John Bryce
Host of Master Brewers Podcast
John Bryce built his first brewery (Blacksburg Brewing Co.) on a shoestring budget in 2002 and his career continued at several Virginia breweries, including Capitol City, Old Dominion, Starr Hill, and Mount Ida Reserve. He graduated from Versuchs- und Lehranstalt für Brauerei (VLB) in 2008, has helped countless breweries as a consultant, served as MBAA's Technical Outreach Director from 2015 to 2017, and is Founder & CEO at The Lupulin Exchange, where he answers every single support ticket personally and agonizes over making life easier for brewers. John has been the host & producer of Master Brewers Podcast since its inception in 2016.
John Bryce has hosted 318 Episodes.
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Episode 213: Magnesium-accelerated Maillard reactions
June 7th, 2021 | 37 mins 47 secs
We take a deep dive into the impact Mg can have on the Maillard reactions occurring in the brewhouse and during malting.
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Episode 212: Yeast Nutrient: Hard Seltzer vs Wort
May 31st, 2021 | 55 mins 15 secs
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?
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Episode 067: In the Blink of an Eye
May 24th, 2021 | 37 mins 39 secs
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.
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Episode 211: The Sweet Spot
May 17th, 2021 | 46 mins 21 secs
Dextrose, cane sugar, beet sugar, corn syrups, back sweetening with stevia, and more
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Episode 065: Troubleshooting Off-flavors
April 26th, 2021 | 27 mins 24 secs
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.
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Episode 208: Understanding Thiol Precursor in Hops & Malt
April 19th, 2021 | 47 mins 8 secs
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.
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Episode 206: Practical Sustainability
April 5th, 2021 | 43 mins 37 secs
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.
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Episode 066: Sulfate to Chloride Ratio
March 29th, 2021 | 28 mins 5 secs
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.
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Episode 205: Brewing vs. Distilling
March 22nd, 2021 | 55 mins 9 secs
We explore some of the similarities and differences between brewing & distilling.
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Episode 079: Brewhouse Efficiency for the Small Brewer
March 1st, 2021 | 42 mins 31 secs
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.
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Episode 053: Improved Flavor via Trub Removal at Dogfish
February 1st, 2021 | 29 mins 34 secs
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.
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Episode 058: What Yeast has taught me about Brewing over the years
January 4th, 2021 | 34 mins 12 secs
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.
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Episode 028: Draught Line Cleaning P2
December 28th, 2020 | 35 mins 10 secs
This week, we continue our draught line cleaning discussion with Keith Lemcke.
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Episode 027: Draught Line Cleaning P1
December 21st, 2020 | 35 mins 45 secs
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.
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Episode 195: Thiol-releasing Capability of Brewers Yeast
December 7th, 2020 | 33 mins 43 secs
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.
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Episode 010: Free Education
November 23rd, 2020 | 19 mins 23 secs
Master Brewers is dying to pay for your education; it's part of what we do.