In this episode, we travel from Poland to the United States as we sit down with Jamie Bogner—co-founder and editorial director of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine and host of the Craft Beer & Brewing Podcast.
Jamie’s journey into beer journalism is as fascinating as the industry itself. From his early days in media to helping shape one of the most influential beer publications in the U.S., he has witnessed the evolution of craft beer culture firsthand. We explore the impact of beer media, the rise of Polish craft brewing, and the latest trends shaping the industry—including the fine balance between tradition and innovation.
But Jamie’s story isn’t just about beer. Having lived in New York City in 2001, he experienced 9/11 firsthand—a moment that not only shaped his life but also reinforced the power of community and resilience in the face of adversity. That same spirit of togetherness can be found in the beer world, where brewers and beer lovers rally around each other in tough times, whether facing economic challenges or global crises.
And of course, no BierTalk episode is complete without a beer in hand! We sample some exceptional Polish brews, discuss the influence of beer media, and reflect on the role of storytelling in keeping beer culture alive…
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Link für Apple/iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/biertalk/id1505720750
Link für Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FWgPXstFr1zR9Fm2G0UJS
BierTalk – Gespräche über und beim Bier.
Markus Raupach: Hello, and welcome to another episode of our podcast BierTalk. Today I’m still in Poland, meeting great people from the brewing world and now we are a little travelling to the United States and meet Jamie Bogner. He has also a podcast but also a huge magazine for brewing, home brewing and other things. We’ll talk about that in a moment. It’s great that you are here. Maybe you can introduce yourself a little to our listeners?
Jamie Bogner: Sure. Thank you, Markus. I’m Jamie Bogner, I’m a co-founder and editorial director of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine and host of the Craft Beer & Brewing podcast. I live in Fort Collins, Colorado in the United States and been a big craft beer fan since 1995 when I turned 21 and could finally legally consume beer in the United States. The magazine has been around since late 2013.
Markus Raupach: Wow. And you live in Fort Collins, so in terms of the weather here in Kraków we now have around 0°. Yesterday there was a bit snow. What is the weather around at home?
Jamie Bogner: It’s little warm for me here.
Markus Raupach: Okay!
Jamie Bogner: But, you know, I can walk without a jacket and be just fine. We have good, beautiful mountains in Colorado and have plenty of snow now up in the mountains. I live at about 5000 feet of elevation so 1800 metres, 1900 metres, so a little bit of good elevation, and the mountains go up from there. But it’s a beautiful place in our town of 150,000 to 180,000 people. We have 25 breweries and the city produces about 10 million brewers’ barrels of beer per year. It’s significant. You know, so hectolitres is 11.5 million hectolitres. We have a large Anheuser-Busch brewery that does most of that. But New Belgium Brewing, Odell Brewing, and some very large craft breweries too. Then some very small craft breweries.
Markus Raupach: So a little beer Mecca.
Jamie Bogner: It is a wonderful place for us to be located with many, many smart brewers.
Markus Raupach: And I think Root Shoot Malting is also in the area, I think?
Jamie Bogner: Root Shoot Malting is about 20 minutes south of my house, yes. We also have Troubador Malting right there and Grouse Malting is just a, they produce gluten-free malt. They’re one of the biggest gluten-free malt producers. They are just north of Fort Collins in Wellington. So we are right there at the interface of farmland and mountains, and so there’s lots of agriculture and lots of people that make things with that agriculture.
Markus Raupach: Wow. Yes. I had the guys from Root Shoot Maltings also on the podcast. That was great. They talked a lot about the landscape and everything and the breweries.
Jamie Bogner: Sure. Todd and Mike.
Markus Raupach: We can, yes, and we can just dive in a moment, as you say, gluten-free malt, because I can imagine many of our listeners just have some question marks in their head. So can you say, just quickly, what is a gluten-free malt?
Jamie Bogner: Gluten-free malts are obviously malt made from non-gluten-containing grains. Grouse Malting has been around gosh, nine or ten years now. It started very small but it’s grown significantly and, you know, they’re using a malting and number of grains again, that don’t contain gluten but that can actually produce good-tasting beer. So there’s some major non-gluten beer brands like Ghostfish, which is based up in Seattle. There’s another one, Holidaily in Golden, Colorado. A lot of these breweries that are making gluten-free craft beer rely on Grouse Malting for malt that can make beer, because it’s one thing to reduce gluten in a beer using, say, brewers’ clear ice, clarity ferm and other chemicals like that. But you can’t call it gluten free if it starts with gluten containing grains. These breweries want to be 100% safe for those with a medical condition like coeliac. So in order to be 100% safe they can have no gluten grains in their facility and they count on Grouse Malting to produce malt that can make interesting, flavourful beer. We are at work with them in the confines of a technical brewery.
Markus Raupach: That’s something like buckwheat or something?
Jamie Bogner: Yes.
Markus Raupach: Okay. Very interesting, thank you. So now let’s talk a little bit about you, sorry. That was just because maybe people have these question marks and you should go right there.
Jamie Bogner: Mhm.
Markus Raupach: Maybe before we start talking, of course we should start drinking. Because we are here for of course a beer competition and a beer conference and we’re talking a little about beer and you never can talk about beer without drinking beer.
Jamie Bogner: It’s the name of your podcast, right?
Markus Raupach: Yes.
Jamie Bogner: Biertalk, but you talk over beer also.
Markus Raupach: Yes, especially. So we have six cans now here. You brought three from a Polish brewery and I stole three others from other Polish breweries yesterday at the conference. So free choose, what do you think? What will we start with?
Jamie Bogner: Later on we’re going to have to try the Rauchbier because, you know.
Markus Raupach: Of course, yes.
Jamie Bogner: I have to hear your thoughts on it. But maybe we should start with Desitka …
Markus Raupach: Perfect.
Jamie Bogner: … a small lager.
Markus Raupach: Sounds good. Oh, you have a great glass, a mug. Is it also from here? #00:05:49-6#
Jamie Bogner: This is also from the same brewery. Brew Market.
Markus Raupach: Ah. Nice?
Jamie Bogner: I visited a few breweries in the two days before the competition started here and so made a visit to Wrocław and saw Brewery Stu Mostów, and also Vidala and then took a train down to Bielsko-Biała, and visited with Pinta and Bart, and then we drove up to Moon Lark and picked up Pavel, then drove here, drove to Krakow. So here we are. So I got to see the brewery and then of course Pavel from Moon Lark was on my judging table on the second day of judging with the competition.
Markus Raupach: So the audience now knows you are a professional. That sounds good. Cheers. So this beer is from the Moon Lark brewery, you just told us, and it’s called Digit Desitka. Mmm. Does it say anything about the …
Jamie Bogner: It’s a 10° degree beer.
Markus Raupach: Yes, just a nice, easy drinking lager.
Jamie Bogner: Czech, Polish, somewhere in there, definitely, that’s strong hop character in the more Czech tradition.
Markus Raupach: Also a little nice smoke base, so quite balanced. I like it. That’s one for you. So a great start.
Jamie Bogner: Good.
Markus Raupach: Thank you for this. Fantastic.
Jamie Bogner: As an American I enjoy lots of bitterness and so on. We have an affinity for the Czechs in that regard.
Markus Raupach: Many bad German jokes would now say, should we now add some water to your beer? Sorry. Yes, so let’s talk a bit about you. You grew up also in Colorado, or somewhere else?
Jamie Bogner: I grew up in central Florida, the home of Disney World, and lived there for most of my life. I went to college in Memphis, Tennessee, home of the Blues, and then moved back to Orlando and then New York City for ten years. I was in New York City from 2001 to 2010. I’ve worked for my entire career in media, mostly magazines but also web digital, and I have in a volunteer capacity for many years worked as a radio DJ in college and community radio stations, and DJed in Orlando as well as in Memphis, Tennessee. Got away from that in New York City and then came back to that through podcasting back in 2017, when we launched our podcast. But lived in New York City for ten years, and both of my children were born in New York City and then in 2010 we moved out to Colorado. The company I worked for had a headquarters, they were bought and had headquarters. They offered me a promotion to move to Colorado and I thought, hmm, I’m going to say ‘yes’ to that.
Markus Raupach: Yes. And maybe you already heard it, but you have a great radio voice.
Jamie Bogner: Well, thank you. As do you.
Markus Raupach: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. That’s great, to have some identity also voice-wise, so that’s perfect. As you said, you were in New York in 2001, so you had the 9/11 thing, or you’ve been up there?
Jamie Bogner: Oh yes. Yes. That was a difficult time. We moved in May of 2001 and lived in Long Island City, we actually lived in Sunnyside, Queens, just in the city but across the river from Manhattan. So I was on the subway platform to head to work at 8:45 that morning and out there, the subway platforms are above ground. My wife called and said, you should a plane just hit the World Trade Center. I walked down to the end of the subway platform and sure enough, you could see the World Trade Center, and smoke coming off one of them. You know, so people started talking, of course, no one knew what was happening then. But in time, the subway came, we kept watching it through the windows until right before we went underground, saw the other tower again, you couldn’t tell that it was another plane. We just saw another explosion, like, what was that? But then by the time I got to the office, everyone was standing and watching the televisions. That was a really difficult day. They ended up shutting down all of the public transportation. So after an hour, after the first Tower had collapsed, everyone just left.
Markus Raupach: You could get home, or?
Jamie Bogner: I had to walk home.
Markus Raupach: Walk?
Jamie Bogner: So I walked home from Central Manhattan up to the 59th Street Bridge, over the bridge and all the way home. You know, from there it was, you know, yeah, it was difficult.
Markus Raupach: Yes. Crazy times. But glad that you came out safely, but it’s still. I was there.
Jamie Bogner: It is nothing compared to what the Ukrainians are suffering through now at the hands of Russia.
Markus Raupach: That’s right.
Jamie Bogner: All of this, you know, through the history of the world there are many more horrible things, not that we’re comparing those things, but …
Markus Raupach: Yes, but I think it was maybe the first event where more or less the whole world was watching at the same time, just in a different time zone. But I also remember I was at home in the afternoon we were sitting, what happened and we were all stunned. And I was there some years ago in New York at the World Trade Centre site and this is still heart, shaking if you are there.
Jamie Bogner: I think the thing that, you know, I took away from all of my experiences, including that in New York, is that when things get hard, people pull together.
Markus Raupach: Yes.
Jamie Bogner: Even in New York City, even in a city that can be rough and tumble, that when people need things, the whole neighbourhood helps. That was a wonderful thing. We saw that through when the City lost power a few years later, the whole north-east of the United States’ power grid went down, you know, and a local neighbourhood pizzeria that had gas but didn’t have a cash register because they couldn’t. They had no electricity, they could make pizzas, they didn’t have refrigerators, they needed to get food out to people. They made pizzas, they just gave them away. We saw the same thing after 9/11. People hit, the community was wonderful. People pull together when things get hard, and they help each other through.
Markus Raupach: Yes.
Jamie Bogner: Markus, I didn’t realise, right, it gets so heavy in this podcast!
Markus Raupach: No, but I think it’s always important, because having these experiences, it’s part of our lives. Maybe you cannot really compare it, but a little bit, if we look into what’s happening in the beer world right now, it’s also a little bit that there is a lot of depression, the loss of market shares and a lot of trouble in terms of prices, energy everywhere.
Jamie Bogner: Sure. Sure.
Markus Raupach: And somehow on the fair in Nurenberg some weeks ago, I had a bit the same experience, because I was thinking, okay, everything is going down, there will be less people, there will be less exhibitors, it will be all a big depression and it will be all a very sad experience. And it was the opposite, because the people were more into coming together, into cheering together, yes, talking, helping each other. And I think this is, as you say, like a human reaction, to stick together if there’s trouble and also something I always experience when I’m travelling with the beer world, that wherever you are in the world, when the beer people come together, it’s like a family. This is something that is worth a lot and it helps a lot and also when sometimes some one of us has whatever problem, we really help each other. I think it’s the very human part also in the beer world, which is also making us maybe a bit different. So, yes.
Jamie Bogner: It’s a beautiful feature of the community of beer and it’s so constant wherever you are throughout the world, you know, this whole culture. You know, I think that all of us who make things have a basic optimism. You have to feel that if you make things, whether you’re making beer or you’re making media, you’re making magazines and putting these things out, that you have to have an optimism that tomorrow can be better than today. You know, just you have to. That’s just, if you didn’t, then you wouldn’t feel any compulsion to make things. So I think brewers, by their nature, have that kind of optimism. I think that as challenging as this year, next year, even the year after, maybe, in terms of some pullbacks, some declines, some rebalancing in the overall market, the wonderful thing, I think, about where we are now in the world of beer, is that the quality is so high. When I look at, in terms of the United States’ craft industry, the last time it experienced something like this, if you look at the last time that the number of breweries in the United States decreased, the last time was 2001 to 2003. And there were about 1100, 1200 breweries in the United States then and they saw a net reduction over two or three years there, the total number of operating breweries. We actually still have not seen a net reduction now.
Markus Raupach: No.
Jamie Bogner: We’re still actually adding a few breweries, which is very strange, even though things are down. But the last time we saw that, you know, 22 years ago, the quality of the beer was nowhere near as good as the quality of the beer is now. So I think to some degree the focus on quality, that the brewers around the world have focused on ambry in the United States, provides some higher floor. I think that that raises just how far things could drop. That, you know, our ceiling might not be higher, or as high as it once was, but I don’t think we drop as far this time around. I think that brewers still make such compelling beers in such quantity, you know, and more and more breweries, especially in this craft sector, make such good beer that it’s harder for it, you know, if it was not as good, it would be easier for it to drop.
Markus Raupach: Yes, and that brings us a little bit back to your history, because I think, especially if you look at the beer quality in the US, there’s a reason why it also is rising there, because there is more and more good beer media, so magazines, YouTube channels, podcasts, whatever, so that the word is spread more and bigger and wider. Also people are more exchanging their experience and raising the average quality. How did that come to you, that you say, okay, now I do a beer magazine?
Jamie Bogner: Well, I can’t say that it’s because of us. I can say that there is a, oh, not at all, not at all. Brewers in the United States after that difficult time period committed to helping beer brewing in general in the United States get better, and created a culture of sharing that we’ve been able to benefit from. It’s not something we created, but we are a product of the culture itself.
Markus Raupach: Or part of the story.
Jamie Bogner: I keep trying to be part of that story, yes. But the culture, and there were some significant leaders of that who really focused on giving away information about how to make high-quality beer, and then have worked hard within industry groups to improve the quality of ingredients, to improve the quality of hops, of yeast, of malt, so that brewers had better tools. And the brewers, these highest quality brewers, really just shared so much that has just built this wonderful culture. So when we decided to start this, my business partner and I came out of another media business that was focused on handcrafts, all built around makers, but a different kind of maker, a maker that loved to sell, that loved to make jewellery, loved to knit, you know, fine art painting and drawing. So we understood how to build compelling media from makers, and our thought was, what if we take what we know about media for enthusiasts and apply that to brewing and beer, which is a subject matter that we were personally interested in. That was the genesis of it, and my business partner, John, actually came up, he left the business we worked for, spent, you know, a few months working on a business plan, put some data together, convinced me to leave my job at that business. He was a senior VP Group publisher. I ended up with his job, VP Group publisher, managing a $35 million US unit and 100-plus employees all working in this field. I’ll just tell you that managing people is less interesting than what I get to do now. So we put the business together. He put a business plan together. We decided to, once he, it was I think in 2013 he was looking at the numbers. Like I think craft beer is going somewhere now and they will support the kind of business that we think we can have with this if we do this. You know, of course, there were no guarantees. But we are completely self-funded. We have no outside investors. We are 100% employee-owned and we control our own destiny and ours is also tied to craft beer itself, obviously, so it’s significantly now. But that’s how that got started. I did not know nearly as much about brewing as I do now and had to learn. But I knew plenty about beer and I knew far less about brewing and so on.
Markus Raupach: Does that mean there was a culture of making or of craft making before that craft beer culture came up? Because sometimes, I don’t know if you know that fake movie about artisanal firewood? Yes, I haven’t put it in the show notes, but my question was always, what was first? So was it a generalist thing of self-made things and the craft idea? Or was beer leading this, or?
Jamie Bogner: I think that craft beer hit right around the time where a lot of other things hit. You know, this history of craft beer, I think it’s impossible to take it outside of the context of things like farm to table food, of shopping at farmers’ markets to buy from growers and of artisanal coffee with single origin beans and thoughtful roasting by local roasters for fresh coffee, where you know where it came from. I think culturally we all started wanting to get closer to the source, and I think that that, from restaurants that were then starting to tell people which farm their greens came from or which farm that their pork was raised, you know, that kind of general cultural consciousness was increasing significantly in the 1980s and really hit a head in the 1990s at the same time that craft beer accelerated. So I think the cultural trends are connected. I wouldn’t pull them apart. While at the same time, because the beer industry in the United States was so dominated by large corporate manufacturers, we have actually had such an incredible home brewing community that pushed creativity but then also caught big competition and, you know, that home brewing world created so many brewers who were just primed to become professional brewers as the market continued, you know, the potential continued to grow for that. Then you had a recession in 2008 that put lots of people out of work, and you combine that with a whole bunch of inexpensive brewing equipment in the United States that was on the market still because of all that pullback of the earlier 2000s, so you had access to cheap equipment, you had people who’ve got laid off and had some money and, like, I don’t want to go back to my job doing that thing in the investment world. I want to start a brewery. And they now had time and it was a beautiful foundation for this new resurgence that we saw in the early twenty-teens in craft breweries in the United States, and of course in lots of other parts of the world as well, right around the same time.
Markus Raupach: Yes. So you found that all about brewing. What was the original idea? Was it just for home brewers? Or was it for beer lovers or both or? Did it change the focus, or?
Jamie Bogner: And pro brewers. The answer to that is just ‘yes’.
Markus Raupach: Yes, okay.
Jamie Bogner: What I find, Markus, is that putting very tight definitions on things, drawing lines too closely, doesn’t really help anyone. We didn’t need to be a homebrew magazine. We didn’t need to be a pro brew magazine. We didn’t need to be a be a beer consumer magazine. I find that a lot of people I know were all three of those things, that pro brewers are also beer nerds and beer fans. Some I know, some professional brewers I know, still home brew in addition to working commercially there. Some were piloting on their own one-barrel system at home. I don’t find many professional brewers that also don’t geek out about beer. Then there’s plenty of home brewers that were on their path or would like to become professional brewers. What we decided to do, at the time most of the media was focusing on, yes, it was too tightly aligned around that. You had homebrew magazines that would make clone recipes where someone would try to copy, you know, a recipe from a professional brewer. Our thought was, well, why try to copy that? Why don’t we just go talk to them and get a recipe from them and work together to make the home brew recipe so that it’s something someone can make? Then, of course, you know, other professional brewers can also look at that same recipe, maybe they use it, you know. Again, we just don’t put lines around that. But it also seems more interesting to tell the story of that brewery and get insight from them. Because so much creativity had been driven by home brewing for so many years, and that had been the source. But right around then, you know, we started seeing some of that like significant creativity and respect, you know, happening within the professional brewing world in the same way that the entire world of celebrity chefs, you know, were such a thing, like we thought, ah, there’s an opportunity here to focus on working with phenomenal, world-class professional brewers and share their insights on brewing with the world, and give them the kind of credit and the kind of platform and, not just exposure, they’d plenty of exposure, but to celebrate them for the artists and the makers that they are. That was important to us, and that is the strategy that we have taken ever since, both within the magazine but also within the podcast.
Markus Raupach: Yes, also I think it’s a good idea to have a stage where you can present these brewers and give them the opportunity and help them in communicating. Before my next question, maybe we can taste the next beer?
Jamie Bogner: Let’s do that. Let’s do that.
Markus Raupach: So, all right. Which one?
Jamie Bogner: I chose the first one, you choose the next one.
Markus Raupach: Let’s see. Who? I got also some strange ones, but maybe that we do later and that, oh, that will be a challenge. But let’s have the IPA. It’s a wheat India pale ale.
Jamie Bogner: Sounds great.
Markus Raupach: I guess you already had it, because it’s on the competition, but let’s see from the …
Jamie Bogner: From Czech Republic?
Markus Raupach: Yes. So let’s see. Here we go. Of course, it’s cans.
Jamie Bogner: What’s wrong with cans?
Markus Raupach: Nothing wrong. I love cans. In Germany we always have this discussion because we had the problem that we banned the can in the time when it was quite also a bad can, so with the metallic aromas and whatever, and then we didn’t have cans for about ten, fifteen years. Then the can came back as a tool for Prosecco, so for the expensive and special stuff, and it was never used for beer anymore. That now slightly comes back into beer. So it comes from a different angle. Before it was a cheap, bad thing. Now it’s the expensive and whatever thing. And but most of the brewers come from the old times, so for them it’s still a problem. I always say, the can is the best for beer if you don’t have a barrel. The only thing is that you should use a glass.
Jamie Bogner: So don’t drink, that’s such a Franconian point of view.
Markus Raupach: That’s the only thing. Oh yes, but it’s nice. It’s a lot of spelt. Cheers.
Jamie Bogner: Cheers.
Markus Raupach: Fantastic. We’ll talk a bit about the Polish brewers in a moment. But first, because I also had the idea, and more often had the idea, to also do like a beer magazine in Germany. Then I had the opportunity that one of the existing ones was broken, so the idea was how to take it over potentially and then about analysing the numbers. I found out it’s a total mess, because of the logistics and everything. I think for us, Germany is quite a big country, but to have a beer magazine in the whole US, with all the different states and the huge territory and things, I really can’t imagine how you can set up this totally on your own. This must be like a 28-hour job, for 24 hours or whatever.
Jamie Bogner: Yes. It’s every new business and every small business is a challenge. We have about thirteen employees now. We had nine, ten, eleven, now we have thirteen. So it has grown over time. The first five or six years of the business are like every small business. You worry that you’re not going to make it and, you know, we definitely had some of those weeks and months, when I came. But then, the strange thing, I mean, it was an interesting effect of the pandemic, but we happened to be, we launched the podcast in 2017 and by 2020 we were, strangely enough, in the business of sending things to people’s homes, both magazines to people and as well as podcasts out there to them on a digital basis. Strangely enough, it was this connecting thing. I heard that from lots and lots of people, like they listen to the podcast while working out, you know, in their homes, and they felt connected to this other, you know, bigger world still through these kinds of things, and the magazine continued, again, even because we produce it in a very, you know, slim and distributed way. That actually, weirdly enough, was positive for our business and, you know, that we were in the right business of sending things to people’s homes when that’s exactly what people needed.
I don’t want to make light of the pandemic because obviously it was a very serious, impactful negative and many, you know, a million people died from this. It’s nothing to make light of. But while it just wasn’t as challenging in that regard just for our business, because of what we did. I don’t know, I lost my train of thought there.
Markus Raupach: Yes, but then I think it’s also, things may be …
Jamie Bogner: Yes, there’s no guarantees with any of this, but we’ve taken a very focused strategy. We also focused heavily on the business-to-business market because within the United States, but then it’s not just the United States. It’s also Australia, Australia is our second largest market, UK, actually Canada’s our third, UK is our fourth. There’s a large English-speaking audience in the world. South Africa is a significant part of our audience. So across that, we aggregate a good-sized audience and by focusing also on the professional side of the brewing industry, it’s able to sustain the business in a way that if we were just focused on consumers, we wouldn’t sustain a business like this.
Markus Raupach: I think, also just one word to the pandemic thing. I think it was, as far as I know it from Germany, it was a special challenge also for people with their own company, like also myself, because of course we were able to do things and get through, but it was also a challenge of reinventing yourself, finding your niche. You didn’t have any help from anyone or anybody, so I think the first weeks I was delivering beer and bread to people, because I had a whole garage of beer, which I had for events which never happened. So I had all this beer and didn’t know what to do. A friend of mine, she has a bakery, so we said, okay, let’s make an online delivery for beer and bread. And I’m a journalist, so I was one of the few guys allowed to drive around. All the rest had to stay at home. So I could do this delivering and you make strange things in strange situations. In the end, that’s how it went. Back to the podcast thing, I also had a nice experience. Some alumni from the beer academy started also a podcast like a year ago or something. Then they asked me if I would like to be in one of the first episodes and I said, yes, and first we will have to buy all this software and hardware and then we make these scripts and then we have to learn the text on them. We have some music and whatever. So huge things to do. Then I just thought back, okay, when I started my podcast I more or less had a microphone, and that’s it. I never did a scripted thing because I just like talking as it is. How did you start? Did you have something like a professional approach, with everything scripted? Or was it more also radio-like, or?
Jamie Bogner: I think we were never scripted and sometimes we’d write out intros, but most of the time we would just wing it, you know. I think that there is something to conversational style that is very beneficial in the podcast space. I don’t love podcasts that lean towards like a radio shock jock or, you know, group of making jokes together. I’m not an entertainer in that sense. I am an interviewer and I try to focus on the guest that I have. Then I think the biggest skill is, of all my pre-preparation, there was conversations or that’s why inaudible most in person, because I find that drinking beer with someone, walking through the brewhouse, being able to see where they brew the beer, being able to taste the beer that they brew raises lots of questions for me. That becomes my preparation. I do a little bit of research and make sure that I have some general, usually I know who I’m talking to, you know, you don’t just stumble into these things. It takes work. But through that, and then through very active listening throughout the conversation, I’m able to keep that going. There are certainly podcasts out there where they come with a list of questions. I find that less dynamic. I love achieving, finding things, finding topics and working together with the guests to get there. It’s more interesting, I think, to me, than coming in with what I think I want to ask. When they say something that raises a question, that’s where I try to drill down. I think that’s the feedback the brewers give me, like you asked the exact same question I wanted to ask right there. That just helps, because, you know, I don’t know very much. So by being a little bit dumb I just have to keep asking questions, and if I keep asking questions, then I’m the one asking the stupid questions and that way no one else has to feel stupid for asking it. That strategy has worked out rather than trying to take some, I think the key with everything is not letting the preparation be the stumbling block to starting. I think you just have to start. I will say that after this many years of running the podcast, interviewing, producing everything, editing, all these other things that I do, I wasn’t as good at it when we started. We were good enough, and we learned. We got better at it as we did it. Now I think we’re pretty good at it.
Markus Raupach: Yes, I think it’s a process and also I can remember that maybe someone told me when I started it at the radio station, that this is the golden rule, that you try to be at least as stupid as the most stupid listener. Maybe it sounds strange, but you ask the right questions and that’s a way to guide and to always find a point where you can start over, and also –
Jamie Bogner: Particularly within technical conversations, where we’re talking about processes that are dense and we’re trying to describe them using spoken language. Any professional, in any kind of field is going to assume a certain amount of knowledge and sometimes assuming that knowledge doesn’t help the audience actually gain that knowledge. So having been, not assuming that has been a positive thing for us.
Markus Raupach: Also, as you mentioned, having the beers with the brewers, that can be also a lot of fun. So I had some episodes where I had like six, eight, ten beers together with them. You know, brewers tend to empty things. I can always drink maybe just a little bit and that’s okay, but they normally empty everything. I had some episodes where at the end the brewer was very talkative, let’s say, like this. I never had to cut anything but it’s also interesting to just also hear and listen what the mood is changing and the things and they tell maybe little things that nobody will ever do and that is also an interesting part of it, yes. Great, so now we are here in Poland and you already had the opportunity to visit some of the breweries, when we had all these beers in the competition. What is your impression about Poland, the Polish beer world and what you find here?
Jamie Bogner: It is incredibly impressive to me where the Polish craft beer world has gone in the past fifteen years, that the Polish craft beer scene almost didn’t exist fifteen years ago, and that they have built what they have in such a short period of time is pretty incredible, honestly. And talking with other brewers in Europe in the week, because I was in Belgium for a few days and then in Prague for a night before coming up here to Poland, talking to other brewers. Everyone’s like, oh, the Polish craft beer scene is great. You know, they were less burdened by some historical traditions. Germany has very highly regimented brewing and beer culture and so pushing innovation in that kind of space was hard. The Czech Republic: strong brewing culture. So people had expectations for what beer could and should be and here in Poland there were large breweries, people drank beer, but it’s definitely more of a distilled spirit culture. But there was space and openings for innovation, and the craft brewers came in and found ways to make good, flavourful beer and, you know, there was plenty of brewing knowledge right here in Europe to pull from. But they also weren’t burdened by some of the same cultural traditions as some of the countries around them and so craft beer itself has just flourished here. It’s interesting to see, and I think the quality of the beers is really tremendous. I wouldn’t say I didn’t expect it to be, because I have had beer from Polish brewers before coming here. I knew that the beer was going to be good, you know, but it’s like every country, there’s a normal distribution of, you know, it’s a bell curve, right? The question is, how good is the best of the best? I think in some beer styles, they’re everywhere, they’re right up there with the best of the best. Polish brewers have won European beer star awards this year, there’s plenty that shows that they can play on an international stage.
Markus Raupach: Yes. I think they are a little bit a mixture of the best approach. So because they have all the creativity and the curiosity and the ideas to do the experiments which you also find in the American craft brewing scene maybe twenty years ago. But on the other hand, they also have the professionality and the will to make it in a perfect way, like you maybe expect from, let’s say, a German brewer, whatever. But they bring that together. So they make crazy, creative, very interesting and just very well done beers. But they do it in a very perfect, professional way. You can walk in the brewery, you can eat from the floor. It’s clean, everything is well kept. I think this is maybe a little bit the key, because in other countries – yes, maybe you don’t have in both. Sometimes you have less creativity or you have less professionality, whatever, the average. But there’s something that is really inspiring me in Poland. Wherever you go, you find these guys that really want to make this perfect beer and this is a great spark which is in them somehow.
Jamie Bogner: Sure. Sure. In defence of American brewers, I have been to plenty of American craft breweries where you can also eat off the floor. You know, so I don’t think that that focus on creativity is mutually exclusive with that kind of approach. But I know what you’re saying. There are certainly out there, also in the plain American breweries where you make beer.
Markus Raupach: Yes, it’s an example.
Jamie Bogner: Sure, sure.
Markus Raupach: But you can find that in Germany too.
Jamie Bogner: Again, I think that national distribution happens in every world of brewing, no matter what country you’re in. There are the best, that are just absolutely beautiful, they’re the best that are very regimented in type, and then there’s a lot in the middle, some that are creative, some that are more technical, you know, and then there’s just some brewers that are, you know, we run a brewing business here.
Markus Raupach: Yes, I think maybe it’s because they don’t have the burden, like the German brewers, that you have twenty generations that always did that and you have to do it like this. On the other hand, they have the idea of wanting to make it as good in terms of quality and so that’s in the people. You also realise it on the judging table. So they are also really taking it seriously. Yes. So in general, I’m really also impressed by the Polish beer culture. As we are impressed, maybe we are ready for the next beer?
Jamie Bogner: Sure, sure.
Markus Raupach: I don’t know if it’s too fast for you?
Jamie Bogner: Oh, that sounds like a challenge, Markus.
Markus Raupach: No, no, no.
Jamie Bogner: Are you challenging me?
Markus Raupach: No, no, no.
Jamie Bogner: All right, I’m just finishing this one.
Markus Raupach: Maybe one more or two more.
Jamie Bogner: All right. Bring it on.
Markus Raupach: Yes.
Jamie Bogner: Do you want to stay in hazy IPA or you want something else?
Markus Raupach: Oh no, it’s on you. So we will still have four, but we can go on your side again, but whatever you like.
Jamie Bogner: We have Pinta and we have Moon Lark, and I have spent, I have visited both of those breweries in the last few days.
Markus Raupach: So feel free.
Jamie Bogner: You want to put it on me? Let’s try Rauchbier. Let’s just. Oh, that’s a Rauchbier.
Markus Raupach: Let’s go for it.
Jamie Bogner: I don’t want to miss this one, since I have the opportunity to drink it with you. That must be celebrated.
Markus Raupach: The colour is already great.
Jamie Bogner: Okay. It’s promising.
Markus Raupach: Yes, and there is smoke.
Jamie Bogner: There is.
Markus Raupach: Definitely. And a nice one, it’s really like a campfire, some honey, quite complex. Nice foam.
Jamie Bogner: Cheers. A beautiful, deep copper colour. Nicely nuanced, just a little bit of malt sweetness there, actually, not quite as much as I had thought there might be in that. Still it has that sweetness but still feels like a trim body to it.
Markus Raupach: 5.7%. It just doesn’t feel like that. Maybe it’s not Bamberg, but it’s quite there. No, we’re good.
Jamie Bogner: And that is Moon Lark, and a Rauchbier, yes.
Markus Raupach: Yes, one more Rauchbier. Great. 5.7% and yes, it’s just barley malt. That’s it. It’s just barley malt mentioned on the can, so it will be perfect. But I like it, it’s nice, it’s an easy drinking beer in terms of the mouth feel and it’s 5.7%, it’s just some alcohol.
Jamie Bogner: Yes. Yes.
Markus Raupach: Nice.
Jamie Bogner: There’s one more is the OneMoreBeer is the distributor.
Markus Raupach: Oh, okay.
Jamie Bogner: So this appears to be a collaboration with the OneMoreBeer beer distributor.
Markus Raupach: Thank you for that, yes. Perfect. Yes, it’s always if you have these labels in the other end, it’s always hard to guess what is behind them.
Jamie Bogner: I’m going to dig back in, that OneMoreBeer, that distributorship is also owned by the same ownership of Pinta, even though Moon Lark is an independent, separate brewery.
Markus Raupach: Yes, so there’s …
Jamie Bogner: There’s my story. I have filed away from the last several days of running about Polish brewers.
Markus Raupach: Perfect, yes. Now we’re getting into beer trends a little bit. That was also the topic of your talk yesterday. So would you say Rauchbier, smoke beer, is a trend?
Jamie Bogner: I have to say “yes”. Not because it’s true, but because I want it to be true.
Markus Raupach: Okay. Me too.
Jamie Bogner: And I believe that this is the secret. The secret of visualisation, that if you want it to be true, you just say it’s true enough and then it becomes true.
Markus Raupach: So all the audience, close your eyes, imagine smoke beer is the big new trend. Visualise it, and we will have created this. Perfect, yes. But there is smoke beer in the US also, a lot?
Jamie Bogner: There is well.
Markus Raupach: There was when I was in Nashville last year, there was even an event during the CBC and one of the breweries, a lot of barrels around, and they only had smoke beers and it wasn’t that bad. So very interesting.
Jamie Bogner: It wasn’t that bad. I like it, I like it. Yes.
Markus Raupach: Of course, because they made everything with smoke.
Jamie Bogner: Sure.
Markus Raupach: So it was from the smoky goes to the smoky quadruple, whatever, everything. Of course, there’s maybe some beers you think maybe they could have done something else. But most of them were nicely and also, I always say it’s not on my opinion, because if the market wants it, if the people drink it, it’s perfect. I always find beers I like, so it’s okay. But this beer is a wonderful beer that presents the smoky idea without being too pushing. So I think this really is a beer everybody can drink and enjoy that special aroma, which is not in every beer.
Jamie Bogner: Yes. Yes. I think you’re right. That’s what I loved about Bamberg smoked beers. You have this idea and unfortunately by the time they get packaged and sit on a ship and get to the United States, they usually have oxidation, and they don’t taste as fresh and vibrant as they do in Bamberg. But these beers, while they are smoky, they’re not, like that isn’t this sharp, defining factor to them. They’re also full, beautiful, a little bit sweet, a little bit fruity sometimes, you know, and then that smoke captures some of that character. And it was the most beautiful thing for me to walk through the streets of Bamberg at night, see giant crowds hanging out outside of Schlenkerla on this poured out on the street and Joe, our executive editor, put a €2 coin deposit down on a glass and got glasses and stood outside and drank them. You know, seeing that many people drinking smoked beer, it’s like, it just warms my heart.
Markus Raupach: Yes, it’s a living …
Jamie Bogner: I keep, I show that picture, I took a picture of it and share that picture with American viewers/business. Do you want to see how many people drink smoked beer in Bamberg? This is just an average weekend night in front of the Schlenkerla. And most just can’t believe it, because the idea of that many people drinking smoked beer, it’s just mind-blowing. They just couldn’t fathom it. But it does exist and Bamberg is its own separate reality in that regard. That’s why breweries love it so much.
Markus Raupach: Yes, and it’s not only about smoked beer. In general, I think it’s one of the very few places in the world where they really live the beer culture in a daily way. So no matter what day, always the breweries are full of people. And they’re not always drunk. Sometimes they just have a non-alcoholic beer or whatever else. But it’s just they are enjoying the places, the food, the whole culture this is really. And I cross my fingers that that can survive, because this is really special and is something that keeps me sane at home.
Jamie Bogner: Sure. Sure.
Markus Raupach: So that’s always great.
Jamie Bogner: In the United States we see breweries like Live Oak in Austin, Texas, that make a deep selection of smoked beers. I was there in, I guess it was 2021. They did a smoked beer that had six smoked beers on tap, you know, a whole, across a bunch of different styles, like being able to taste that many different smoked beers all at once, it’s just absolutely incredible. One year at the Great American Beer Festival, Live Oak, just the only beers they sent to the festival were four smoked beers. They know their audience and for fellow brewers, you know, the brewers love that because it’s just its own different thing. Dovetail, Chicago, make some great smoked beers. There’s a lot of good, usually it’s a beer that the brewers make for themselves and, you know, usually those beers the brewers make for themselves are some of the best beers the brewers make, because they put the most care into it. They want it to be the most right. They know it’s not going to sell much, but they’re making it for them, and that’s all that matters.
Markus Raupach: Yes, and I think people can, when they listen to your podcast, can have a lot of these experiences when you talk to these brewers.
Jamie Bogner: Yes. Yes.
Markus Raupach: Yes. Just maybe three last things, takeaways from your presentation. Two things I learnt and one thing I’m very curious. The first learning was there is a West Coast Pilsner which is something very strange for a traditional German guy. It was already hard to learn that there is an Italian Pilsner, and it was hard to hear that they want to make a Brazilian Pilsner, but what the hell is a West Coast Pilsner?
Jamie Bogner: It’s what you have when you take that kind of baseline Pilsner and just add a bunch of American hops to it. It’s just like that. Imagine a West Coast – and I guess we should set the stage. One of the most interesting things about West Coast IPA now is that more and more West Coast IPA in America is being fermented with lager yeast. It still says IPA. It still says ale in the name of the beer. But it’s become much more common amongst most award-winning brewers to ferment with lager yeast. It’s usually 34/70 or something pretty neutral like that, just in order to provide a no ester platform for these hops to carry all of the flavour duty. It creates just a slightly more crisply defined IPA. So now you have West Coast IPA being made with 34/70, and usually very light Lovibond malt. So you have 1.7, 1.8 Lovibond. Pilsner malts are extra light, pale, 2-row pale malt and this is what West Coast IPA looks like now, the last two or three years, this is where it has gone. To win a medal just has to be very, very pale and it’s usually now made with lager yeast. So that’s West Coast IPA. It just almost naturally follows from the West Coast Pils. It’s just going to be a scaled down version of that. It’s going to be the same Pilsner malt and it’s usually American Pilsner malt, not European Pilsner malt, also it seems like from what people are saying, the American Pilsner malt tends to kick off less sulphur in fermentation, which makes it actually work pretty much better with some of these. But still a very light colour, you know, in that 5% ABV range, you know, very –
Markus Raupach: It’s like a pale ale somehow in terms of the intensity of the hops?
Jamie Bogner: That’s the funny part, Markus, because this past year, the Great American Beer Festival, there’s a brewery out of Los Angeles, Highland Park Brewery, that makes a beer called Timbo Pils. Timbo Pils is that prototypical West Coast Pils and they won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2019 in the India Pale Lager category. Then I think it was 2020 or 2021 when they won a bronze medal with the same beer. The category had been changed to like hoppy lager. The year after that they did a fun collaboration with some brewer friends and they shared the recipe out with all their brewer friends, and their own brewer friends made the same Timbo Pils recipe, but they did it with their own selected hops. Well, one of those breweries, Pint House in Texas, entered their version of Timbo Pils in the Great American Beer Festival, and they won a silver medal, I believe it was, for that beer in the Hoppy Lager category, same hoppy lager. So this beer actually has won those medals, actually, the same beer, brewed by two different breweries. Well, this past year, Timbo Pils won a gold medal. What category do you think it was in? Knowing it went India Pale Lager, hoppy lager, hoppy lager?
Markus Raupach: Maybe they were as crazy and put it into the pale ale or something?
Jamie Bogner: They won a gold for American pale ale.
Markus Raupach: Wow.
Jamie Bogner: And you knew this, because I said it in my presentation, we were setting the drama up as a good podcast first. We’re playing a professional game right here.
Markus Raupach: It is.
Jamie Bogner: I’m trying to feed you the drama here. Yes. So it’s interesting to watch that evolution that a beer that would win in the hoppy lager category as a West Coast Pilsner can also really now, it’s also, I mean, that’s what a lot of judges would lift up as American pale ale, which is just fascinating and interesting.
Markus Raupach: So they’d say the idea or the term IPA or pale ale, got away from the technical ideas, so you have to use an ale yeast to an idea of a beer, whether crispy, hoppy, bitter, like a canvas for the hops but less multi-thing?
Jamie Bogner: All that matters in this is what customers expect. And if it meets a customer expectation, that’s what you call it. The naming follows the expectation, but it’s interesting again, and there are some brewers who cannot get over that to save themselves. We can’t, that’s an IPA. Well, okay. But you can call it that: if you don’t want to sell it, go ahead. But I think that it’s fair to customers to not bog them down in the jargon based on our technical background and process around these, but instead describe these beers in a way that helps them understand that if they like this, they will probably like this. There’s a whole bunch of other issues with that, because what we call American pale ale, you know, it’s not hazy pale ale. It’s very similarly named, and yet an incredibly different beer. So we’re confusing people to no end around those things. It’s a whole nother issue. But I think in this regard, it’s fascinating and interesting to see. And then of course, no one uses session IPA to describe anything anymore. Because it just doesn’t sound good. It doesn’t sound good.
Markus Raupach: No. That brings us directly to question number two, because normally, if you, let’s say, ask one hundred German beer experts, people, and you say, okay, what is an IPA brewed with lager yeast? They would say, it’s a cold IPA. But it’s not, as we learnt yesterday.
Jamie Bogner: It’s not a cold IPA unless it includes adjunct. So unless it’s got rice and corn in it, we would just never – we wouldn’t call it a cold IPA. I say we wouldn’t call it a cold IPA. Kevin Davey, who created the first cold IPA, wouldn’t call it a cold IPA and has said as much to us many, many times, again, just use adjunct. The point of cold IPA is to, one, use classic American sea hops, more so than modern hops, and to also use adjunct to lighten the body and keep that super-light. Again, some of these things, whether it’s the Highland Park process around brewing lager, yeast, brewing IPA with lager yeast that has also significantly expanded as of late, right around the same time Kevin was working on cold IPA and did the same kind of similar, like some of these things were just happening concurrently in different places. But for us, we just wouldn’t call it a cold IPA if it doesn’t have adjunct in it.
Markus Raupach: So the idea is, we use the malt taste or character even more? So how close are we then to alcoholic hop water?
Jamie Bogner: Oh, we’re still. Have you tasted these? They are so far away for now.
Markus Raupach: Okay. I just wanted to be curious. Okay. No, I had good cold IPAs in the States, but it’s really interesting, if you follow up that track, you end somewhere there. Let’s see how it will go.
Jamie Bogner: We have to drop a lot of malt out of those to get to that kind of point. However, there are brewers making hard hop water now in the United States. We have an article about that in our new brewing industry guide issue. Great Notion in Portland makes a hard hop water, Pollyanna in Chicago makes a hard hop water. That exists also, I just, you know.
Markus Raupach: Okay. So maybe to the last thing we were also talking about yesterday is there are a lot of new products now, especially hop products and yeast products. Yes, may have the potential to change a lot in the brewing world, because you can more easily add aromas or aspects or just things into your beer or even take something out. How far is that now? How far is it away from the traditional brewing, let’s say?
Jamie Bogner: You know, I’ve been following all this technology using extracted terpenes and what-not. I would say that over the last number of years, that whole technology has improved remarkably. We can actually thank the cannabis industry for some of this extraction, and solubilising technology, because they’ve just been at the forefront of figuring those things out. But now some companies like Abstracts, that actually got their start, you know, some great science that they applied initially within the cannabis industry, they have been doing a lot of great work in extracting terpenes from natural sources, either from hops themselves or from, you know, similar natural sources with the same terpenes in them, so that they’re naturally dry, they’re not necessarily synthetic terpenes like that. But building flavour profiles and HAAS also has been doing the same kind of thing. What they offer now is actually really interesting and really compelling. At first, a number of years ago, I think it was pre-pandemic, I got really interested in this because New Belgium Brewing and Fort Collins brewed a beer called the Hemperor. The goal of that beer was to smell like cannabis when you opened up the bottle, and if you opened up a bottle, everyone in the room would then smell that your beer smelled like cannabis. Like it was so potent and powerful. But they had gone through and thrown cannabis strains into their GC mass spectrometer and looked at the aroma compound spikes for actual cannabis, and were able to reconstruct that aromatic profile using naturally derived terpenes that were not cannabis, because it wasn’t legal to actually use cannabis terpenes in a beer. But, I mean, that was an early kind of drive down that same kind of pathway. Now we see similar with companies like HAAS and Abstracts, where they’re building different kinds of profiles, whether they’re profitable fruit profiles or whether they’re cannabis-derived profiles, whether they’re classic berry kind of, like they have done this kind of work to identify what those aroma compounds are, using some of these naturally occurring terpenes, and they can reconstruct those. Within beer, I think that time will tell. Like all things, you go through an initial phase where people are so excited that they do everything, and a lot of it sucks. Then you find the things that truly work, that make better things, and brewers get better using them. And then they focus less on the tool and more on the product and the result itself. Then you watch those tools become more nuanced in the way the brewers use those tools, become more integrated and wrapped into the thing. I think that’s what’s most exciting to me, to see, not this first generation is going to have a lot of failures and a lot of just, you know, but I think within four, five years we’ll have a really good handle on how to use these in a compelling way that adds to the experience, that makes something better. It doesn’t replace hops, it doesn’t replace the work the brewers put into building these things. It’s simply augments, extends, intensifies and makes better. I think we’ll see where that goes. It’s really interesting.
Markus Raupach: Yes, I think it’s a lot of alternatives that are now coming to the market. So, for example, they make hop aromas with yeast, so we never saw any hop, anyhow, but at the end you have aromas you associate with hops. Now we have the Schals ferm here also on the fair, which has also hop aromas made out of plant source, but not hops. On the other hand, we have a lot of new things made out of hops. So the fair number, we even had hop popcorn or hop border and other things. I think there’s just a lot of things which are now tried out and being made and let’s see what it brings. So it’s great to always have a look also on the future of brewing without losing the basis. I’m very happy that we had the opportunity to talk. I can only invite our audience to watch for your magazine, to listen to your podcast and to maybe visit you somewhere in the States. It was great having you here and thanks a lot for the great beers, too.
Jamie Bogner: Thank you so much, Markus. It’s been my pleasure.
Bier Talk – Der Podcast rund ums Bier. Alle Folgen unter www.biertalk.de.