Troye sits down with Alastair, former Devil's Peak brewer turned sole brewer on remote Lord Howe Island, to talk island brewing, mushroom-growing pizza experiments, and a pilgrimage to Sierra Nevada. From shipping costs to "town beer" culture, it's a look at how isolation breeds creativity in craft beer.

Murray Middleton is back in Cape Town for BeerEx Africa, and episode 123 starts where it always does — with good beer and no plan. The boys open a rare Liefmans Goudenband (a 2016 blend Murray smuggled home from a brewery visit in Belgium), get a surprise drop-in from friend-of-the-show Trevor, and spend the better part of an hour riffing on the global beer market, declining craft distribution in South Africa, and why the taproom model might be the only thing that makes sense anymore. Murray also reveals he's now a new dad and working for TNS Solutions (now under ADM), and there's a listener prize buried somewhere near the end of the episode — if you can find it.

Luke Edward is a former Cape Town creative, who somehow ended up as Regional Sales Manager for Yakima Chief Hops in the USA. The road there involved advertising, app development, a knee destroyed on a mountain in Oregon, an online fermentation science degree he never finished, and a PowerPoint presentation built in a Frankfurt airport layover.
In this episode we talk hops, harvest selection, the magic of agricultural ingredients, and what it actually takes to connect the world's best brewers to the world's best hop farms.
One of the best origin stories we've had on the show — and that's saying something.