Great American Beer Festival 2023 Preview Guide: Non-Alcoholic Beers & Beverages

The Great American Beer Festival is all about trying some of the best beers in the country, but what if you’re trying to be mindful of how much alcohol you consume, or aren’t drinking at all? No worries! There are dozens of delicious non-alcoholic beers, hop waters and other NA options at the Great American Beer Festival 2023. Here’s our guide to all the options.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Pairing Fall Beer Styles with Craft Chocolate

The arrival of fall means the arrival of fall seasonal beer styles. Fortunately for us, fall beer styles like pumpkin beer and Oktoberfest can pair great with craft chocolate, and today we’re going to talk about some of my favorites and recommendations to check out. Pumpkin ales, Märzen, Festbier, and even fresh hop and wet hop beers can be paired with craft chocolate. Listen in to learn which bean to bar chocolate bars will work best with each seasonal style to get the most out of pairing fall beer and chocolate.

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Great American Beer Festival 2023 Preview | Ohio Beer

Ohio is a fantastic craft beer state, with over 420 craft breweries that together make the Buckeye State the sixth highest in craft beer production in the country. Numerous Ohio breweries will be pouring their best beers at this year’s Great American Beer Festiva. Here’s our guide to the Ohio beers you can taste at the Great American Beer Festival 2023!

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Hoppy and [Alcohol] Free: Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA Takes Flight

Hazy IPAs have been the most popular style in craft beer for half a decade now, so if the nascent non-alcoholic (NA) segment of craft was going to gain a foothold, it was critical for this style to be a big part of that movement. Fortunately, numerous NA producers are now brewing excellent Hazies, and the style seems to adapt well to the NA format. Non-alcoholic Hazy IPA is thriving, and drinkers are appreciating the chance to enjoy their favorite hoppy style without the effects of ethanol.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Oliver Holecek at Primo Chocolate

Most people associate mushrooms with savory foods, but that’s because many of us are unaware of both the wide flavor diversity of different types of mushrooms and the range of ways in which they can be incorporated into foods and beverages. Just a couple episodes back we talked with pastry chef and mixologist Michael George, who made an award-winning cocktail that incorporated black truffle mushrooms, and today we’re going to hear from a chocolate maker who offers a variety of craft chocolate bars using mushrooms, or what he calls, our little helpers.

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Fruity and Alcohol-Free: Non-Alcoholic Fruited Sours

Sour ales brewed with fruit have grown in popularity in recent years, and they have proven to be particularly attractive options for non-alcoholic (NA) craft brewers. Fruited sour ales—particularly kettle sours that don’t take nearly as long to brew as some more complex historical sour styles—offer a playground for brewers to experiment with flavor outside the strictures of traditional guidelines. They also offer some unique advantages for the non-alcoholic brewer. As NA craft beer surges in popularity, it’s not surprising to see these non-alcoholic fruited sours being offered by many prominent brands.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Cacao Pulp in Brewing with Leila Carvajal Erker & Sam Mosle

While brewers have long used cacao nibs for brewing chocolate beers, the pulp of the cacao fruit has been an unexplored resource due to its high perishability and cultural obscurity. Leila Carvajal Erker of Cocoa Supply wants to see that change. Her company is importing pasteurized cacao pulp from cacao farms in Ecuador and working with brewers to figure out how best it can be used in the brewing process.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Blackest in the Forest: Bartender & Pastry Chef Michael George

Michael George is a bartender and pastry chef in Salt Lake City. They split their time between a couple different bars—you can find them on various nights at Water Witch, a James Beard-nominated bar, and Acme Bar Co. They bring a passion for flavor and story, their own vibrant personality, and the sensibility of their background in the kitchen to their drinks, in which they seek to both honor tradition and break through artificial barriers of what a drink can be. As a Black, queer, non-binary person, the barriers Michael is working to break down go far beyond just the strictures of what can go into a cocktail to encompass who gets to make that cocktail in the first place.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Coffee & Cacao

In this episode of Bean to Barstool host David Nilsen talks with two gentleman who work with both coffee and cacao. Kyle Bellinger of Osito Coffee partners with Jose Jadir Losada in Colombia to import both coffee and cacao to North America and Europe. Through the lens of the Colombian supply chain, he has a keen understanding of the problems and opportunities facing both coffee and cacao farmers. Hans Westerink runs Violet Sky Chocolate and Cloud Walking Coffee in South Bend, Indiana, and has spent years working with both of these enigmatic beans to deepen his understanding of how to roast and process both to make amazing bean to bar chocolate and a perfect cup of coffee. Sitting at the consumer end of the supply chain, he recognizes the problems facing these industries from a public education standpoint.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | How to Taste with Author Mandy Naglich

Mandy Naglich has written a book that explores how our senses interact with food and beverage, and how understanding our senses can help us better enjoy our favorite indulgences. How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life (Citadel) combines science and whimsy to teach us more about our sensory world and bring our favorite flavors to life. David Nilsen talked recently with Mandy about some of the amazing things she experienced and learned while writing the book, how they both approach the tasting process, and why tasting with other people can be so impactful.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Leila Carvajal of Cocoa Supply

Leila Carvajal’s family has worked with cacao for generations, stretching back to the 19th century, but every generation has reinterpreted their relationship with this fruit tree that gives us chocolate. Growing up in Ecuador, Leila remembers visiting the cacao farms that provided beans for Cocoa Supply, her family’s company. Leila eventually became a chemical engineer and now lives in the U.S., and has guided Cocoa Supply into its current position as a leading provider of cacao for bean to bar makers and, notably, craft breweries.

Listen in as Leila introduces us to Cocoa Supply. We talk about their business and sourcing practices, the farms they work with, and the products they offer. First though, she tells us the story of her family’s company, a story that begins on a small cacao farm in the 1800s.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Beer Basics

A lot of Bean to Barstool listeners come to this podcast from the craft chocolate world, and given how complicated and overwhelming beer can be, we want to make sure you all get to enjoy the beer-related parts of this podcast to the fullest. Today we’re going to look at beer basics—the ingredients and processes of brewing and some frequently asked questions about beer, which will hopefully make the beer conversations we have on this show make more sense and be even more enjoyable. Grab a beer and listen in!

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Book Review & Interview | Josh Bernstein’s The Complete Beer Course

The revised and expanded edition of Josh Bernstein’s The Complete Beer Course: From Novice to Expert in 12 Tastings Classes comes out June 6 from Union Square & Co., and is less an updated edition than an entirely new vision of the original concept. The title was first published in 2013, and a lot has changed in craft beer in the last decade. From the explosion of brewery openings between 2012 to 2014, to the emergence and subsequent dominance of Hazy IPAs, to long-needed (and ongoing…slowly) internal culture changes, craft beer in 2023 is hardly recognizable from the industry Bernstein covered ten years ago.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Arron Liu of Chocobien

In this episode of Bean to Barstool, David Nilsen talks with Arron Liu of Chocobien in Hong Kong. Chocobien is a bean-to-bar chocolate company that produces many truly unique bars that employ flavors and ingredients from other artisan food and beverage segments, including beer, whiskey, coffee, sake, tea and more. Chocobien’s Beer Fermented bar uses malt, hops, and beer yeast in innovative ways to subtly evoke the flavors of beer from Hong Kong’s Black Kite Brewing. Arron talks about the ideas behind these bars, the partnerships and processes that went into their development, and the satisfaction this curious and creative maker finds in achieving the flavors he could only hold in his imagination at the start of each experiment.

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Ohio Breweries Continue Their Awards Success at WBC

Ohio craft breweries earned 10 medals at this week’s World Beer Cup (WBC) in Nashville, Tennessee. Continuing the Buckeye state’s run of success at the Brewers Association’s largest events — WBC and the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) — seven Ohio breweries earned medals, including six golds for beers deemed the best in their style against breweries around the world. 10,213 beers from 2,375 breweries in 51 countries competed for medals in 103 categories.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Sarah Bharath on Cacao Fermentation (Ep. 59)

Many people don’t realize chocolate is a fermented food. Before we can make chocolate from cacao, that cacao has to undergo a fermentation process. This process is usually spontaneous, meaning the microbiotic cultures that carry out cacao fermentation are not manually added to the fermentation substrate but instead occur naturally. That doesn’t mean it’s a hands off process. A great deal of knowledge and expertise both traditional and technical is required to yield the best results. The entire process has much in common with spontaneous fermentation used in brewing Lambics and many Wild Ales.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Estelle Tracy on Pairing Wine and Chocolate

Pairing beer and chocolate is one of the major topics of Bean to Barstool. Chocolate can pair beautifully with a wide variety of grown-up beverages, however, and most people probably think of wine for this role first. Estelle Tracy leads wine and chocolate pairing events professionally. She comes to this not as a stuffy expert but as a curious observer who has learned along the way, following her senses to new areas of knowledge and expertise without losing the joy of discovery.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Honey Beer & Honey Chocolate

Honey beer styles are more popular than ever, but they aren’t new. There were several beverages in antiquity that were fermented from honey, many of which have survived today. Mead is fermented entirely from honey, while Braggot is basically a hybrid of beer and mead. In recent history, Belgian brewers have proven adept at brewing Biere de Miel, less a style than a group of beers that incorporate honey. And from there, modern craft brewers have started putting honey into more and more styles.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Hi-Wire Brewing’s 10W-40 Chocolate Imperial Stouts

In this episode, host David Nilsen talk with brewers at Hi-Wire Brewing in Asheville, North Carolina, about 10W-40, a family of Imperial Stouts brewed with French Broad Chocolates cacao, Dynamite coffee, and Ugandan vanilla. He talks with Peter Batinski, head brewer at Hi-Wire’s South Slope location in Asheville, where he trials many of Hi-Wire’s beers and leads innovation; and Hank Marshall, head brewer at the Big Top, Hi-Wire’s production brewery near Biltmore Village in Asheville. Peter and Hank talk about developing new variants of 10W-40, the process of brewing the base beer, the dozens of 10W-40 variants, and the related beers that have sprung off from the 10-dub family.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Wolves, Sons & Ethereal Confections

In this episode we talk with Chris Davison of Wolf’s Ridge Brewing and Colin Vent of Seventh Son Brewing, both in Columbus, Ohio, who use quality cacao in a variety of their beers. Both brewers source their cacao from Ethereal Confections with Ethereal Confections in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, and we’ll also talk with Marisa Allen and Michael Ervin of Ethereal, who also provide cacao to a variety of other breweries.

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