Master Brewers Podcast

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.

A study examining the impacts of wort gravity, IBUs, and serial repitching of California Ale yeast.Special Guests: Luis Castro and Nichole Bryant.

Important tools every brewer should have within reach, as we all struggle to deal with increasing competition, costs, variability in raw materials, and strive to operate more sustainable breweries.Special Guest: Mark Sammartino.

We take a deep dive into the impact Mg can have on the Maillard reactions occurring in the brewhouse and during malting.Special Guests: Euan Thomson and Hannah Charnock.

What does a brewer who is new to brewing hard seltzer need to know about yeast & fermentation? And more importantly, what the heck is actually in yeast nutrient? Which type of nutrient do you need and how much should you be using?Special Guests: Avi Shayevitz, Brittney Christianson, and Eric Abbott.

When Keith Miller got blasted in the face with caustic, he was blinded instantly. This could happen to any brewer. Imagine yourself crawling on the brewery floor, completely blind, in desperate search of a safety shower. What happens in the seconds immediately following an injury like this determines whether or not you'll be blind for the rest of your life. Understanding the risks and being fully prepared for an accident like this greatly increases the odds of regaining your eyesight.Special Guests: Keith Miller and Scott Millbower.

Dextrose, cane sugar, beet sugar, corn syrups, back sweetening with stevia, and moreSpecial Guest: Scott Helstad.

4 real-life off-flavor scenarios from Highland Brewing Company, how each issue was discovered & remedied, and the role that sensory data played in each case.Special Guest: Anna Sauls.

We catch up with a guy who's been studying thiols since before most of us understood why they matter. If you're chasing tropical flavors in beer, this episode is a must listen. Special Guest: Laurent DAGAN.

We take a look at the carbon footprint of barley and hear about how a maltster's procurement contracts have drastically reduced that carbon footprint at no cost to farmers. We'll also hear about some case studies from the malthouse, as well as how & why every brewery should take a practical approach to sustainability.Special Guest: Nigel Davies.

Aaron Justus from Ballast Point discusses targeting sulfate to chloride ratios to enhance hop & malt character. This research, which informed recipe development for gold medal winner Manta Ray, was presented during the 2017 Master Brewers Conference.Special Guest: Aaron Justus.

We explore some of the similarities and differences between brewing & distilling.Special Guest: Todd Leopold.

How a simple case study conducted at 35 Rock Bottom breweries more than 10 years ago can inform your process to increase brewhouse efficiency and make better beer.Special Guest: Van Havig.

In today's competitive craft beer market, if you're standing still, you're dead. Continual improvement is a required survival skill. This episode tells the story of how Dogfish Head Craft Brewery went about reducing perceived mercaptan via fermentor trub removal. Read more at MBAA.comSpecial Guest: Joe Spearot.

Tom Eplett joins us to talk about some anecdotal fermentation problems, lessons learned, and his go-to papers, books, etc. for troubleshooting and learning about brewing. If you still think the best yeast is in the middle of the cone, you should listen to this episode.Special Guest: Tom Eplett.

This week, we continue our draught line cleaning discussion with Keith Lemcke.Special Guest: Keith Lemcke.

Draught beer line cleaning is a critical factor in the service of excellent draught beer. Cleaning your system frequently ensures beer quality but increases the cost of service due to beer lost when preparing the lines for cleaning. Throughout the industry, there is debate over the "best practices" in draught cleaning, including what defines a "clean" draught system. With the ever-increasing selection of draught beers, it is imperative not only to the brewer but all the way to the consumer that the beer provided as draught is representative of the beer provided by the brewer. The challenges of clean beer lines have never been more evident than today. Many of the draught beers on the market come with active yeast cultures, wild yeast cultures, and bacteria, all part of the flavor mix. These organisms can contaminate draught lines for the next beer to be tapped on those lines. Additionally, the intrusion of contaminant microorganisms from various sources and breweries needs to be eliminated and controlled within draught systems to ensure that the beer poured is exactly as intended.Special Guest: Keith Lemcke.

It is well known that hop-forward beer styles exhibit tropical fruit aromas. These aromas are conferred by a range of hop-related volatile compounds, including polyfunctional thiols such as 3-sulfanylhexan-1-ol (3SH) and 4-methyl-4-sulfanylpentan-2-one (4MSP). These compounds are present at relatively high concentrations in hops and are extracted into beer during dry-hopping. Polyfunctional thiols are also abundant as non-volatile glutathione and cysteine conjugates in hops, and to a lesser extent can be found in barley (and therefore, malt). These conjugates are cleaved into amino acids and free thiols by enzymatic activity of yeasts, thus bound precursors may represent an important pool of tropical fruit flavor in beer, particularly in beer styles where dry hopping is minimal. In order to successfully liberate this pool of flavor, yeast with strong carbon-sulfur ß-lyase activity are needed. In wine research it has become evident that only a small number of commercial Saccharomyces cerevisiae starter cultures possess this capacity. High-activity strains may release 10-30x higher concentrations of free thiol from the same amount of available precursor, relative to low-activity strains. This variation has been linked to a range of inactivating mutations in the carbon-sulfur ß-lyase encoding gene, IRC7. In this study we have catalogued several additional mutations in IRC7 that are found in brewing strains of S. cerevisiae. Based upon known mutations that affect wine strains we compare predicted IRC7 activity for various brewing strains, and actual measurements using a model substrate. Furthermore, we show that one of the mutations only found in brewing strains inactivates IRC7. Overall, the data show that brewing S. cerevisiae strains vary widely in their potential to release polyfunctional thiols from conjugated precursors, and that efforts to extract maximum flavor from malt and hops should include consideration of yeast strain.Special Guests: Chris Curtin and Karen Fortmann.

Master Brewers is dying to pay for your education; it's part of what we do.Special Guests: Jeremy King, Jim Mellem, Justin Ang, Mike Perine, and Stephen Bernard.

Could beer infected with diastaticus be rescued by killer yeast?Special Guest: Nicholas Ketchum.

John Mallett (Bells Brewery), Rebecca Newman (Lagunitas Brewing Company), Paul Pettinger (New Belgium Brewing), and Jason zumBrunnen (Ratio Beerworks) will be answering YOUR questions about Business Continuity in a Covid-19 Environment during the #worldbrewingcongress Mainstage Panel Discussion this weekend. We'll hear about how their breweries have pivoted, as well as topics like ensuring employee safety, rethinking the workplace, exploring brewery culture, and controlling external factors. Submit your questions for the panelists via the link below.

Cans have become the primary packaging type in the U.S. craft brewing scene. While cans are a near-ideal package for maintaining the quality of the beer, it's important to understand the seaming process and how to diagnose and fix issues with the seamer. Failing to do so will lead to tremendous damage to brands and consumer confidence in canned craft beer. This presentation will focus more on the key quality indicators of seams, how to identify seam issues, tools needed to fix the issue, and how to adjust the seamer to fix the issue.Special Guest: Rick Blankemeier.