John Brewster

I follow global beer market data the way other brewers track hop harvests — because what happens at the market level determines what styles get brewed, which ingredients get investment, and where the next generation of interesting beer will come …

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit defending beer at dinner tables where wine is treated as the only serious beverage.

Prohibition taught me more about American beer culture than any brewing textbook. When I started researching the history behind the beers I brew — why American lagers became so light, why craft brewing exploded in the 1990s rather than the …

Nelson Sauvin is the New Zealand hop that introduced me to the concept of wine character in beer. The first time I dry hopped a saison with it, the white wine and gooseberry notes were so prominent that a non-brewing …

Galaxy is the Australian hop that I consider the most versatile high-intensity tropical variety available.

Amarillo is the orange-citrus hop that I use when I want something more rounded than grapefruit-forward Cascade or Centennial.

Blockchain for beer authenticity is one of those ideas that sounds futuristic but has real-world pilots already running at major breweries.

I’ve used AI to generate beer recipes a dozen times in the past year, and my honest assessment is that the results range from genuinely useful starting points to algorithmically competent but uninspired formulas.

When I started brewing in India, I ran into a specific frustration with most brewing calculators: they assumed ingredient availability, unit systems, and equipment that didn’t match what I was actually working with.

Adding sensors to a fermentation chamber is the step between having a box that holds temperature and having a system that gives you visibility into what’s actually happening inside.