guest: Paige Lesondak.

There are lots of different approaches to producing NA beer. Justin McKellar walks us through the tradeoffs of each method.Special Guest: Justin McKellar.

The quest to determine the origin of hop creep takes an interesting twist.Special Guest: Matt Cottrell.

The popularity of heavily-hopped beer styles has put USA hops front and center, but threats are looming; wildfire, climate change, water availability, the loss of hop farming families, and the ongoing shift from public to private hops. Hop growers Darren Gamache (VGF) and John Segal (Segal Ranch), master brewer Karl Ockert, and hop consultant Eric Sannerud joined John Bryce on stage during the 2022 Brewing Summit to discuss these topics and more.Special Guests: Darren Gamache, Eric Sannerud, John Segal, and Karl Ockert.

When Madtree Brewing Co. expanded from a 15 bbl brewhouse to a 100 bbl brewhouse, they experienced intermittent acetaldehyde spikes in one of their brands. Becca Ransohof & Trent Leslie walk us through the troubleshooting process that resolved the issue.Special Guests: Becca Ransohoff and Trent Leslie.

What is ISTT water and what can it do for us?Special Guests: Carl Halterman and Jeff Gunn.

The discovery of new alpha and beta acids.Special Guest: John Paul Maye.

Graham Stewart discusses the mechanics of yeast stress during the 2019 Master Brewers Conference in CalgarySpecial Guest: Graham Stewart.

OSU probes the sustainability of hops, from kiln cycles to double dry hopping.Special Guests: Lindsey Rubottom and Tom Shellhammer.

Oliver Meinhold takes us back to the basics of cleaning & sanitation in the brewery.Special Guest: Oliver Meinhold.

Like it or not, you're in the wastewater business.Special Guest: Campbell Morrissy.

Do you know how much DO is in your wort? What percentage of injected oxygen is solubilized? Derek Dawson set out to answer these questions at Modern Times Beer.Special Guest: Derek Dawson.

A recent Master Brewers Technical Quarterly paper explores the answer.Special Guests: Aaron Staples, Alec Mull, Alex Adams, Rob Sirrine, and Scott Stuhr.

The previous episode explained how and why North American 2-row barley evolved to take on 6-row traits. This week Joe Hertrich explains why that's problematic for all-malt brewers and what can be done about it.Special Guest: Joe Hertrich.

Since 1972 North American 2-row barley has slowly but steadily evolved into something that has more in common with 6-row than traditional European 2-row barley. Find out why this is great news for adjunct brewers and problematic for all-malt brewers.Special Guest: Joe Hertrich.

Things to consider before making the transition from bagged to bulk malt.Special Guest: Tim Roberts.

The author of one of the latest publications from ASBC & MBAA joins us to talk about Mashing.Special Guest: Evan Evans.

Our friend, Dr. Yin, returns to discuss his new Malt book and the 2021 barley cropSpecial Guest: Xiang Yin.

Stijn Mertens and Jan Steensels talk about what's happening inside one of the world's most advanced yeast labs.Special Guests: Jan Steensels and Stijn Mertens.

How Wicked Weed made a beer smell like cannabis, without using cannabis.Special Guests: Joe Pawelek and Ross Hunsinger.

A collaboration between OSU's Barley Project Lab, Admiral Maltings, and Seismic Brewing explores the possibilities for achieving Maris Otter flavor in newer barley varieties, bred for better agronomics & brewhouse performance.Special Guests: Campbell Morrissy and Curtis Davenport.

To what extent does yeast strain selection & dry hop timing put the haze in your hazies?Special Guests: Keith Lacy and Laura Burns.

Joe Hertrich continues discussing how to establish your own criteria for malt performance on your specific recipe, process, and equipment rather than relying on theoretical "good" values on a malt COA. He explains how to track brewhouse yield, lauter performance, and attenuation vs. beta glucan.Special Guest: Joe Hertrich.

Fan favorite, Joe Hertrich, is back with an extremely practical approach to evaluating malt performance based on his experience at breweries of drastically different sizes over a 50-year period.Special Guest: Joe Hertrich.

Luke Chadwick (Bell's), Andy Farrell (Bell's), Tom Shellhammer (OSU), and Jason Perkins (Allagash) take a deep dive into the phenomenon known as Dry Hop Creep.Special Guests: Andy Farrell, Jason Perkins, Luke Chadwick, and Tom Shellhammer.

How & why to operate a mash filterSpecial Guest: Jason Platek.

Have you ever wondered if you're pushing the limits of how much pressure your cans can handle? A Master Brewers Past President joins us to discuss a chart he designed to keep you out of trouble.Special Guest: Jim Kuhr.

How yeast propagation works (both in the lab & in the brewery) at Urban Chestnut Brewing Co.Special Guest: Florian Kuplent.

As reported in Nature Communications, Charles Denby used CRISPR-Cas9 to successfully engineer brewers yeast to produce linalool and geraniol. We interview both Charles and Bryan Donaldson (Lagunitas) who oversaw the sensory analysis for this groundbreaking study.Special Guests: Bryan Donaldson and Charles Denby.

How & why Resident Culture conditions with speise.Special Guest: David Fuhrer.

How Drake's Brewing Co approaches sustainability. Special Guest: Hal McConnellogue.

Elliot Parcells & Josh Pohlmann put together some experiments to better understand if the sanitizers used at Bell's Brewery were doing their jobs.

Over-carbonation. Exploding bottles. Lawsuits. Super-attenuation caused by diastaticus contamination is a hot topic in the brewing industry. We bring you interviews with brewers, yeast suppliers, and independent microbiologists to talk about detection, prevention, and more. Whether your strategy is to keep diastaticus out of your brewery altogether or to manage it alongside other Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains lacking the STA gene, you're guaranteed to learn something from these interviews.Special Guests: Andy Tveekrem, Matt Linske, Matthew Peetz, Michelle McHugh, Sylvie Van Zandycke, Tobias Fischborn, and Wade Begrow.

Over-carbonation. Exploding bottles. Lawsuits. Super-attenuation caused by diastaticus contamination is a hot topic in the brewing industry. We bring you interviews with brewers, yeast suppliers, and independent microbiologists to talk about detection, prevention, and more. Whether your strategy is to keep diastaticus out of your brewery altogether or to manage it alongside other Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains lacking the STA gene, you're guaranteed to learn something from these interviews.Special Guests: Andy Tveekrem, Matt Linske, Matthew Peetz, Michelle McHugh, Sylvie Van Zandycke, Tobias Fischborn, and Wade Begrow.

How brewery chillers work, troubleshooting tips, common mistakes, and easy preventative maintenance to keep it running for years to come.Special Guest: Damon Reed.

Why does dry-hopping during active fermentation change sensory profiles? Is the black box of biotransformation really what drives those changes or is it something else entirely?Special Guests: Leandro Meiners and Mati Cavanna.

The disease has moved out of Africa, it's now in the Middle East. It's only a matter of time before it arrives. It's a numbers game. Pat Hayes joins us to talk about barley breeding, the race against disease, genetic tools, and more.Special Guest: Patrick Hayes.

Are you prepared to face the most challenging barley crop most of us have ever seen?Special Guests: Drew Sharp, Matt Enns, and Peter Watts.

"Thiolized" CRISPR yeast, the world's 1st convincing argument for mash hopping, and more.Special Guests: Lance Shaner and Laura Burns.

Brian Faivre explains how one of the largest craft brewers is using data and tools (accessible to breweries of any size) to improve their process.Special Guest: Brian Faivre.

Dan Stromberg discusses industry best practices for glycol system piping. You'll learn how to balance your system, how to size headers for correct flow rates & velocity, which pipe materials to consider, why the ubiquitous solenoid valve is a bad choice, and more.Special Guest: Dan Strömberg.

Tips & inspiration for using honey in your beer.Special Guest: Keith Seiz.

Ben Edmunds describes his unique & effective approach to brewing hoppy beer.Special Guest: Ben Edmunds.