Category Archives: Beer

With today’s focus on alcohol and health, there’s sweet irony in the history of Coopers Brewery. Its founder, Thomas Cooper, first brewed beer in the family bathtub, urged to do so by an ailing Yorkshire-born wife, convinced of beer’s health benefits. She died.

But not because of the beer, said Dr Tim Cooper on a visit to Canberra last week. His ancestor remarried, fathered 19 children in the two marriages, and in 1862 moved from the bathtub to a proper brewery, perhaps so the kids could bathe.

A Methodist, convinced of the evil of spirits, wine and pubs, Thomas Cooper built his business on door-to-door sales. Only in 1905 did a descendent embrace the devil, and Coopers has been in pubs ever since.

But as the business faltered in the 1970s young Cooper opted for a career in medicine. In the mid eighties, practicing in the UK and seven years into cardiology studies, he felt the call of the family business – motivated partly by a belief in beer’s health giving qualities. So, it was off to Birmingham University to study brewing.

Cooper joined the family company in Adelaide as brewer in 1990, continuing to practice medicine on weekends. In 2001 Coopers moved from its original site to a new $40 million facility at Regency Park. Since then the company has fought off a hostile bid from Lion Nathan, invested another $70 million in production facilities and boosted production from 27 to 62 million litres – lifting its share of the Australian beer market from to 3.6 per cent, from one per cent. Dr Cooper still advocates the health benefits of moderate beer consumption.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Beer for the cellar?  You bet. On 30 June Coopers released its 2010 Extra Strong Vintage Ale – the tenth in the series following 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2009 – and on 2 August Foster’s released its third Crown Ambassador Reserve Lager 2010.

It’s a choice between the bling and dazzle of Crown’s gold-embossed 750m bottle at $90 (with a pair of purpose-built Riedel glasses for $129) or the no-frills 375ml Coopers 6-pack  at $20.

They’re clearly pitched at different markets. Crown pushes into luxury goods territory alongside, perfume and Champagne. It’ll even be served in Australia’s poshest restaurants – Quay, Catalina, Aria Sydney and Brisbane, Circa, The Prince and Grossi Florentino.

Coopers, on the other hand, comes in plain vanilla packaging saluting the company’s long, independent brewing heritage. There are no flashing lights here, just a straightforward appeal to beer lovers, particularly the Coopers faithful, of which there are many.

Without having sampled the 2010s, though, we can be sure they’ll both be top-notch, although very different brews – Crown, a high-alcohol lager, brewed in Melbourne under John Cozens; and Coopers, a strong, dark ale brewed in Adelaide under Dr Tim Cooper. Bottles are on the way now, so we’ll report on the comparative tasting next week.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

How much beer do Australians drink? A fair bit it seems, but less, per capita, than we did five years ago.

Figures released in May by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show we drank 104.7 litres a head in the year to June 2009 – well down on the 109.9 litres we enjoyed back in 2004, when we ranked fourth in the world behind the Czech Republic (156.9 litres), Ireland (131.1 litres) and Germany (115.8 litres).

The ABS figures reveal our clear preference for full-strength and mid-strength beer and a declining taste for low strength brews. Per person consumption of low alcohol beer (above 1.15 per cent alcohol, but less than 3.0 per cent) declined from 11.8 litres in 2007, to 10.4 litres in 2008 and 9.0 litres in 2009.

In the same period, per capita consumption of mid-strength beer (greater than 3.0 per cent alcohol but less than 3.5 per cent) increased slightly from 15.8 to 16.0 litres, while full-strength moved from 78.7 litres to 79.7 litres.

Our total intake of pure alcohol declined from 10.4 litres to 10.08 litres per person over 15 years between 2007 and 2009. Beer accounted for 4.54 litres of this in 2007 and 4.49 in 2009 – making it still our biggest source of alcohol nationally.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

There are delicious, idiosyncratic beers that belt you over the head (like Matilda Bay’s Long Shot, reviewed below), beers that beguile and seduce with subtlety (like Asahi Super Dry reviewed last month) and beers that just don’t register on the flavour meter, but succeed anyway.

The new Carlton Natural Super Dry Lager might fall into the latter category. The sample bottle arrived with the obligatory cliché, jargon-riddled press release. And the beer, to my taste, seemed low on flavour and bitterness, albeit with a trace of pleasant hops character. It’s a low carb beer – achieved by extending the “brewing process to break down the complex sugars”. But unfermented sugars contribute much to the flavour and body of traditional beers. Take them out and there’s a hole to fill. Brewers achieve this to some extent with clever use of hops.

To me, though, low-carb beers seem made for a neurotic market. And clichés like “the finest natural ingredients are brewed” and “Carlton Natural hits the flavour and style bulls-eye for 25 to 30 year old guys” simply don’t gel in the face of such bland flavours.

What’s marvellous, though, is that a brewer as big as Fosters has the ability to produce both a large volume, market-driven style like Carlton Natural and the idiosyncratic Matilda Bay Long Shot.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

On 20 June, Zierholz Premium Beers, Fyshwick released an oat malt stout on tap at its Kembla Street Fyshwick outlet. Brewer Christoph Zierholz calls the new stout a German take on an old English-Irish beer style. These traditional styles use a proportion of unmalted oatmeal, added during the brewing process, to create a rich, creamy smoothness to the palate.

But as Zierholz brews to Germany’s purity laws (using only water, malted grain, yeast and hops), he used malted oats, not oatmeal, to create the same effect.

The oats – along with roasted, malted barley and English-grown Kent Goldings and Brambling Cross hops – produced a 4.8 per cent alcohol stout. Zierholz describes it as having rich, roasted coffee flavours and a smooth, rounded texture, courtesy of the oat malt. We’ll review it in Food and Wine next week.

Canberra’s other brewery, the Wig and Pen, will shortly release its gold medal winning The Judges Are Old Codgers Russian Imperial Stout. Brewer Richard Watkins says it’s been maturing in tank for nine months. This year’s version is down to 8.5 per cent alcohol, a significant drop on the ten per cent we’ve seen in recent years.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Judges at this year’s Australian International Beer Awards sipped 1,112 brews from across the world. The catalogue of results makes mouth-watering reading as it lists all of the medal winners across the show’s 19 categories.

Some might be hard to track drown in Australia. But the long honours list includes plenty of readily available beers from breweries of all sizes.

Canberra’s Wig and Pen Brewery covered itself in glory as it has consistently for more than a decade. It won three gold, four silver and four bronze medals across an impressive range of styles. The brewery won golds for its Lambic style Tarty Blonde, Belgian-style Staggered and monumental Russian imperial stout, The Judges Are Old Codgers (but good judges, nevertheless).

But brewer Richard Watkins showed even more versatility. His other medal winning styles included barley wine, Kriek fruit beer, two intense hop-season ales, and a range of pale and dark ales in the Australian, British, American and Irish styles.

The judges’ champions from each of the major categories came from Oregon USA, Dunedin New Zealand, Colorado USA, Western Australia, Copenhagen Denmark, Hunter Valley New South Wales, Sydney New South Wales, Boston USA and Kansas City USA.

The catalogue is available at www.beerawards.com

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010