Category Archives: Beer

Craft beer positions itself with wine

11 December 2013BeerChris Shanahan

Co-director of Melbourne’s three-day Great Australian Beer SpecTAPular (GABS), Steve Jeffares, says the event attracted around 12.000 visitors this year. Then in late November, Jeffares invited breweries to participate in GABS 2014 at the Royal Exhibition Building from 23 to 25.

From next year GABs becomes part of Good Beer Week – a Victoria wide celebration of beer, established in 2011. Good beer week claims to have doubled the number of events to over 100 in 2012. And in 2013, reports its website, “Many of Melbourne’s leading culinary lights took part, including the traditional, such as Grossi Florentino and Metteo’s, and the new wave, such as Cumulus Up, Rockwell and Son, Kumo Izakaya and Pope Joan”.

Dramatic, sustained growth in craft beer consumption seems to be steadily repositioning beer as an upmarket beverage deserving of the same attention being lavished on wine.

Hops on the rise

27 November 2013BeerChris Shanahan

Hops once drew very little attention from drinkers. If anyone other than brewers talked about hops, it was normally about bitterness.

The explosion of craft brewing, however, generated a fascination with all the flavour components in beer, but especially with hops.

Late and dry hopping with aromatic hop varieties gave us popular session beers like Little Creatures Pale Ale. And, at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve seen the rise of uber hoppy brews, sometimes quite confronting in their bitterness.

The search for flavour and aroma nuances, in turn, gave rise to the breeding of new varieties, and a global search by brewers for just the right combinations for their brews.

Indeed, the trend recently prompted Australia’s largest grower, Hop Products Australia, to begin replanting one fifth of its hop fields in Victoria and Tasmania, principally to exclusive proprietary varieties.

Vintage beers – Coopers takes the crown

20 November 2013Beer, Beer reviewChris Shanahan

Ten thousand individually boxed bottles of Australia’s most expensive beer hit Australian retail shelves last week. Crown Ambassador Reserve Lager 2013, the sixth vintage produced by CUB, has a recommend retail price of $99 for a 750ml bottle.

CUB produces the beer just once a year, coinciding with the Myrtleford, Victoria, hop harvest. Galaxy hops from the region, hand harvested and added to the kettle within 24-hours, add to the brew’s distinctive character.

The 2013 vintage was brewed from 100 per cent Australian malt and hops. A portion of it was matured in seasoned French oak barrels, and the final product weighs in at a chubby 9.6 per cent alcohol. The high alcohol content and significant level of hops both add to the beer’s cellaring ability.

Brewers make most beers for current drinking. But the two reviewed today – Crown Ambassador and Cooper’s Extra Strong Vintage Ale – have the capacity to evolve with bottle age.

Crown Ambassador Reserve Lager 2013 750ml $99
Crown Ambassador pours into the glass cloudy and caramel–amber, topped by a dense, persistent foam. It’s fruity and pungently, florally hoppy, with deep, sweet, malty notes. The opulent, malt-sweet palate finishes hop-bitter with alcohol sweetness and warmth – the alcohol at present taking over the finish.

Coopers Strong Vintage Ale 2013 355ml 6-pack $25
Cooper’s vintage ale lurches strongly towards hops in 2013, their pungent aromas leap from the fresh-poured glass; their flavours dominate the palate; and their lingering bitterness complete the hoppiest vintage to date. However, the high alcohol (7.5 per cent) and rich, sweet malt largely offset the hops, suggesting a long flavour evolution in bottle.

Coca-Cola Amatil prepares for 2014 beer and cider launch

13 November 2013Beer, CiderChris Shanahan

When Coca Cola Amatil sold its stake in Pacific Beverages to SAB Miller, it agreed to remain out of the Australia beer and cider markets for a couple of years. But CCA always intended to re-enter the market and is now on the brink of doing so on a considerable scale.

Initially, CCA acquired Foster’s Group Pacific Limited (renamed Paradise Beverages (Fiji) Limited, owner of a Fiji brewery; entered into a joint venture with the Casella family to brew beer in Griffith, NSW; and then agreed to distribute Rekorderlig cider in Australia from 1 January 2014.

Then in early November Managing Director Terry Davis added several more products to the list – Molson Coors and Samuel Adams beers from the USA, and its own Alehouse draught beer and Pressman’s Australian cider.

The January 2014 launch should have a considerable impact on the Australian beer and cider markets.

First published 13 November 2013 in the Canberra Times.

Return of the tinny – in cans we trust

6 November 2013Beer, Beer reviewChris Shanahan

Lion chief brewer, Bill Taylor, sees a trend among American craft brewers away from bottles and back to cans. Indeed, SanTan Brewing, Arizona, this year hosted the third AmeriCAN craft beer festival – under the slogan, “In cans we trust”.

Taking up the cause locally, Australian Brewery’s Neal Cameron, now packages beer in elegant, slimline, 355ml cans for sale in Australia and export to the USA, Japan and, from 2014, India.

Cameron enthuses about the lower cost, lower weight and ease of packaging cans compared to glass. He also claims cans deliver better quality as they’re impervious to light and provide a better barrier against oxygen.

While exposure to light can damage beer, modern packaging technology should ensure little, if any, difference in oxygen levels between canned and bottled beer. Cans, though, should present a cheaper and easier packaging option for small brewers and another choice for drinkers.

The Australian Brewery Pale Ale 355ml can 4-pack $16
Australian Brewery’s naturally conditioned cloudy ale comes in a slim can that feels deceptively smaller than 355ml. As you pour, the abundant, dense white head says, “I’m very fresh” – an impression confirmed by the fruity–pungent hops aroma and lively, palate, also cut through with passionfruit-like hops flavours.

Wowsers rejoiced as cabinet rejects early Canberra brewery

30 October 2013BeerChris Shanahan

On 9 October, historian Dr Brett Stubs published Capital Brews, a brief history of brewing in Canberra. Stubbs piece marks the national capital’s centenary.

Surprising in a city not noted for moderation, let along abstinence, plans for Canberra’s first brewery ran aground in 1933. The territory’s liquor laws failed to allow for the granting of brewers’ licences.

“An application was made to establish a brewery at Braddon”, writes Stubbs. But approval of the venture would require an amendment to the law. The cabinet declined to do so. Subsequently the Methodist minister in nearby Reid sermonised relief at the decision, “not to allow the national capital to be disgraced by the erection within its bounds of a brewery”.

Ironically, Canberra’s first brewery, the Parson’s Pint, opened in 1989 at Glebe Park, just a stone’s throw from Reid.

Read Capital Brews by Brett Stubbs.

US brewers’ bureaucratic nightmare

23 October 2013BeerChris Shanahan

The recent American Government shut down highlighted a little known fact about the country’s vibrant craft-brewing industry. The shut down affected new brewers and existing brewers with new products to sell. While it continued to collect brewery taxes, the responsible agency “stopped approving new brews”, reported USA Today.

The report said the Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, an arm of the Treasury, must approve “all new beers that get bottled or canned to be sold across state lines”.

While beers and breweries with existing approvals were not affected, a growing backlog could have had a serious impact on those with new brews in the wings.

Carla Villa, of New York’s Brooklyn Brewery, described a domino effect, “it’s this one thing that then affects all these other things. We can’t launch beers on time, which means our distributors can’t sell it, which means our customers can’t buy it”, reports USA Today.

Beer brewing machine to be launched January 2014

16 October 2013Beer, PeopleChris Shanahan

OK, so you’ve got the coffee machine and thermostat-controlled kettle for delicate white and green teas – but how about a beer machine?

The Seattle Times reports the launch of a machine that “almost completely automates the process of producing beer” using grain, hops, yeast and water.

The machine, the PicoBrew Zymatic (about the size of a large microwave), is the invention of former Microsoft employees Bill Mitchell and Avi Geigner, and Mitchell’s brother Jim, a physicist, home brewer and designer of food-processing facilities.

The machine is currently being tested by several small breweries and experienced home brewers ahead of an anticipated commercial release in the USA in January.

The machine is controlled from a web browser and can be monitored from a smart phone. PicoBrew expect the price to be around $US1300.

View the PicoBrew machine.

Badlands Brewery to open in Orange

9 October 2013Beer, Beer reviewChris Shanahan

After years of home brewing, Jon Shiver completed post-grad studies in brewing at the University of Ballarat and established Badlands Brewery at Orange, NSW.

While Shiver developed his own beer recipes, he had the beers brewed under contract in Sydney, while he built his own brewery. With construction recently completed, he expects to be brewing in Orange by mid October, when he returns from a trip to England.

For some time he’s been offering Badlands beers at the Orange brewery site. But he recently moved the tasting to a new venue, The Agrarians – an outlet for produce of the Orange region. The venue includes a cheese factory, a café and a wine bar, says Shiver.

The high quality of his pale ale, reviewed below, suggest it’ll be a highlight of Orange’s fast-growing local food scene.

Badlands Brewery Pale Ale 330ml $3.85
From Orange, NSW, Badlands Pale, sits between the uber malty–hoppy American pale ale style and the mild, delicately balanced English versions. The back label carries a little matrix of maltiness, hoppiness and bitterness, accurately reflecting the rich, smooth, but not over-sweet malt, pungent but not overwhelming hops flavour and lingering, fresh bitterness.

Strong beer for India as Australia sobers up

2 October 2013BeerChris Shanahan

Some of the world’s biggest brewers are piling into the Indian market, exploiting the country’s fast-growing taste for high-alcohol beer.

A 24 September Reuters report says Calrsberg, SABMiller, Anheuser-Busch Inbev and United Breweries all now target a market dominated by whisky and in which strong beer (alcohol content of 5–8 per cent) “accounted for 83 per cent of all beer sold in India last year”.

The report says drinkers there want to get drunk, and they want products with a macho image.

This contrasts with a sobering Australia where, according to ABS data released on 18 September, total alcohol consumption declined in 2011–12 for the second consecutive years. Beer consumption hit a 66-year low, and our tastes moved from low and full-strength beer to mid-strength.

Full strength beer accounts for around 77 per cent of the total, comprised mainly of beers containing between 3.5 and 5 per cent alcohol by volume.