evanrail

I’m Evan Rail, and you’re listening to the Good Beer Hunting podcast.

It’s September 2020, and the coronavirus pandemic is still raging on—and nowhere more obviously than in the United States, which has about 25% of the world’s reported cases, even though it is only home to about 4% of the world’s population. Because of that infection rate, for the first time in memory, U.S. citizens haven’t been able to travel to Europe, with almost all of the European Union countries currently closed to travelers coming from the United States. So when it comes to beer, what are we missing out on?

Although I’m originally from California, I’ve been living in Europe and writing about food and drink here for over 20 years. Normally, I’d spend a good part of my summer showing North American brewers and beer lovers around Prague, Czech Republic—my adopted hometown—or bumping into folks from back home at beer festivals and pubs in places like Brussels, Berlin, and Munich. I started thinking about what beer lovers really get out of a trip to Europe—what they’re missing out on, in other words, while the pandemic makes travel impossible, at least for now.

For this podcast I reached out to four friends in the U.S. who have spent quality time here in the Old World, including Joe Stange, managing editor of Craft Beer & Brewing magazine and the author of Good Beer Guide Belgium; and Annie Johnson, the 2013 American Homebrewers Association Homebrewer of the Year and a BJCP National Judge. I also talked to Aaron Johns, whose company, Taste Local Beer, used to run beer tours in Prague until he moved back to the West Coast a few years ago; and Good Beer Hunting’s own Jamaal Lemon, who toured across a bunch of European beer countries after winning a competition for bloggers from World of Beer in 2016.

I wanted to ask these folks what they missed about beer in Europe, and what they thought was valuable about their time here. I wanted to know what they learned and what they thought beer fans might miss out on if they just read an article or watched a video from Europe instead of traveling there themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I wanted to know why this situation sucks.

I’m Evan Rail, and you’re listening to the Good Beer Hunting podcast.

Today we’re doing things a little differently: I’m taking you along with me on a reporting trip to Germany’s Hop Research Center, where I am trying to find out more about what the institute does—and especially, to find out more about the exciting new hops, like Mandarina Bavaria and Hallertau Blanc, that have recently been developed here. How do scientists develop new hops? How long does that take? Who decides which hop varieties are going to be released?

The Hop Research Center is located in Hüll: a small village in Bavaria, in Germany’s south. It’s right in the middle of one of the Old World’s most celebrated hop-growing regions, the Hallertau. All around it are commercial hop farms, with tall trellises of heavy, dark green hop bines climbing up 20 feet off the ground, as far as the eye can see. It was originally founded in 1926 to help combat hop diseases, like downy mildew.

Although many industry professionals have heard about the Hop Research Center, it makes sense that the name isn’t well-recognized by most of us. It’s not exactly open to the public: there’s no visitor’s center, you can’t buy a T-shirt or really do anything here. Its goal is to help German hop farmers, many of whom are located in the surrounding region. No joke: in harvest season, the most popular vehicle on the narrow road here is a tractor.

It might be hidden behind the curtain, but the work done at the Hop Research Center is truly important for the future of beer. The best-known reference to the place is probably the new flavor hop Hüll Melon, which was developed here along with other new cultivars. In addition to new flavors, the institute is doing important work on major issues for the hop industry, including climate change, saving traditional “landrace” or “land variety” hops, and developing new high-alpha varieties.

In this episode, we tour the center with research director Dr. Elisabeth Seigner. Along the way, Dr. Seigner explains the lengthy, 10- to 20-year process of developing a new hop cultivar, and talks about some of the issues facing the hop industry today. It’s an insider’s view from a place most of us will probably never get to visit, let alone hear about—even if its work benefits all of us.

We’re going inside the Hop Research Center in Hüll, Germany with Dr. Elisabeth Seigner. 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 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.

And for today’s conversation, I was also the photographer. I recently shot a unique story assignment in a remote corner of the Czech Republic, called South Moravia. South Moravia, as you’ll hear, is a famous wine-producing region. And now, it’s also home to one of the country’s most wine-inspired brewers—Jitka Ilčíková of Wild Creatures. 

I was especially keen to go on this assignment because it meant rejoining my friend and colleague, Evan Rail, who lives in Prague. I’ve joined Evan on a few journeys, starting way back around 2013 in Prague and Pilsen, when he first took me to Pilsner Urquell, Kout na Šumavě, and beyond. On this trip we met in Budapest for a conference and hitched a ride from some brewers to Mikulov, where we planned to visit what might be the country’s only wild ale producer. Listen in.