Friday 5pm

Friday 5pm is a weekly ramble made by the team behind YouTube's Craft Beer Channel, timed for the moment the working week stops. Brad and Johnny pour something and start talking. There is no interview format and no rigid running order. What there is instead is a pair of people who follow beer closely enough to have an opinion on almost everything that happens in it. Competition results get picked apart rather than reported. When a brewery ranking comes out, the hosts note which states are over-represented, wonder aloud whether the tasting was blind, and recognise most of the past winners on sight. Industry news gets the same treatment. A holiday park chain replacing Guinness with BrewDog is met with real disbelief, and the conversation stays on it longer than a news bulletin would. Homebrewing is the spine of the show. The hosts have their own recipes in circulation, including a best bitter, a West Coast IPA and a hazy session beer engineered to go from grain to glass in less than two days, and they talk about ingredients the way people talk about them when they actually use them. Guests come on when the subject calls for it. Rachel Auty describes a brewing campaign where participants arrive with very different levels of experience and very strong ideas about what makes a good beer, and the results are as memorable for the label artwork as for the beer itself. That conversation drifts, as they often do, into the difficulty of making brewing look good on social media. Pub visits get reported back in detail. One night out is remembered mostly for a venue where new acoustic treatment made the music bleed downstairs so badly that the staff looked sheepish when asked about it. Another thread turns on the memory of drinking an imported lager at nineteen out of a small heavy bottle and feeling, briefly, like you had arrived. Tangents are not accidents here. They are the format. The show also reads and reacts to the comments left on that week's YouTube video, which keeps the audience inside the conversation rather than outside it. Language is unguarded and occasionally salty, in the way pub conversation is. Episodes close the same way each time, with a nod to the back catalogue of mini documentaries, the Patreon community and a Discord described as a welcoming place for people who like beer, food and brewing. Then the sign-off: loving beer. For anyone who already watches the channel it is the extra conversation. For anyone who does not, it works as a standing weekly briefing on beer, delivered by two people who would be having this conversation anyway.