Grit & Grain: 200 Episodes, One Community
Across the Pacific Northwest, brewers regularly leave their breweries behind.
They pour beer at festivals, tap takeovers, pint nights, bottle releases, and neighborhood pubs. Customers shake their hands, compliment a favorite IPA, ask a question about hops, and wander off with another beer, often without realizing they’ve just spent 10 minutes talking to the person who imagined, brewed, and obsessed over the beer in their glass.
Nearly 200 episodes ago, Grit & Grain set out to change that.
Hello
The podcast wasn’t created to review beer or rank breweries. It was created to connect beer drinkers with the people behind the beer. Two hundred conversations later, that simple idea has quietly become one of the Pacific Northwest beer community’s favorite gathering places.
“I started the podcast for a few reasons,” says co-host Matt McLaren. “I was hoping to give non-industry folks a closer look into the craft beer world.”
His goal wasn’t to make brewing seem more mysterious.
Quite the opposite.
“The podcast was started as a way to pull the curtain back a bit and help beer drinkers put a face and a name to the beers they love.”
Then came the thought that, in hindsight, quietly predicted everything Grit & Grain would become.
“I also wanted it to give listeners ice breakers if they ever saw those folks at an event or a festival and it’d give them an easy way to say, ‘Hello.'”
It sounds almost disarmingly simple now.
Say hello.
Not because you’re introducing yourself to a celebrity brewer. Not because you’re hoping to learn the secret behind your favorite IPA. Simply because the conversation has already begun. You listened to an episode on your drive over. You laughed at the same story. You heard the brewer talk about a disastrous batch, a favorite hop, or the winding road that led them into beer. By the time you finally meet in person, you’re no longer strangers separated by a bar top. You’re simply two people picking up a conversation that started somewhere else.
Every other Wednesday, that conversation begins at Peaks & Pints in Tacoma’s Proctor District.
The Room
The Events Room transforms into a recording studio. Producer Doug Mackey checks the microphones and readies the recording board. Chris frames the cameras for YouTube. Pints are poured. Conversations begin. Squeaky stools protest as guests settle in, another familiar voice in a room built for good stories.
It doesn’t take long before the conversation drifts somewhere unexpected. That’s always been part of the appeal.
“There was humor, deep knowledge of the subject, great chemistry, and nearly complete disregard for standard podcast decorum,” says longtime producer Doug Mackey. “Oh, also the love and compassion that seems to be inherent to the beer community.”
He’s right about the decorum.
Conversations wander. A technical discussion about fermentation suddenly detours into baseball, family, road trips, or an unforgettable beer festival. Someone remembers another story. Everyone laughs. No one seems especially eager to steer things back on course because the detours are usually where the best moments are waiting.
Over nearly 200 episodes, the conversations have wandered from hop science to startup breweries, spontaneous fermentation, Washington beer history, forgotten corners of Tacoma history, road trips, beer festivals, brewing mistakes, marriages, barrel aging, favorite dive bars, and the occasional story no one ever expected to tell into a microphone.
Brewers such as Shane Johns, Colin Lenfesty, Will & Mari Kemper, and Steve Luke have shared the stories behind iconic beers, unexpected careers, and the winding paths that led them into brewing. Beer historian Charles Finkel and beer journalists Kendall Jones and Ezra Johnson-Greenough have explored the changing culture surrounding craft beer, while Tacoma historian Michael Sullivan reminded listeners that every great beer town has stories worth preserving beyond the brewery walls. Festival organizers, cidermakers, hop growers, publicans, and historians have all found their way to the microphones. Every guest arrives carrying beer. Almost every conversation leaves talking about people.
Pull Up A Stool
For Chris, that’s never been something to watch from a distance.
“I’ve never thought of myself as behind the camera,” he says. “I’m in the room.”
That distinction matters.
The cameras capture each episode for YouTube, but they don’t define Chris’s role. He’s part of the conversation as it unfolds, laughing at the same stories, reacting to the same surprises, and helping preserve the atmosphere that listeners hear every Friday. Grit & Grain has never felt like a show being produced as much as a gathering being documented.
Few people have watched that gathering grow more closely than Phaedra Russell Miller. As the Parkway Tavern‘s former social media manager, she was there from the beginning, watching the podcast take shape during its first year before it eventually found its home at Peaks & Pints. What stood out wasn’t simply the conversations about beer. It was the absence of pretense.
“Alter your expectations,” she says. “Grit & Grain is not pretentious; it’s not stuffy; there’s no gatekeeping. While beer is serious business … there is so much belly laughing! Who doesn’t love a good fuck-up story?
“It isn’t about giving ratings of beers or breweries, or scrutinizing someone’s pedigree. It’s about community, and sharing, and support. Everyone is welcome in the room. It’s simply three cohosts and friends, each bringing different industry experience and perspectives, getting together to drink beer, nerd out about our local beer scene, and have wide-ranging conversations with friends, colleagues, experts, and enthusiasts. They’re the kinds of conversations you’d hope to have sitting at a bar with someone from the industry, in a taproom with a brewer, or at a beer festival with a brewery owner—only they’re available for anyone to listen to and drink along with.
If Matt McLaren supplied the mission, Sean Jackson supplied the spark.
“Sean had a strong desire to get a group of people together in a room and listen to the giants of this industry tell their stories, immortalizing their contributions in much more than just vague influence, but real tangible and relatable experiences and efforts to push the boundaries of beer,” McLaren says.
For the first 64 episodes, the Parkway manager’s humor, knowledge, curiosity, and everyman’s perspective helped shape the easygoing rhythm that became Grit & Grain’s signature. When an opportunity arose to manage the taproom at E9 Brewing alongside longtime friend Shane Johns, Sean’s Wednesday evenings belonged to the brewery instead of the podcast.
Bethany Carlsen arrived with a résumé that stretched from brewing at RAM Restaurant & Brewery to leading Pacific Brewing & Malting, co-founding Mother Fern Brewing with partner Greer Hubbard, and launching The Funk Busters, the brewery line-cleaning business she owns with Hubbard. Where McLaren often approaches beer through the lens of an Advanced Cicerone and curious homebrewer, Carlsen brings the perspective of someone who has spent years designing recipes, solving fermentation problems, and living with the daily realities of professional brewing.
None of those credentials mattered nearly as much as what happened once the microphones came on. Carlsen had long been part of the same Pacific Northwest beer community—and part of the Grit & Grain orbit. The only thing that changed was where she sat.
“Grit & Grain is all about sharing knowledge,” Carlsen says. “There is so much to learn from every episode. Every guest brings dimension and insight to the amazing world of beer that is our workplace and playground. I am grateful to be invited to play along.
“Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like I was joining someone else’s podcast. It became my podcast, too,” Carlsen says.
Episode 200
On Wednesday, July 22, Grit & Grain celebrates Episodes 199 and 200 the only way it knows how: with old friends, fresh beer, loud laughter, and the sort of conversations that wander wherever curiosity points them. Georgetown Brewing lead brewers Matt Edwards and Jen Nicosia join Episode 199 to unveil More Me Less You IPA, a collaboration brewed alongside the Grit & Grain crew, inspired by a Bethany on-air mic drop. Episode 200 welcomes Georgetown founder Roger Bialous back to the microphone, nearly four years after he appeared with his business partner, Manny Chao (Manny wasn’t available for the 200th Episode), in the podcast’s earliest days.
Which brings us back to Georgetown.
Roger Bialous and Manny Chao weren’t invited because they’re famous.
They weren’t invited because Georgetown brewed a collaboration IPA.
They were invited because they’ve been part of this story almost since the beginning.
The More Me Less You IPA isn’t simply commemorating Episode 200.
It’s commemorating nearly 200 conversations that have transformed strangers into regulars, guests into friends, listeners into participants, and a podcast into a community.
That’s why we have regulars every other Wednesday.
That’s why people linger after the outro.
That’s why a collaboration beer somehow feels inevitable.
Because the best craft beer has never really been about hops.
Or yeast.
Or medals.
It’s about the people who keep showing up for one another, opening another beer, telling one more story, and leaving room at the table for whoever pulls up the next chair.
After nearly 200 episodes, Grit & Grain is still doing exactly what Matt hoped it would do all those years ago.
It’s giving people an easy way to say hello.
Only now, after nearly 200 conversations, many of those hellos have become friendships.
Grit & Grain Podcast was founded in 2022 by Matt McLaren, Sean Jackson, and Ron Swarner. The podcast records every other Wednesday at Peaks & Pints and celebrates the people, places, and stories behind Pacific Northwest beer. Grit & Grain Podcast releases new episodes every Friday on Tacoma’s Channel 253, gritandgrainpodcasts.com, and across major podcast platforms, continuing a conversation that now stretches well beyond the microphones in Peaks’ Events Room.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
