GBH Collective

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Claire Bullen, and I’m the Editor-in-Chief at Good Beer Hunting.

One of the greatest pleasures of my job is fielding pitches that our writers send in, which range from the bold to the brilliant to the baffling. Recently, GBH staff writer Jonny Garrett sent in an idea that was a mix of all three; as soon as it came into my inbox, I remember thinking—“this is something we have to publish.” That pitch evolved into his recent piece, “TL;DR – Tracing the Origins of Beer Language, from Michael Jackson to Emojis,” which is part of our Mother of Invention series, underwritten by Guinness.

With this article, Jonny set himself an almost impossibly expansive task: examine the history and evolution of modern beer writing, from the groundbreaking author and beer personality Michael Jackson, who helped codify a formal language around beer in the ’70s and ’80s, all the way up to today’s frenzy of Twitter timelines, Instagram captions, and Untappd reviews. As the article’s title suggests, Jonny even digs into the role that emojis play in beer writing.

In researching his article, Jonny spoke to linguists and delved into the history books. He also examined how wine-tasting notes came to be, talked to one of Beer Twitter’s most infamous wordsmiths, and spent more than a little time scrolling through his various social media feeds. The result is an up-to-the-minute piece with a unique, metacritical scope. In the space of just a few thousand words, he manages to touch on everything from the debate around the term “craft beer” and the way that specialized vocabulary functions within niche communities to “crispy bois” and dank memes.

It’s a remarkable piece of writing, and it may well change the way you think about and describe beer forever. If you haven’t yet read his article, you can find that on GoodBeerHunting.com. For now, tune in and listen as Jonny describes how the idea for this article first came about.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Jonny Garrett, and I’m a staff writer for GBH.

Today, I’m catching up with Anthony Gladman, a new writer at GBH. With the U.K. on lockdown, I thought this would be a great opportunity to transcend the physical distances and get some much-needed social interaction. The episode starts with a chat about how both are coping with the isolation—particularly now that Anthony is homeschooling his kids—before moving on to Anthony’s first full feature for GBH: a dive into the world of British cider called “Rebirth in England’s Orchards — Find & Foster Fine Cider in Devon, U.K.”

Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the British cider scene was gathering some momentum and press as both an off-shoot of the craft beer movement and a traditional part of Britain’s beverage heritage. Anthony and I discuss the unique conservational approach of Find & Foster, and whether the world of cider is better or worse placed to weather the current storm than beer.

This is Anthony Gladman on the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast. Listen in.

Welcome to this special series of the GBH Collective podcast, where we’ll be checking in with members of our global team to keep you updated on unfolding events surrounding COVID-19. I’m Ashley Rodriguez.

We’re consuming news at a rapid rate. The front page of the New York Times is totally dedicated to COVID-19 coverage, and many other outlets have shifted to focus on the current global pandemic.

I wanted to understand how folks who work in breaking news cover stories. We’ve shifted our editorial platform dramatically, so I’m first chatting with Kate Bernot, lead contributor to Sightlines, our news vertical. Kate has years of experience reporting on breaking stories, and we talk about how this moment is different—and the surprises she’s uncovered through a week of nonstop reporting.

Then we shift to Alyssa Pereira, GBH contributor and staff writer for SFGate, a news outlet primarily serving the Bay Area and Northern California. From their computers to yours, we talk about how to cover such an unprecedented event, and how you can look at the news through the eyes of a reporter. Here’s Kate to kick us off.

Welcome to this special series of the GBH Collective podcast, where we’ll be checking in with members of our global team to keep you updated on unfolding events surrounding COVID-19. I’m Ashley Rodriguez.

If you have an iPhone, it probably tells you how many hours per day you’ve looked at your screen. According to my phone, my screentime has been up 63%—and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m doubly sure most of us are looking at articles that make us feel a sense of dread as opposed to providing comfort.

In this check-in, I wanted to talk to our team about the bright spots: the ways that folks have come together, the ways that communities have brainstormed creative solutions—anything that makes us feel better in this weird time. I catch up with Jim Plachy first, who is the community manager of the Fervent Few, our subscriber-based beer community. Then we jump to Jonny Garrett, one of our U.K.-based GBH contributors. He has been searching for small optimistic episodes within the pandemic—and offers some hot tips for folks who suddenly find themselves at home for the foreseeable with their partners and spouses.

This is the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast. Listen in.

I’m writing and recording this from my home office. I imagine at this point, COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has affected your life in some way. Maybe you’re quarantined at home; maybe you’re a business owner who’s wondering what measures like social distancing will do your business, or maybe you’re just trying to navigate what is shaping up to be one of the weirdest times in our collective history. Either way, there’s a lot going on.

We decided to bring you a special edition of the GBH Collective podcast, checking in with our team of writers and editors across the globe. Our team has always consisted of folks reporting from their corners of the world, and this global crisis is no exception. One thing I’ve always appreciated about working for Good Beer Hunting is our willingness to be frank and have open conversations … and that includes bringing you folks—our listeners, supporters, and fellow beer professionals—in on how we’re handling the current state of affairs.

What you’re about to hear is a series of five short interviews that I conducted with members of our team. The first is with Bryan Roth, who is our Sightlines editor, reporting from Durham, North Carolina. Next, you’ll hear from GBH founder and creative director Michael Kiser, who will update you on how we as an organization are handling the pandemic. Next, we’re gonna check in with Claire Bullen, our editor-in-chief reporting on what’s happening in the U.K., and the influence of social media on community responses. We’ll then touch base with Eoghan Walsh, a staff writer reporting from Brussels, and lastly, we’ll go to the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak and talk to Dave Riddile about working in service and supporting local businesses in Seattle.

This is the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at our favorite articles. I’m Jonny Garrett, and I’m a staff writer and podcaster here at Good Beer Hunting.

Today I’m talking to Eoghan Walsh, who just had his first article for Good Beer Hunting published. Entitled, “The Last Crusade — Rich Soriano Wants to Talk to You About Lambic,” it’s essentially the story of a day with one of Belgium’s most beloved beer characters, Rich Soriano. And by a day with, I really mean a bar crawl with.

Eoghan’s piece manages to make it feel like the reader is right there with them, and over the course of a few thousand words, we travel to a number of special Lambic producers and pubs, slowly learning how an American has ended up being one of the faces of Brussel’s traditional brewing scene. We start, though, by addressing the fact that that’s the last way that Soriano would want to be described.

This is the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

I probably sit with our blog, Beer is Offal, more than anything I interact with on Good Beer Hunting. Not only is it something we produce totally in house—all the artwork comes through us and it’s written by a member of the GBH team, Mark Spence—but it’s also the only series we’ve captured entirely on audio. Mark has read every single one of his blog entries on our Out Loud series, where we record our favorite stories for our audience, and there’s a reason for that—Beer is Offal is special.

Beer is Offal is a food blog. That’s a simple way to put it. But that doesn’t capture all of it. It’s full of feelings, rants, brutal honesty, sometimes curveballs, and always this feeling of authenticity that I think is really interesting in the context of food writing. As Mark and I discuss in this episode, Beer is Offal is deeply personal—you get to know a lot about him pretty quickly—but it differs from most food writing in that it’s not a series of recipes, it’s not about someone trying to learn a new cuisine or venturing into traditions and styles of cooking that aren’t part of their background. It stays so close to the chest, and in that way, the lessons and ideas Mark talks about become wonderfully universal and relatable. It’s sort of remarkable how he makes that happen.

I sat down with Mark and talked about what it means to write about things happening to you right now—in real time. Beer is Offal isn’t just a collection of lessons learned, but is very much about things going on in Mark’s life, and his attempts to slowly acknowledge and work through them. Mark is admittedly not a very “emotional” person—as he says himself, he’s much more likely to be the guy in the corner of the room sticking close to his friends. So what does it take for someone like him to put all his stuff out there? How does he transform into, as he calls it, “a food and feelings writer?” Let’s find out.

Here’s Mark Spence. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at our favorite articles. I’m Jonny Garrett, and I’m a staff writer and podcaster here at Good Beer Hunting.

I first met Breandán Kearney in 2015, when he swept the board at the British Guild of Beer Writers Awards. I, like quite a few people in the room, had no idea who he was at the time, but I only had to read a few of his articles to see what a brilliant writer he is. And you’d have to be brilliant to tackle the article we talk about in today’s podcast.

Breandán’s latest piece for Good Beer Hunting is titled, “Flying With Clipped Wings — West Kerry Brewery, County Kerry, Ireland.” It tells the heartbreaking story of a brewpub on the Irish coast. Few beer articles have two deaths in their opening paragraphs, but even fewer manage to tell such an uplifting story of personal grit, and success against the odds.

The piece also serves as a wonderful insight into the small world of Irish brewing and the people who have slowly turned the country into an exciting, modern brewing nation. I start by asking how Breandán came across the brewery, before delving into what it’s like to research such a difficult, emotional story.

This is Breandán Kearney. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

2019 was a big year for us at GBH. We published more stories than ever before, our writers took home dozens of awards, and we broke our own record for the number of visits to our site. It was truly a banner year.

One of the reasons for that is Claire Bullen, our editor-in-chief. Perhaps we didn’t give this occasion enough fanfare—I know I certainly would have participated in a ticker-tape parade to celebrate, but this is our time to do so.

Claire took over the role of editor in June, but has been on the editorial team since mid-2018. Claire is responsible for two of our 10 most popular stories of the year; she published a book in March; and shone like the beer beacon she is at this year’s North American Guild of Beer Writers Awards and British Guild of Beer Writers Awards, winning nods including Best Book, Best Technical Writing, and Best Travel Writing. It’s an understatement to say that we’re lucky to have her on the team.

One of the pleasures of my job is seeing Claire at work. Articles come in from our writers, and I get to watch Claire work with folks to produce some of the best beer writing on the internet. Every editor has a different approach to how they coach and guide writers, making small edits and suggestions as to how to really punch up an article. I saw this at work especially in a recent House Culture article we published by Helena Fitzgerald. Helena is a freelance writer who shared a beautiful story about stepping back from drinking while maintaining her love of bars, and it was lovely to see the touch points in the piece—the moments I knew Claire helped shape. I get to know Helena in this piece, but I also see Claire in there as well.

It’s funny writing this (and now saying it out loud), because I know Claire has to edit it—and I can imagine her brain working through this introduction that’s about her. It’s kind of a mind trip, but Claire makes us all better. I benefit so much from having her as editorial teammate, and I hope you see the flashes of her on our website like I do. They’re quiet and subtle, but when you find them, they shine brilliantly.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

Hey! Did you hear we hired someone new?

We’re all excited to welcome Kate Bernot to the Good Beer Hunting team. She’s taking over as the lead at Sightlines, our news channel (don’t worry, Bryan Roth is still around, working on new projects and definitely making charts).

Kate brings years of experience to the team, which she put to good use pretty much from the moment she started. On day one of Kate’s new job with GBH, it was announced that Ballast Point Brewing Company would be sold to Kings & Convicts Brewing Company, a brewery in Highwood, Illinois. I live in Chicago and I had to Google where that was—and collectively, so did the rest of Beer Twitter, essentially shutting down the Kings & Convicts website when the news broke. Kate had to write her very first article for us about one of the biggest news stories in beer EVER.

As you probably know if you keep up with our site, Kate crushed it, reporting through all the noise that the news stirred up, and finding out some key facts that made clear how this sale was possible. Talk about on-the-job training—within hours of reporting for duty, Kate published one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of the Ballast Point sale out there. And today, we’re gonna learn more about how that story unfolded.

Likewise, we’re gonna learn more about Kate herself—for all the messages and emails flying around during that Ballast Point article, this is the first time I get some time to chat with her. Along with her stellar work for previous beer publications and her penchant for asking simple and straightforward questions, we quickly learned we at the office were making one fundamental mistake.

Witches are having a moment in the current cultural zeitgeist—it’s impossible to ignore. And, as Beth Demmon says, the resurgence of witchcraft and wizardry have a sort of nostalgic feel that appeals to the older millennials among us. 

Beth is a freelance writer, and published her first piece for Good Beer Hunting, called “Witch (Craft) Beer — How a New Wave of Brewers are Incorporating Magic into Beer,” on October 31, 2019 as part of our Mother of Invention series with Guinness. In the article, Beth talks about modern-day brewers who utilize magic in their approach. They range in type and tradition, from those that practice “chaos magic,” or what Beth calls the punk rock version of The Secret, to folks who rely on ideas and practices passed down from generation to generation, and who employ specific rituals to brew their beer. 

It might sound gimmicky, or perhaps a little silly, but we examine why that is. Where does the gimmick come from? Likewise, the stories that Beth tells and the people she interviews reveal a level of intentionality, respect, and regard for history that transcend whatever preconceived notions you might have about the idea of magic. And they also reveal a lot about the way we view women—past and present—in the context of beer brewing. 

We also talk about what it means to tell this story, as she says in the beginning, as a non-witch, and how to handle things like tradition and ancestral knowledge respectfully. We also talk about what a little bit of positive thinking—and perhaps a little magic—might have to do with Beth’s recent beer fortune. We start at the very beginning of this piece.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind the scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Michael Kiser, and I’m the founder and director of Good Beer Hunting.

A year ago we launched a series of stories underwritten by Guinness called Mother of Invention. The beer industry is often spurred on by the need to meet new necessity with invention. This leads to all sorts of unique evolutionary paths in the history of beer, from making to selling to drinking. These articles explore the innovations, big and small, old and new, that have transformed the beer in your hand in surprising ways.

One of my favorites from this series—“A Fire Being Kindled — The Revolutionary Story of Kveik, Norway’s Extraordinary Farmhouse Yeast”—was written by Claire Bullen, our editor-in-chief. She was interested in digging into the origin of the kveik family of yeast, which first earned international acclaim thanks to articles published by Norwegian writer and beer enthusiast Lars Marius Garshol on his blog, Larsblog. His discoveries and writings have since inspired thousands of homebrewers to reimagine the craft of farmhouse-style brewing, using a category of yeast that had been preserved by traditional brewers in western Norway. But how has this new experimentation and investigation influenced commercial breweries? And what are the benefits and opportunities kveik affords those who are willing to take the risks?

Talking to Claire about the content of the story, but also the process of the reporting itself, reveals a lot of the questions and excitement behind kveik’s meteoric rise.

This is Claire Bullen, GBH’s editor-in-chief. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

There’s always more to every story you read. As a writer, I’m perpetually intrigued by the choices other writers make—what to include, what to cut—and I’m especially interested in people who are super clear about who their work is for. Part of that is selfish: I host a podcast, called Boss Barista, that I describe as a feminist coffee podcast—I like to let people know what they’re in for from the get-go, and that they’re probably not going to hear light coffee chatter. And for the first time ever, I got to talk to someone who uses the exact same language to describe their own project.

Beca Grimm is an Atlanta-based freelance writer and co-founder of the zine Dope Girls, which describes itself as a feminist cannabis culture zine. Beca also lends her talents to Good Beer Hunting, writing articles, also called Dope Girls, about the issues surrounding cannabis as it becomes legalized around the country. Along with her latest article, which profiles Lowell Farms: A Cannabis Cafe in West Hollywood, Beca tackles really fundamental questions surrounding the growing cannabis market. She also keeps one foot on the ground, reminding us that, as the cannabis market grows, there are people whose voices are often not heard. Dope Girls is an attempt to elevate those voices, as they talk about issues of gender, race, and clemency in their articles.

Along with these serious issues, during this conversation, we also talk about the grind of freelancing, and what it’s like to hound editors for money or feedback, and wax poetic about being a freelancer for GBH. Spoiler alert: it rules, partially because of our amazing editorial team, whom Beca talks about, and partially because you can actually count on getting paid. But moreso because the connection between cannabis and beer isn’t a far one, and as Beca discovers, there are more similarities than she ever imagined. Here’s Beca.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind the scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Michael Kiser, and I’m the founder and director of Good Beer Hunting.

Today I’m going to catch up with our Sightlines editor and lead contributor, Bryan Roth.

It’s been a busy couple of years for Bryan, but this past week’s range of stories is evidence of all the ways Sightlines has become essential reading for our audiences. From proactive analysis of the Denver scene as Colorado retail laws shift to digging into the closure of Lagunitas’ Community Room in Portland to keeping up with the shifting responses to the Founders racial discrimination case, and sensitively reporting a story of that importance—it’s all in a week’s work for Bryan.

So we’ll catch up on how all that reporting came to be, and what he’s working on next. But we’ll especially dig into the process behind the Founders stories that he’s written, as well as the other essential updates that have been published by a range of publications. In fact, that’s turned into a new part of the site called FYI, which is designed to keep track of all the updates in a major story in one place—and which you can find by going to GoodBeerHunting.com/FYI/Founders.

This is Bryan Roth, Good Beer Hunting’s Sightlines editor. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

If you’re part of the beer world, you’ve probably heard folklore about our Founding Fathers—the men who signed the Constitution, the first American presidents—brewing their own beer. That’s an appealing story, a fun tidbit you might tell a friend when they ask you about your own brewing adventures.

And yet, how critically have we regarded this story? Think about the timeframe folks like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson were operating in. Both men, the first and third presidents of the United States, respectively, were slaveholders. And it’s much more likely—guaranteed, even—that their slaves, not them, were the actual brewers.

Dr. J Nikol Jackson-Beckham pulled at the thread of this tale to point out its logical fallacies, and to shine a light on the actual brewers, specifically Peter Hemings, in her piece, “Missing Ingredients — The (Incomplete) Story of Thomas Jefferson’s Unsung Brewer,” which was published on our website on December 12, 2018.

The path to this story wasn’t quite linear for Dr. J, as she’s known throughout the beer world. Dr. J, who has a PhD in Communication & Cultural Studies, and who uses her training to study the beer world, started having inklings about this story as she was still working on PhD, but couldn’t quite find a place for it. We’ve all had this happen—a brilliant idea strikes us while we’re working on a different project, and we can’t exactly articulate where it belongs. So it stayed with her. For almost a decade. Now, in our conversation, she shares more about its long evolution—and its rewarding payoff.

This is the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast. Here’s Dr. J.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at our favorite articles. I’m Jonny Garrett, and I’m a staff writer and podcaster here at Good Beer Hunting.

In our Mother of Invention series with Guinness, we’ve been looking at the great innovations in beer—ideas that have changed or could change the course of the industry.

In the context of brewing, invention can mean a lot of different things. Usually, it implies the discovery of something new: an ingredient, a recipe, a process, a piece of equipment. But sometimes, it means looking back to find something we lost along the way. Luke Robertson, a GBH writer in Australia, found one of those things hanging from a washing line at a house party.

A “goon” is the Aussie term for a bag of wine, and staggeringly, during the ’80s and ’90s, the goon accounted for over half of all wine sales in Australia.

While that trend has died due to the product’s association with poor quality, the bag-in-box format has started to take off in the beer world for styles that don’t require much—or indeed any—carbonation. That means lightly sparkling British ales and, of course, Lambic. Luke and I start with the remarkable history of the bag-in-box and its invention in Australia, then muse on the benefits it might have when reapplied to beer. Along the way we dig into the party game, Goon of Fortune—and explain why that bag of wine ended up on a washing line—as well as the difficulties of talking to some older, less press-friendly Belgian breweries.

We also discuss Luke’s role at the Independent Brewers Association, which supports and represents small Australian breweries. The IBA just held this year’s conference in Melbourne, during which Luke was on a panel about mental well-being.

This is Luke Robertson, GBH writer. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind the scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Michael Kiser, and I’m the founder and director of Good Beer Hunting.

For this Collective episode, I’m talking to writer Evan Rail. Evan is based in Prague, and has become more active with Good Beer Hunting as we increasingly look beyond the U.S. beer market and bring you stories from around the world.

Evan has a unique perspective, having grown up in Fresno, California, and later relocated to the Czech Republic. For us he’s an essential voice: both because he has an endless curiosity about European beer history, but also because his work ethic motivates him beyond the obvious headline—and pushes him to look for the thing that’s just out of sight, around the corner, or behind the next door. His interview technique pulls out remarkable stories from people you’d otherwise rarely hear from.

And in the end, he understands a story’s place in a publication like Good Beer Hunting, which is still, and probably always will be, a U.S.-minded publication to one degree or another. Not many writers can do all that. And that’s how we ended up talking today—because all those factors came together in a recent piece about the long, weird, and newly complicated story of the Budweiser trademark. It involves a tiny town in the Czech Republic, and the world’s largest-ever brewing conglomerate, AB InBev. We discuss the process of writing that piece, Evan’s approach to interviewing, and mention a couple of other things coming up with Evan that you’ll want to look out for.

This is Evan Rail, GBH contributor and beer writer based in Prague. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

What does beer have to do with politics?

It’s a simple enough question. And some would argue that beer has nothing to do with politics—the two should remain totally separate. Here at Good Beer Hunting, that idea has never really sat well with us. So instead of staying away from politics, we invited it in.

After a particularly low day—the 2016 election—GBH founder Michael Kiser was talking to his neighbor, David Faris. David lived just above the GBH studios, then in Logan Square in Chicago, and was absolutely devastated by the results. So, after a few beers, they decided they wanted to create something new.

In January of this year, David and Michael, with some help from me along the way, launched Electing to Drink, a podcast that invites progressive thinkers, writers, and elected officials to talk about the topics they’re excited about while sharing a beer with us. Part catharsis, part town hall, what makes Electing to Drink so special is David. He’s uniquely positioned to go into the depths of political discourse while still making information accessible and useful for most people. This isn’t a show where David invites progressive big wigs to yell ideological nonsense at you—it’s a show where you can sit back, grab a drink, and feel like you’re amongst friends, just discussing some of the most important ideas driving society.

Here’s David Faris, host of Electing to Drink. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

I live in Chicago, and there’s this liquor—maybe some of you have heard of it—called Malört, which is made from wormwood. If you ask anyone in Chicago what their local spirit is, they’d point to Malört; they might even trick their out-of-town friends to take a straight shot of it when they come to visit. And everyone knows how hard it is to drink Malört. The bottle’s label quotes creator Carl Jeppson as saying: “My Malört is produced for that unique group of drinkers who disdain light flavor or neutral spirits.” It goes on: “It is not possible to forget our two-fisted liquor. The taste just lingers and lasts—seemingly forever. The first shot is hard to swallow! Perservere [sic]. Make it past two 'shock-glasses' and with the third you could be ours... forever.”

Some would say that this sentiment is a perfect encapsulation of the people of Chicago. Perhaps not for everyone on the first sip, but they grow on you with time. Others might find that comparison silly, but it’s interesting to figure out what a city’s chosen liquor says about its history and spirit (no pun intended).

In this episode of the GBH Collective, I interview Gray Chapman, a freelance writer and frequent GBH contributor. She’s launching a new series for us called Beer and a Shot, which will profile the relationship between bartenders, spirits, and their relationships to the cities they inhabit. In this ongoing series, made in partnership with Miller High Life, Gray will write about a different city and a different bartender every month and will show how a place’s personality can be discerned through its choice of spirit—a couple ounces at a time.

This is Gray Chapman, GBH contributor. Listen in.

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Claire Bullen and I’m the Editor in Chief at Good Beer Hunting.

I have an almost endless appetite—no pun intended—for stories about food and beer. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the fact that I wrote a cookbook on the subject, The Beer Lover’s Table, earlier this year. At risk of sounding like an evangelist, I think beer is such a natural at the table—so versatile, so flexible, so broad—that it feels like a real shame that we still ascribe dinner-party dominance to wine.

That’s why Good Beer Hunting’s recently revived Provisions column fills me with such hope. Beyond one-to-one beer and food pairings, and recipes, our Provisions pieces celebrate the way that beer organically fits into a meal. Many of our writers and readers are as passionate about good food as they are good beer, and so the two frequently and naturally intersect in our lives. Provisions aims to capture these memorable moments of hospitality—the stories and travels and friendships that lead up to special, beer-centric meals along the way.

And so, when Lily Waite, one of Good Beer Hunting’s London-based staff writers, recently pitched me a fantastical Provisions story featuring Cornish fishing trips and wild foraging sessions and multi-course beer-and-seafood feasts, I couldn’t wait to read the end result. Her final piece, and its accompanying photos, was as exquisite as expected—Lily is a true polymath. In addition to being an exceptional writer, photographer, artist, and cook, she’s also the visionary behind the Queer Brewing Project, a non-profit, collaborative brewing project that supports LGBTQ+ voices and visibility in the beer and brewing industries.

In this conversation, we talk about how a brewery visit turned into an unplanned fishing trip, which in turn yielded an extraordinary meal. We also talk about Lily’s various creative endeavors, from pottery classes to brew days. Here’s Lily Waite. Listen in.