Four Brewers: Craft Beer and Homebrew · John Holzer, Greg Nagel, Joe Senigaglia, Jason Harris

367: Style Pile: Kölsch

July 15, 2024·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

Greg says the Köln brewery Pefkin makes Kölsch that is “almost identical” to what he drank there.

Four Brewers kicks off its Style Pile run with Kölsch and uses the style as an excuse to sit around and talk. The crew says Greg coined the name, and he also chose Kölsch as the first stop. The opening stays loose and friendly, with Jon, Jason, Greg, and Joe talking over one another the way they usually do. They spend time on a day out in Orange County with their significant others, and the whole thing already sounds like it started after a long day and a train ride. The train becomes its own bit because one station display points toward Oceanside and sends the conversation into a full detour about travel anxiety. That is exactly the kind of tangent this show likes, because a practical detail can turn into a complaint, then a joke, then a story. Once the beer talk settles back in, the panel starts chasing smells and comparisons instead of polished tasting notes. Greg reaches for terms like petrichor and damp earth, and the others follow him into the weeds. The conversation also lands on trumpet vine, which gives Greg another very specific smell memory to work with. Jason pushes back with the kind of casual disbelief that keeps the table moving. The hosts joke about 70s Band-Aids, quaaludes, surf shops, and the strange catalog of scents a person picks up over decades. Greg makes the case that age and experience matter here, because some references only click if you lived through the same era. That turns a simple style discussion into a talk about memory, vocabulary, and why different drinkers describe the same beer in wildly different ways. The banter is messy, but it is not empty. The beer judgments stay practical, and the table keeps circling back to whether a description actually fits what is in the glass. The show never tries to sound tidy or reverent. It sounds like a group of beer people talking over cans, correcting each other, and following the next odd association wherever it goes. The style itself gets more interesting because the hosts refuse to flatten it into brochure language. What comes out is a familiar Four Brewers mix of beer knowledge, inside jokes, and side conversations that still manage to land on the point. It ends up feeling like a hang where the beer is real, the digressions are part of the recipe, and the listeners are invited to sit at the table.

As heard by us

A loose Kolsch kickoff that blends beer talk with train mishaps, smell riffs, and easy table banter.

The episode opens on Kolsch, but the real pull is the table: four beer people launching a style series while the talk drifts through Orange County train logistics, a shared day out, and the usual run of jokes.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a Style Pile kickoff that starts with Kolsch and drifts into train anxiety, smell riffs, and beer-show banter.

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