120: Urban Chestnut's Florian Kuplent on Brewing Lagers, Selecting Ingredients, and the Importance of Fermentation

Florian Kuplent, brewmaster and cofounder of Urban Chestnut Brewing Company in St. Louis, Missouri, got his start brewing helles and weissbier at a small, traditional brewery in Bavaria. In this podcast, he talks about what he learned from that experience and the other stops in his career, including Meantime in London and Anheuser-Busch. Founded in 2011, Urban Chestnut has stuck to its approach of showcasing both Old World traditional beers—its Reverence series—and more experimental, New World playthings—its Revolution series. Since then it's grown to three breweries in St. Louis, including one with a beer hall of Munich-like proportions, and a fourth brewery in the Hallertau region of Bavaria. Kuplent also talks about the URB—Urban Research Brewery—which features a "consumer research bar" where visitors can evaluate pilot beers and provide feedback, and about how that concept has informed their recipes at Urban Chestnut.

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