Recent Articles

Brewers who’ve enjoyed repeat success at the judging tables have this advice for their friendly competition: From category selection to packaging methods, you need to sweat the details.

Medals and other honors can raise your brewery’s profile, boost your team, and even increase sales. Yet with tighter budgets and more competitions than ever, breweries are carefully considering where and how many they can enter.

In the first episode of his Brewing a Business video course, Allan Branch of History Class Brewing in Panama City, Florida, outlines the most important questions you need to answer if you’re serious about opening a brewery.

It’s the toughest time of year for beer—cold weather, health kicks, and lots of people just staying home. For breweries barely hanging in there, these months can be a knockout blow. From a variety of voices in the industry, here are some ideas about how to make it work until spring.

In this clip from his video course, Allan Branch—founder of History Class Brewing and El Weirdo tacos in Panama City, Florida—explains the usefulness of “fear-setting” as a way to be ready for warning signs that your brewing business could be in trouble.

These are tough times to run a small brewery—but was it ever easy? For perspective and advice on finding success in today’s industry, we reached out to seven successful brewers and entrepreneurs who’ve left it behind.

“There’s nothing romantic about a dirty wood cellar,” says Lauren Woods Limbach, New Belgium’s wood-cellar director and master blender. In this clip, she explains the importance of cleaning and preventive maintenance—especially when it comes to aging foeders.

There are hops in abundance, but beer sales are unpredictable—it’s no mystery why many small breweries are relying on the spot market. Yet many suppliers are aiming to lure brewers back to more flexible contracts that better suit today’s market.

In an updated chapter from our Brewing a Business course with Allan Branch, we identify what makes a business fail—and how to fix those issues before it's too late.

Conditioning in the container may be a path to longer shelf life, but it’s also a traditional way to prepare beer for the drinker—the beer is “alive” until it hits the glass. Here’s a technical look at two traditions that may provide inspiration for today’s brewers.

New Belgium wood-cellar director Lauren Woods Limbach explains the methodical way they forecast maturation times in their foeders, using sampling plans, specific lab tests, and deploying contingency plans when things don’t go as expected.

In Washington state, a new program is helping breweries and other beverage producers give reusable glass bottles a fresh look. Nationally, the cost and supply of new glass—and glaring weaknesses in recycling programs—could make such programs increasingly feasible.

Scott Jennings, Sierra Nevada’s innovation brewmaster in Mills River, North Carolina, offers a closer look at the brewery’s dialed-in approach to bottle conditioning.

Having a sensory panel to regularly evaluate your beer is good practice—but what about one to evaluate your hops? Brewers and hop-sensory experts share their best tips on starting up a specialized panel—and careful hop evaluation is something that even the smallest breweries can do.

As a small brewery devoted to cask-conditioned ale, Seattle’s Machine House is a rare bird in the United States—and it’s one that recently marked a decade of brewing, guided by the pragmatism of founder Bill Arnott and his “simple, primitive” approach to making their distinctive yet highly accessible beers

Whether farm breweries are out in the country or right downtown, state licenses for them depend on flexible benchmarks for local ingredients. There are lessons to be learned for any state considering similar privileges for breweries that aim to buy local.

In this clip from her video course, New Belgium wood-cellar director Lauren Woods Limbach explains how and why they brew their mixed-culture, wood-aged beers precisely to spec—starting with the beer that goes into the foeders.

One of the most effective ways to increase shelf life is one of the oldest tricks in the book: package conditioning with a bit of fresh yeast. Yet there are pitfalls. Here’s how “the biggest natural-conditioning operation in the world” goes about it.

New Belgium’s wood-cellar director and master blender Lauren Woods Limbach shares pragmatic advice based on years of experience developing and running a large-scale blending program

It takes more than a skilled brewer to consistently make great beer. It takes a holistic approach that extends from the top to every employee—and even to the drinkers themselves.