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…

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.

I’ve promised “beer” in this blog’s description, but blog very little about it.

Yesterday, we went to France to buy some more beer. (If you’re reading outside Europe, you might not appreciate the wild difference in tax on beer between EU member states).

So - here’s a nice photo of some Kronenbourg. If you get told your train home is 4 hours delayed, what else is there to do than to drink? We enjoyed three cans of Kronenbourg Pur Malt before driving onto the train.

(If you’ve not yet guessed, it’s a zero-alcohol beer. It has over 70% of the French market. Costs the same as a coke. And it almost tastes like a proper beer, if not quite the same clean taste. Quite pleasant.)

I liked this photo, if only because it captures our slight unease at sitting in a car, drinking what looked like proper beer!

Any beer with its own page on Wikipedia is all right by me.

One of the very few authentic Belgian Trappist Ales, it’s bottle conditioned and doesn’t taste as sweet as, say, Leffe Triple (which it’s probably pretty close to).

The trout on the bottle (which is a trademarked shape) is holding a ring in its mouth; this was lost by someone called Mathilda who was then very happy and gave the monastery lots of money. And the rest, as they say, is history - except it probably isn’t.

(PS: The new camera is rather good, isn’t it? This was taken in dim flourescent light, and I didn’t even need a tripod.)

The old beer shelf was ruined when British Gas put in the (slightly wonky) new boiler, and all the pipes, and everything.

So, today was spent going to B&Q and buying an awful lot of wood and brackets and things. And then spending around three hours cutting things and drilling things and everything.

And, may I present, the (slightly overstocked) new beer shelves. Possibly my finest hour in DIY’ery.

One of the reasons I’m falling out of love with my camera is its shoddy, awful fuzzy picture quality in low light. Grr. Any recommendations for decent cameras would be very much appreciated: with the proviso that it must be a small point/click, not a big SLR.

Anyway: probably my last blog posting before Christmas: and a seasonal bottle of beer. Saint Landelin normally make either blonder or ambrée beer, but this is the Christmas special. The saint was the founder of Crespin Abbey, where this beer originated, in the Hainault province of Belgium (and there I was thinking that Hainault was a tube station). It’s now brewed in Douai, south of Lille, by Les Brasseurs de Gayant.

It bears a lot of resemblance to an ambrée, but is much more complex and tasty. At only 6.5%, it’s not terribly strong, either (though it certainly tastes it).

So, given I’m drinking a Christmas beer at the moment, perhaps now’s the time to wish you Season’s Greetings, and all the best for the next couple of days.