Australia - a good country for beer

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.