Master Brewers Podcast

United We Brew

About the show

Each week, thousands of brewers download The Master Brewers Podcast to hear interviews with the industry's best & brightest in brewing science, technology, and operations. The show is known for featuring technical deep dives, a bit of brewing history, cutting edge research, hard lessons learned, important industry contributors, and no fluff. If you make beer for a living, this show is for you.


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Episodes

  • Episode 185: Filler Cleaning Meets Quality at Surly

    September 21st, 2020  |  40 mins 40 secs

    To avoid having every brewery reinvent the wheel with filler cleaning practices and save the time and money it takes to trial new processes, we share one brewery’s story of developing a robust cleaning program on both of its canning lines.

  • Mainstage

    September 16th, 2020  |  1 min 5 secs

    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.

  • Episode 184: Just Say No to Leaking Can Seams

    September 14th, 2020  |  46 mins 50 secs

    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.

  • Episode 183: Dry Hop Creep During In-Package Conditioning

    September 7th, 2020  |  28 mins 14 secs

    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.

  • Episode 182: De-skunking Beer

    August 31st, 2020  |  34 mins 50 secs

    Just when you thought light-struck flavor in beer was permanent...

  • Preview: 2020 WBC

    August 27th, 2020  |  3 mins 2 secs

    The 2020 World Brewing Congress is almost here! Have you registered yet?

  • Episode 181: Tracking Biotransformation of Sulfur Compounds in Beer

    August 24th, 2020  |  38 mins 40 secs

    A growing demand in utilizing biotransformation, a general term for the conversion of compounds through biological pathways, to improve the organoleptic profile of beer has changed the way hop forward beer recipes are approached. While the analysis of terpene biotransformation has been well documented, there remains a gap in knowledge in sulfur compounds due to their extremely low concentrations (sometimes in concentrations of parts per trillion) and high volatility. Analysis of sulfur compounds requires precise and sensitive analytical methodology in order to detect them. While sulfur compounds have been successfully detected using gas-chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) a pulsed flame photometric detector (PFPD), and a GC sulfur chemiluminescence detector (GC-SCD), the research presented here utilizes a GC-SCD via stir bar-sorptive extaction (SBSE) methodology previously used to track aroma intensities in optimizing harvest picking windows. This work shows an identification of various thiols and sulfur compounds found in both un-hopped and hopped wort (with Amarillo® (VGXP01), Cashmere, Idaho grown Saaz (Osvald-72 c.v.), and Czech Saaz) and tracks them through the fermentation process confirming the volatility of some thiols and most notably the presence of 4-methyl-4-mercaptopentan-2-one (4MMP) in the final beer at a retention time of 9.5 minutes, a compound that contributes a catty, black currant/Sauvignon Blanc aroma character. Differences in hop varieties were compared with an American ale yeast, and the effect of yeast strain as well as temperature on thiol production with VGXP01 was compared between an American ale, German lager, Belgian saison, and Brettanomyces bruxellensis strain.

  • Episode 001: Total Oil Content ≠ Aroma

    August 17th, 2020  |  16 mins 46 secs

    This was the very first episode of The Master Brewers Podcast, recorded during the 2016 WBC. As we prepare to kick off the all-virtual 2020 WBC in just a few weeks, this seems like the perfect opportunity to listen in on what was happening during the 2016 WBC.

  • Episode 180: Exogenous Enzyme Applications in Malting

    August 10th, 2020  |  33 mins 27 secs

    We continue conferencing vicariously from the Master Brewers Live event during the 2019 Master Brewers conference in Calgary, where former Master Brewers Technical Director Mark Sammartino joined me to talk about trials using exogenous enzymes in malting to get brewers more consistent malt and make life easier in the malthouse.

  • Episode 179: Reuse of Spent Dry Hop Slurry in the Brewhouse

    August 3rd, 2020  |  26 mins 52 secs

    Isn't it a shame to just throw out all of that spent hop slurry after dry-hopping a tank? Ola Oladokun from Carlsberg sat down with me during last year's conference in Calgary to talk about brewing trials designed to put that "spent" hop slurry back to work.

  • Episode 178: Friends Don't Let Friends Drink Oxidized Beer

    July 27th, 2020  |  23 mins 33 secs

    Audrey Skinner joins us to talk about bright tank purges and other important battles in the war you should be waging against dissolved oxygen in your brewery.

  • Episode 040: What is Aleppo?

    July 20th, 2020  |  21 mins 3 secs

    Need to remove haze? Need to add haze? Need to stabilize flavor? This week, we're talking applications for tannic acid in the brewery.

  • Episode 177: The Art & Science of Roasting Specialty Malt

    July 13th, 2020  |  1 hr 1 min

    Specialty malt freshness, roaster technology, flavor development & complexity in specialty malts, and more.

  • Episode 176: Functional Terroir

    July 6th, 2020  |  53 mins 48 secs

    Three people who know a lot about malting talk about base malt flavor development and the variables driving a lot of creativity in brewing.

  • Episode 175: Know Barley, Know Beer

    June 29th, 2020  |  30 mins 35 secs

    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.

  • Episode 049: Breathe, Breathe, Breathe, Scream

    June 22nd, 2020  |  45 mins 2 secs

    Kerry Caldwell suffered severe injuries from an accident in the brewhouse. She was airlifted and overcame the 34% chance of survival calculated by the hospital.