I do promise some small discussion of beer in this blog, and rarely deliver, what with all this talk of radio and occasional rants against Demon Internet, purveyors of my current 128k connection through no fault of my own, blah blah.

However. When I was in Australia recently, I was taken aback with the quality of the beer there. In my beer review posting, I describedCooper’s Vintage Ale as delicious - a bottle-conditioned, treacly, full-bodied, slow-drinking treat. Almost certainly worth hunting out again when I next visit.

With that in mind, I thought I’d let fellow lovers of the hop know that Cooper’s Vintage Ale is currently for sale in Tesco. Tesco have been steadily improving their beer selection, to the point where my local Tesco has three sets of shelves full of different types of ales and foreign beers, and that’s before insipid lager kicks in. It is now certainly one of the best supermarkets for choice and price.

Confusingly, Tesco sell Coopers Vintage with an additional sticker on them saying “Tesco Drinks Awards: Best Import”, and in a cardboard six-pack (much like you buy bottles of beer in American supermarkets). Given that I love this stuff, I simply picked up the six-pack without thinking.

At the self-service till, though, the machine failed to recognise the barcode on the bottom of the six-pack. A man came over. “Any idea how much these are, mate?” I’ve learnt to say “No” every time someone says that, so man tells woman to go and find out. Woman toddles off, gets the price-tag off the shelf, and comes back. Man scans it.

There you go, mate, £1.99 (AU$4.46).

Well, I wasn’t arguing. So I’ve actually managed to pick up six bottles for the bargain price of 33p (74 cents) each. Bargain…

Robert Scoble is furious. Techcrunch US is drawing parallels with China. They’re angry because Australia has announced plans to censor the internet.

Except it hasn’t.

Australia used to offer a free copy of Net Nanny to any citizen that asked for it. This made sense: some parents might choose to offer a sanitised version of the internet to their family. There’s undeniably a lot of unpleasant things on the web (hello, goatse!), and a version of the internet without that stuff does nothing other than encourage use of the internet by those that are sensitive to this kind of thing.

Net Nanny has a few problems.
- It’s Windows only; so users with an Apple Mac, or an Ubuntu box, can’t use it. For those that want a ‘clean’ feed, this may be a deterrent to go with a non-Windows setup. And it won’t help your kid’s PSP, iPod Touch, or other internet-enabled devices.
- It’s easy to get round. There are plenty of sites that help you hack the software; and plenty of proxy sites which can bypass the software too.
- It’s made by one US manufacturer, and using it cedes an awful lot of control to one commercial company. Might they censor anti-NetNanny material? Might they be pro-Bush? Might they be pro-Howard, or pro-Rudd?

Instead, the Australian government is planning to replace the on request copy of Net Nanny, with, instead, an on request cleaned feed. It’s not hackable by your average computer user, it works on every type of operating system including the kids’ PSP or DS Lite. And it’s not run by a commercial company; whether you consider it being run by the government as more insidious is probably up to you, but at the end of the day, the magic words are on request, so you actively have to opt-in to it.

The chances are that you, the reader of this blog, already have a form of censorship on your internet connection: if you’re using Firefox, or you use Google to search, you’re using a connection which actively stops you from going to phishing or malware sites.

I go one further. I use Open DNS for my internet connection at home, which, by request, blocks those sorts of sites and also, by request, blocks pornographic or adult content. It could even block sites like MySpace if I wanted it to. It’s a fine, fine service: works on anything (including my iPod Touch) and is highly recommended, even if you don’t turn the content restrictions on. But it takes a certain type of geek to know about it, much less to configure your home router to use it.

In short, the Australian government are mandating internet companies to make a clean feed available to any of its citizens on request. Parents, and others, can request this service to be activated on their machines - or not, as the case may be.

If (and this is a big if) the service continues to be opt-in - to be “on request” - then for all the reasons given above, I think Kevin Rudd has done a great thing for Australia, not a bad thing; and that he should be congratulated.

(If the service turns into an opt-out service, then we should fight it with all our might.)

– UPDATE –

There’s confusion as to whether it’s opt-in (good), or opt-out (bad); in spite of Scoble’s instant reply. And worth pointing out that I’m not alone - Bobbie Johnson is all for it, even if it’s opt-out (which I’m much less happy about).

I’ve spent the last few weeks in Australia, mainly for the Commercial Radio Australia conference, but also mainly on holiday. (I spoke at the CRA about making money from digital radio - my speaking notes are online if you wanted to take a look). But, since I’ve promised ‘beer’ in this blog for a while now, here’s my take on the beer.

Australia is a country with a resurgent craft beer industry. One thing I didn’t expect, when going into Melbourne’s tourist information centre, was a leaflet on craft beer makers; but that’s exactly what was on offer (complete with a foreward written by an Australian MP).

James Squire makes a ton of English-style beers, and are based in Sydney, Australia. This was a very creditable, and nicely hopped, amber ale, drunk in The Hero Of Waterloo, listening to a pub singer and enjoying the experience. Later in the trip, we visited a brew-pub run by the company (in central Melbourne); on offer was a great porter, a splendid IPA, and some not-normally-available brews. Most impressive; unusually-labelled bottles are available in many places, and it was decried by our tour guide one day as “a bloody good choice”. Which I thought too.

Proper brew-pubs did exist, not just those run by large breweries. As an example, we tried the Lord Nelson Brewery in Sydney, which is also a hotel and a pub. I tried their pale ale: served in typical Australian “too bloody cold” fashion. It was pretty good, if not outstanding, and the ambience in the pub was a little loud (a gaggle of girls next to us being chatted up by a set of blokes fresh-from-the-office on the table text to us) so we didn’t stay too long. The “Three Sheets”, advertised on the beer mats, was over 7%.

Of course, you can’t always get it right, even in Australia. Cascade Premium is from Tasmania, and is apparently from Australia’s oldest continually-operating brewery. It’s made by the same people who bring you Fosters (a beer, incidentally, which I didn’t see once in my trip - whether I was just blind to it or not I don’t know). A pretty standard-tasting lager. I don’t like lager much, but for the middle of the day, it was rather enjoyable, I guess.

Available here in the UK in many supermarkets, is Coopers - available here (in the UK) and in Australia as “Coopers Green” and “Coopers Red”. Green, seen here (and above) is a creditable pale ale, bottle-conditioned and tasty. Coopers also sell home-brew kits, interestingly; possibly the first major brewer I’ve ever seen doing this; indeed, their website almost promotes it as a way to enjoy the great taste of Coopers without going out to the supermarket and buying some. Bizarre.

Also part of the Fosters empire is this, Carlton Draught. I ordered this principally because I reckoned that if it was “on draught” it must be good - but clearly it wasn’t on tap at all! Possibly the most boring beer I’d had all trip; the uninspiring cafe that we were in didn’t sell anything other than cheap lagers.

One of our better finds was a bar and restaurant called Cookie, hiding upstairs from some rather dowdy looking doors on Swanston Street in Melbourne. Not just was the food delicious, but their beer menu was around thirty pages long, including many excellent local brews. Mountain Goat, a small brewery in the Richmond part of the city, produce a lot of seemingly excellent beers; I tried (once more!) the IPA, which was gloriously hoppy and excellently delicious. This was for sale in the odd shop we passed, and I really ought to have brought some home. The bottle is quite fun: “bottled but not tamed” is a nice phrase. Bottle-conditioned, naturally.

Also on sale at Cookie was this - Australia’s answer to Belgian beer. This is Cooper’s Vintage - around 7%, and absolutely delicious - a bottle-conditioned, treacly, full-bodied, slow-drinking treat. Almost certainly worth hunting out again when I next visit; and this was the recommendation of the waiter, who was delighted that someone was taking a good interest in beer. He brought me no less than seven bottles to look at!

We enjoyed that building so much that we decided to visit the rooftop bar the day after. While hardly a huge selection, you could still choose from a number of bottled beers, as well as, on tap, Little Creatures Pale Ale and this, which is Little Creatures Bright Ale. Bright is sweeter than the Pale, and tastes nicely fruity. A perfect beer for a lazy afternoon, particularly on the seventh floor of this rather unusual building. (Little Creatures also sell cider, which the bar stocked.)

I also tried Victoria Bitter (so you don’t have to), Coopers Red, which was a little disappointing, and Tooheys New, a lager, which was equally, um, lagery. James Squire’s porter was nicely authentic, too. And the Lowenbrau dunkel I had in a Bavarian theme pub was excellent.

Beer appears to be measured in different sizes depending which pub you went into. A “pot” is different to a “schooner” (except when it isn’t) and a “pint” is the standard (curiously, a pint glass in Australia is 570ml instead of the UK’s 568ml).

What surprised me is how much ‘proper’ beer is available in Australia. True, the Cascade, VB and Carlton is everywhere; but in virtually every place we went to, we could find some bottle-conditioned, local, beer; and normally some proper beer on tap. The craft beer breweries in Australia are, by and large, pretty new; so it’s clear that there’s a real thirst for a different taste of beer in Australia other than the standard lagers. Indeed, there is probably more choice in Australia for the more discerning beer drinker than there is in the UK, rather embarrassingly.

One of my Australian friends sent me an email apologising for their beer after my visit. Not at all. You should be proud of it.