Beervana Podcast Jeff Alworth & Patrick Emerson

At this year’s Central European Brewers Festival, Polish brewer Marek Kamiński gave a presentation on the briefly extinct style of Grodziskie that has been making a comeback in its homeland. Jeff and Marek later sat down to discuss this fascinating style, its history, and how it’s doing today. We have that interview, along with the news and mailbag and a Croatian beer tasting.

Today we’re going to go to Prague and Budapest, where Jeff recently spent ten days. He was there to speak at the Central European Brewers Conference, and had a chance to get caught up on the beer scenes in the region. The countries there have very diverse brewing backgrounds, from the Czechia, with local intact traditions dating back centuries, to countries like Croatia, where craft brewing dates back only a decade. He’s going to tell us what he found.

Beer Tastings: Varionica Pale, Zmajska Pils, and Maktoob IPA

Not long ago, we received a very interesting email in the mailbag. It came from Pete Hoppins of Portland’s British-influenced brewery, Away Days. It was the length of a short article and came with a color-coded graph. The essence of the email boiled down to a pithy question he posed about the viability of small breweries today. Pete asked: “Do you think we could ever see another brewery as successful as say Breakside or 10 Barrel (in Portland area)?” The email was far to detailed and meaty for a simple mailbag item, so we’re bumping it up to the main topic of this pod.

PHOTO: 10 Barrel Brewing
Beer tasting: Rogue Dead Guy IPA, Hetty Alice Belgian IPA (BIPA)

Audioblog: Singha Beer, Don't Ask No Questions by Jeff Alworth & Patrick Emerson

In September, Dublin's Guinness Brewery opened its second American site, this time in Chicago. Jeff went to the Windy City to check it out and while he was there, sat down with Ryan Wagner, who helped see the project over the finish line, and brewer Megan Schwarz.

When we think of different beers, our minds almost immediately frame them in terms of “style.” IPAs and witbiers and Czech dark lagers: this is how we’ve come to understand beer. Today we get philosophical and ask the question: what if styles aren’t the only way to think about beer? What if, rather than illuminating something essential about beer, styles actually deceive us?