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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spreading the brews

Rick Bonino

Local craft beer is coming to the radio airwaves starting this weekend.

Good Brews, which will explore all aspects of beer in the Spokane area and greater Northwest, debuts Sunday at 5 p.m. on KYRS (88.1 and 92.3 FM).

The hourlong program replaces the previous Portland-based Beer O’Clock by Lisa Morrison (aka The Beer Goddess), which has been discontinued.

Hosting the new show is Adam Boyd, whose day job is in film production. (You might know him as Petty Officer McCall from Transolar Galactica, the Web sci-fi spoof that he co-produces.)

Boyd, 30, wasn’t much into beer as a film student at Eastern Washington University.

“The aim there was just a means of reaching inebriation,” he says of the macrobrew culture. “I didn’t think beer would ever taste good. I thought it was just something you endured.”

Later on, he tried a Fat Tire – and a beer geek was born.

“For the first time I could actually taste the flavor of hops,’” Boyd says. “I thought, whoa, that’s interesting.

“Over the last few years, anything I could find about beer, I grabbed it, I tasted it, I read it.”

He also started homebrewing a couple of years ago, and still brews every weekend.

Good Brews will center around interviews with brewers both professional and amateur, as well as pub owners, distributors and other craft connoisseurs.

“It will go across the board with anyone involved in beer, from making it to putting it into the glass for you to enjoy,” says Boyd.

First up is the crew from Iron Goat (with whom he’s done some video work) talking about recent developments including their move into bottling and wildly popular “Year of the Goat” small-batch series.

The show also will feature new beer releases and a beer of the week. Boyd plans to put the episodes up as podcasts after the first few weeks, so latecomers can catch up.

“I really want to take a broad approach, open up the world of beer to everyone,” he says.

“Some people say, craft beer, oh, that’s a snob thing. I’m not approaching it from that perspective. I want to reach out to people who maybe have tried craft beer but don’t know that much about it, and explain to them the beauty of beer.”