The Best of 2024: My top 5

The Best of 2024: My top 5

This year has been crazy! 🎙️ From hitting 10k downloads to ranking in the top 10% of podcasts globally, the show couldn't have done it without YOU.

Join me, Chris as I revisit my 5 favourite clips of the year—moments that made us think, laugh, and reassess what we all believe as brewers 🍻

A huge shout out to this episode’s sponsor, Brewing Trade.

Tune in now and celebrate an epic year with me! 🎉

🔗 Chris' LinkedIn

Transcript

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Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the Modern Brewer Podcast with me, your host, Chris Lewington. So this episode is going to be a wrap up of 2024, including some podcast statistics and my top five takeaways of the year. So first, let's just kick it off. This year has been crazy for the Modern Brewer Podcast. The first full year of recording. I've managed to squeeze in 23 episodes of the Modern Brewer Podcast. Generating over 32 hours of incredibly niche content. The Modern Brewery Podcast has been listened to in over 80 countries, showing just how global the brewing industry really is. It's actually such a crazy number. It's like, it's actually been listened to as far out as Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Japan, Brazil, Argentina. It's crazy. I mean, of course here in sunny United Kingdom, this is. where the majority of listeners are, but it's still crazy to see how many listeners are around the world. In fact, this year, there's actually been over 10, 000 downloads of the Modern Bro podcast, which crazily puts this in the top 10 percent of podcasts around the world. Over 10, 000 downloads is a crazy statistic to me. I am like absolutely chuffed when I saw that number. The top 10 percent is also kind of crazy but probably says more about how many podcasts don't make it than it does of those that do. But really cool to see So yeah, I'd like to just Thank every single person who's downloaded even one episode of the Modern Brewer podcast, the core listeners, or those who just pick and choose episodes that are relevant to them, which is totally understandable. Look, I really just appreciate everyone on that. I also love all of the kind words that people have shared over LinkedIn, Instagram, when I've met people in real life at trade shows or at festivals, and also the advice and feedback as well. I mean, I actually recently listened back, listened to episode one again, and it's, I just, at the end of that episode, I just stopped. Like there was no music, there was no summary. It was just end of episode. I don't know if he even said bye. It was, it was awfully edited. And I remember a few people reaching out to me after that first episode going. Yeah. Yeah. Great, great episode, mate. Just maybe do something about the end. And yeah, I haven't changed it actually since then. So you can still go back and listen to it, but yeah, really funny. Um, I feel like I've come a long way since then. but that's only because people. Really point out when, there can be an improvements made and I'll always always make them. So now it's time for me to share my top five takeaways from this year's Modern Brewer podcast. it's impossible to do these wrap up episodes without standing on at least one cliche landmine, but this was genuinely really difficult to choose. At first I was thinking of the top five things I think everyone should know from the Modern Brewer Podcast, the best bits of information, and it was so difficult. So I kind of just went back on that a little bit and decided to pick five that meant a lot to me, We're going to start backwards, starting with number five. They are in numerical order. There is a clear number one, one that number one sets itself miles above all the others, but before we get there, we've got to get through the first four. So Coming in at number five on my list of five top takeaways from the Modern Brewer Podcast this year is an episode that was so, so special to me. It was the one that I did with Thornbridge Brewery. They took a huge gamble on me as a very, very young brewer looking hectolitre brewery on the grounds of actual Thornbridge Halls. Truly, truly stunning. I had some of my most challenging times in brewing at Thornbridge Hall. But Rob, Dom and Ben helped me through that, they helped me develop as a brewer and as a person and I owe them a lot. And it was so cool to have Rob and Ben on the Modern Brewer Podcast talking about how, not only, talking about not only how they saved one of the most iconic pieces of British brewing history, the Burton Union System, but how that interacted with their beers and how that they ingrained it into their processes. But my favorite takeaway came from when they were talking about how the Burton Union System affected one of the UK's most iconic IPAs in Jaipur. For everyone who's tried Jaipur, they will know that bitterness hits you straight up front. But how the Burton Union System slightly softened that, And didn't add this really intense, complex ester profile like I predicted it would was really, really interesting to me. I absolutely love when my preconceptions or my assumptions are wrong because it means I can learn from that and I think it's really, really fascinating. And actually, that episode with Rob and Dom is now live on YouTube. We recorded that episode with video so you can see me, Dom and Rob discussing the Burton Union system. And actually from that moment on, all the Modern Brewer Podcast episodes will be live on YouTube. So go check them out, hit subscribe, and you'll never miss a videoed Modern Brewer Podcast episode. So obviously, generally when we use barrels in brewing, we're using like fresh barrels and we want to get flavour from them. and we're expecting, you know, like vanilla and all these different barrel flavours. you know, these barrels are 35 years old. been chosen for their neutral flavour profile. So it was a bit Yeah, you're not going to get any wood. It was strange to not get wood because all the times we put beer in wood, it's such a, a obvious standout flavour, that wood flavour in barrel aged beers. Because, yeah, it depended on the barrel age. Or, or spirit. Yeah, or the spirit that's been in the wood. So to have like, none of that was quite interesting. But Jaipur, like people, people like being smacked in the face by Jaipur. Like that's one of the draws Mm hmm. some people. And the Union Jaipur, like, I preferred it. It was, Rob says, it was softer, rounder, more, more, yeasty, a bit more estuary, maybe. Yeah. like, I preferred it, but I don't know whether, like, die hard fans of Jaipur weren't, like, weren't getting the smack in the mouth they were hoping for. so it was a different beer, but it was, yeah, lovely. Coming in at number four is here simply because it made me laugh for about five days afterwards. It's of course Jordan from Mashgang. His incredible advice to brewers looking to make a non alcoholic beer. It simply went you are under no obligation to make any kind of pun on the name That it's low alcohol at all. I mean what a legend. It was just it caught me off guard It's not what I expected and I was I've been laughing about that probably ever since so that's absolutely comfortably gotten into number four What a guy don't take the piss out of your customer with the name of the beer. Like, I I think it's incredibly bizarre to like, you know, like, I don't want to have a beer that's like, called Cucktoberfest or something, or Designated Dry Vrrr Or, I don't know, like, like Sissy Water or Nanny State or something like that You know, like, I don't want to stand in a bar Where the first thing that happens is I have the piss taken out of me by the brand It's like Like, that's bizarre. Don't do that. You are under no obligation to make any kind of pun on the name that it's low alcohol at all. Ever. Ever. Number three on my list of top five takeaways from the modern rural podcast this year has to be about learning on the impact of proprietary hops and hop surplus. On the iconic Hopanomics episode with Douglas MacKinnon, This episode smashed together two of my favourite nerdy topics, which is Economics and Hops. Doug is the only independent voice in the entire hop industry. Meaning this was the first glimpse for a lot of brewers on just how crazy the world of green gold really is. Doug talked in depth on why he thinks brewers are still required to contract hops even though there is a huge surplus of them sat around the world. He also goes to in depth on how proprietary hops will play a significant role in the future of brewing. To cement these learnings, Doug has an excellent delivery. The way that he imparts knowledge, the way that he can talk so well on such a complex subject that's normally filled with so much data it mind, blows your mind, he undercut all of that with his soft, excellent tone of voice. since that episode, I know a bunch of people who've then gone on to deep dive into Doug's McKinnon report, which goes into all of the statistics, and you can lose a couple of evenings going into this, and they have found out all about the hop market. And for all of those people, they are changing the way that they purchase hops. Some of them don't have contracts anymore, some contracting differently, because understanding the macroeconomics of the hop industry really helps you understand how to interact with it. So that has to be my number three takeaway Number two on my list of top five takeaways from the Modern Brewer podcast this year is Of course my good friend George Wade on the topic of reaching net zero For the people who know me, they'll know that one of my passions is sustainability. And over the last few years, George has taught me so much on this very subject. He's a thought leader in the whole of the sustainability world, and has a really good understanding of the brewing industry. We talked in that episode quite a lot about misconceptions, but actually, one of the things One of the things that really stuck with me just because it was such a good analogy and I'm going to paraphrase him slightly, but it was people were focusing on the pallet wrap until they started to get data. And then they realized it's not the pallet wrap that matters. It's actually the thing in the pallet that you're wrapping. It's quite simple, but it's actually really powerful. We tend to focus on things like pallet wrap, plastic straws, the things that you can see, that is a problem. But actually, how did you make that beer? That's the much bigger question on the sustainability. Are you using a gas fired steam boiler to boil your wort, to heat your water? That's your concern, not the fact that you're wrapping it With palette wrap they were focusing on things like, you know, the plastic poly wrap that was around the pallets. And, that's what my background was in way. So I was spending time helping people understand which bin that should go in and where it should go and how to get rid of it. And actually what we, what I realized in my journey into it was that. Until you have the data on where are your emissions coming from, and you realize it's not the pallet wrap that matters, it's actually the thing in the pallet. So we've actually had that transition from brewers and generally companies going from a lack of kind of carbon literacy, all the way and focusing on things like pallet wrap So That was definitely sat there my number two It's a great episode if you want to check it out, it'll be on youtube very shortly Number one on my list of the top five takeaways from the Modern Brewer podcast this year was was the easiest decision I've made this year. It's the takeaway that I've talked about the most since that episode aired. I've spoken about it at events I've been speaking at, to brewers at conferences, to everyone in between. I also got a ton of messages after that episode aired in total disbelief and over this takeaway. And I feel like it just basically sparked that perfect combination of curiosity and outrage that I think is needed to make sort of a really, really engaging episode. So, the takeaway came from Felix James from Small Beer when he started to talk about his dry floor policy. No spray guns. No mess on the brewery floor. And not a single floor drain in sight. Even for me, who has visited Small Beer many times, that still blows my mind. I can't imagine the uproar in the majority of breweries if you were to remove the floor drains and the spray guns from the brewery floor and people would come into work the next day. They'd be outraged. People would be like, how am I supposed to do my job? So, So, that's why it was such a fascinating policy to have, but mainly because Felix designed his brewery like this. He designed it not to have spray guns, designed it not to have floor drains, and his brewteam happily live without them. so again, we're not using spray guns, you know, typically in a brewery you walk in and a brewer is in all wet weather gear, you know, with wellies, squeegee in one hand, hose in the other, and it's all about water. It's like, how much water can you splash around this place? Because that's cleaning, right? It's all about making things wet. Well, I learned a great trick and a great bit of insight from, from a bartender actually, during my gin years at Sipsmith, which is that something isn't clean if it's wet in order to clean something, you've got to wet it, remove the, the, the dirt, rinse it, you know, get it wet and then dry it. And when it's dry, it's clean, because microbes live in nice, warm, damp environments, right? Breweries are warm, wet environments, and you've also got lots of malt dust in the air, you've got, so a nice sugar source, you've got, you know, bricks, and you've got all this wonderful porous material for things to, to live in. tile grout and all this sort of stuff. Mm hmm. And so what we do here at the brewery is we just keep everything as dry as we possibly can all the time, which A is more hygienic and B saves a lot of water. So we do have a malt store, but instead of having the malt store up on a mezzanine, where you might typically see it in a brewery as is on the ground level, we then move the malt up to the mash tun through a, through an auger. and we keep the malt store as a nice dry, dusty environment. and then we sweep it, so we don't wash anything down, which is fairly typical. but we don't then allow any mulch dust out of that room. In the same sense, you know, we also don't allow any, any liquid. So any, say you've got spent yeast, you know, hop trub, in a lot of breweries, they will let that down onto the floor and then wash it into a drain. so we don't allow anything onto the drain. And so this is where we came up with this concept of a dry floor policy. So the dry floor policy says, Yeah, no water goes on the floor unless you're specifically cleaning the floor. for which we have a really nice little machine. You have a floor scrubber, and it puts water down onto the it splits the water into ions first. So you get this, it's called Eco H2O. It's a nice, nice floor scrubber that basically. splits the water, puts the water down as, as ions so that you're not using lots of harsh chemicals and then sucks it back up again. We use for the entire square, so we have, 5, 000 square foot here, so about 500 square meters in the brewery. And we, we can wash the entire floor here. with one, load is 40 liters, but we barely use that it's about 20 or 30 liters to wash the entire floor. Typically in a brewery, you'd be washing just the brew house down and you'd use hundreds, if not thousands of liters. The brewery is spotless, and they still get to do all the work that they would normally do. And for me, these types of takeaways, these types of this type of information is one of the reasons I started the podcast so I can amplify those big success stories to a wider audience. And it's just challenges that brewing narrative that we all have ingrained in us. So that actually wraps up. this year 2024. In the next shorter episode of the Modern Bro podcast, I will be going through some of the top news stories of 2024 and I'll give some bold predictions for the year 2025 and beyond. So thank you to everyone who has made this year so special to me. Um, just realized I have stepped on another one of those cliche landmines. So on that note, I'll definitely be saying goodbye. Have a great festive period, everyone, however you choose to spend your time. And I will catch you on the next episode of the Modern Brewer Podcast.