Master Brewers Podcast

Episode 182: De-skunking Beer

July 8th, 2024  |  33 mins 27 secs

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

Episode 311: Preventing Heat Illness in the Brewery

July 1st, 2024  |  35 mins 28 secs

A couple of experts offer tips to help your brewery beat the summer heat.

Episode 049: Breathe, Breathe, Breathe, Scream

June 24th, 2024  |  45 mins 27 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. This episode is both the story of her accident and a description of a simple, inexpensive device that should be installed in your brewery to prevent similar accidents. 

Episode 310: Identifying and Eliminating Pectinatus in a Craft Lager Facility - A Sensory Case Study

June 17th, 2024  |  27 mins 44 secs

If you have the same canning line as Jack, you might want to listen up.

Episode 191: Too Much Noise!

June 10th, 2024  |  28 mins 29 secs

Noise exposure may not be on your brewery's radar, but this is an area in which an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Episode 309: Predicting and improving complex beer flavor through machine learning

June 3rd, 2024  |  56 mins 37 secs

Can chemical analytics be used to predict what a sensory panel will taste? Can machine learning be used to improve a beer?

Episode 177: The Art & Science of Roasting Specialty Malt

May 27th, 2024  |  1 hr 57 secs

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

Episode 308: Location, Genotype, Year

May 20th, 2024  |  38 mins 3 secs

A unique study of California malting barley and its practical takeaways for brewers.

Episode 176: Functional Terroir

May 13th, 2024  |  53 mins 33 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 307: Green Chemistry for Beer

May 6th, 2024  |  39 mins 17 secs

What is green chemistry? How and why should you apply it in your brewery?

Episode 175: Know Barley, Know Beer

April 29th, 2024  |  30 mins 18 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 306: Barley Lipids

April 22nd, 2024  |  43 mins 13 secs

Brewing process and quality tips related to barley lipids

Episode 183: Dry Hop Creep During In-Package Conditioning

April 15th, 2024  |  28 mins 19 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 305: COGS

April 8th, 2024  |  38 mins 51 secs

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.

Episode 187: The Guinness Yeast

April 1st, 2024  |  40 mins 34 secs

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.

Episode 304: Kernza

March 25th, 2024  |  58 mins 40 secs

What is Kernza and does it belong in your next recipe?