Local conversations with room to breathe.
The Mike Kara Podcasts is a loose family of interview shows built around friendly, local conversation. Recent episodes spend real time with Central Florida brewers, homebrew club members, a ventriloquist, and Father Leo Patalinghug talking through craft, work, faith, food, and community.
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The Mike Kara Podcasts collects several interview formats under one familiar, conversational roof. It is relaxed almost to the point of wandering, but the wandering usually leads somewhere concrete. Recent episodes are especially strong on Central Florida brewing culture. The Central Florida Buzz visits breweries, homebrew meetings, and club gatherings where guests talk through recipes, equipment, holiday flavors, competitions, and the small decisions that shape a finished beer. At Alestone Brewing Company, Skye Conley discusses brewing history, recipe confidence, high-alcohol beers, and whether an eggnog-style Christmas beer could work without eggs. At Deese Brothers Brewery, Mike Deese and Ben Deese describe homebrew roots, commercial brew days, and recipes that keep changing after years of pursuit. The homebrewing episodes are just as granular. Members of the Central Florida Homebrewers talk about mead, cinnamon and nutmeg in Christmas beers, banana flavor from yeast, orange blossom honey, BJCP categories, old bottles rediscovered later, and Sunshine Challenge entries. The Brew Club of Seminole County conversations widen that beer-world map with Will Dull, Jared Redcliffe, Missy Bdo, and Captain Kirkles appearing in a club-meeting setting built around shared advice and experimentation. These segments are not slick tours. They feel like standing beside the taproom table while someone explains what went right, what went sideways, and what they would try next time. The broader What's Up America episodes bring the same patient interview style to other guests. Landon Harvey talks about becoming a ventriloquist, building puppets, using social media, answering direct messages, handling offended viewers, and treating characters as separate comic voices. Father Leo Patalinghug's episode shifts into Catholic ministry, food, family, and social enterprise through Plating Grace and Grub and the Table Foundation. The show is warm, repetitive, and highly practical. Its best moments come when a simple setup becomes a detailed answer. Listeners looking for fast editing may find it loose. Listeners who enjoy local color, guest-led stories, and unvarnished process talk will understand its appeal quickly.
Made for: Best for listeners who enjoy informal community interviews, Central Florida culture, homebrewing detail, performer stories, and faith-and-food conversations. It suits people who value practical specifics more than tight studio polish.
What sets it apart: Its strength is access: taprooms, club meetings, and guest-led explanations are allowed to unfold at their natural pace. The show feels less like a produced feature and more like a recorded local conversation with names, places, recipes, and real process still attached.
Welcome to The Mike Kara Family of podcasts Where the magic happens. There is actually four separate shows here. We have The Central Florida Buzz, Fantastic Florida, What's Up America, & Hello World
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Mike Cara lets brewers and performers explain the experiments, adjustments and accumulated judgment behind their work.
Mike Cara builds conversations around the knowledge people acquire by doing something for years. Central Florida brewers explain recipe changes, fermentation experiments and the practical realities of a brew day, while other guests discuss stand-up comedy and the mechanics of…
A banana mead experiment meets SNL ambitions when your curiosity refuses to pick one lane.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A relaxed brewery visit centered on recipe risks, high-alcohol beers and the feel of a local taproom.
A visit to Alestone Brewing Company in Longwood turns into a practical look at brewing as patient trial, risk and revision. Skye Conley, the brewery's president, owner and head brewer, walks through a path that runs from opening Hourglass Brewery with a friend to brewing at Big…
A relaxed Central Florida homebrew-club episode on holiday brewing, competition plans, and an aged banana mead.
The episode settles into Central Florida homebrewing in early December, with holiday batches and competition plans starting to crowd the calendar.
A young ventriloquist shows how handmade puppets and live audience feedback shape his comedy.
A young ventriloquist's route from early fascination to working performer gives the episode a clear, easy shape. Landon Harvey looks back on seeing Dennis Lee during Red Ribbon Week and traces how that first spark became a hands-on practice, from building puppets to finding…
A grounded brewery visit about lost recipes, long brew days, and the persistence behind Deese Brothers beer.
At Deese Brothers Brewing in Sanford, Mike Cara frames a brewery visit around the path from homebrewing to running a professional operation. Mike Deese and Ben Deese reflect on roughly 12 years of brewing, including about a decade at home, and the messy process of returning to…
Ricky Glore connects family-shaped comedy influences with club craft, heckler control, and the hope of making entertainment a living.
Ricky Glore’s path into comedy starts close to home, with his father’s taste for older television, films, and music opening the door to Martin and Lewis, Hope and Crosby, the Marx Brothers, the Monkees, Batman, Saturday Night Live, and other comic touchstones.
A barbershop quartet makes the craft of close harmony feel approachable and lived-in.
Barbershop singing turns into a modest, useful lesson in how harmony is built and shared. ABQ starts by singing through a warm-up about joining in and busting a chord, then settles into a conversation about the quartet's several-year history, a lineup change, and the host's…
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Scripture, surrender and faith put into practice.
Host Mike Kara interviews ABQ, a barbershop quartet from Albuquerque, on What's Up America.
Mike Kara interviews comedian Ricky Glore on What's Up America.
Mike Cara interviews a homebrewer about entering meads and beer in the Sunshine Challenge competition.
Mike Cara interviews a homebrewer about Christmas beers and brewing techniques at a club meeting.
Mike Cara interviews Father Leo about his faith-based food truck ministry and related media projects.
Mike Kara interviews Skye Conley, president, owner, and head brewer of Alestone Brewing Company in Longwood, Florida, a craft taproom that opened April 29, 2022 after Skye used an 11-month Disney World closure during COVID-19 to plan his second independent brewery following his co-founding of Hourglass Brewery in 2012.
Host Mike Kara records three back-to-back interviews at a Central Florida Homebrewers general membership meeting at Dead Lizard Brewing in Orlando, covering holiday brewing, competition strategy, and ingredient experimentation.
Mike Carra's interview with Landon Harvey on What's Up America centers on a 22-year-old ventriloquist from Dallas who builds his own puppets and is not rushing toward America's Got Talent.
At Dead Words Brewing in Orlando, Mike Cara brings together the Central Florida Homebrewers, the Brew Club of Seminole County, and Brewers Anonymous to answer one practical question: what does a homebrew club actually do for members?
Mike Cara visits Deese Brothers Brewery in Sanford, Florida, where Mike Deese and Ben Deese say 40 to 50 percent of their recipes came from homebrew days.