It’s the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. I know this not by the fruit laden vines that round the thatch-eaves run (who has eaves these days?) — but by the Hobart Mercury ad for hop-pickers.

Tasmania’s our main hop-growing area, and the ad, closing march 3, sought workers to put in10 hours a day, six days week for three weeks.  Hopefully the ad worked, because I’m told hop picking commenced in Victoria on 3 March and Tasmania won’t be far behind. The New Zealanders will soon be flat chat, too.

Much of the crop will be dried and pelletised for year-round brewing use. But increasingly we’re seeing brewers big and small putting those fresh, sappy, pungent, resiny hop flowers to stunning effect in seasonal brews.

It’ll only be a matter of weeks before we taste them in rich, malty beer flowing through the Wig & Pen’s hopinator. We’ll also keep and eye out for Red Hill Brewery beers made shortly after harvest ¬– they grow their own down there on the Mornington Peninsula and the fresh hop taste is a signature.

And a couple of months down the track we’ll enjoy two widely distributed bottled products – James Squire Hop Thief and Cascade First Harvest from Lion Nathan and Foster’s respectively.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Is it perception or fact that our popular ‘premium’ beers are blander now, especially in the hops department than they once were? There’s some evidence that it’s fact. Chuck Hahn once told me that modern Hahn Premium is considerably less bitter and hoppy than the original he brewed some twenty years ago.

Armed only with memories, a fresh palate and two much-loved, complex lagers as benchmarks (Warsteiner Premium Verum and De Bortoli’s Red Angus), I recently put four popular tipples, purchased from a local liquor store, to the taste test – Carlton Crown Lager, Hahn Premium Lager, James Boag’s Premium Lager and Cascade Premium Lager.

On the positive side they were all fresh, lively and clean variations on the lager theme. But what they lacked, as a group, was the positive, satisfying, complex flavours seen ever so subtly, and moreishly, in Warsteiner and more robustly in Red Angus.

‘Bland’ was my main descriptor, though the Hahn and Cascade showed a vestige of hoppy bitterness and Crown some tart delicacy. But the apparently fatter, heavier Boag’s simply failed to impress.

I get the impression they’ve been focus grouped and ‘de-brewed’ to meet popular taste – basically offending as few palates as possible. Thankfully there’s a vibrant counter culture ensuring that we can still enjoy beers that tastes like beer.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Despite the onslaught of wine over the past few decades and alcopops this century, beer remains Australia’s favourite source of alcohol – in both absolute volume and in per capita consumption.

In the year to June 2008 we consumed 170.5 million litres of pure alcohol – 78 million litres of it in beer; 53.6 million litres in wine; 20.2 million litres in spirits and 18.7 million litres in alcopops.

That works out at 9.95 litres of pure alcohol per person – 4.55 litres in beer, 3.13 litres in wine, 1.18 litres in spirits and 1.09 litres in alcopops. While per capita consumption of alcohol increased from 9.84 litres to 9.95 litres in the two years to 2008, per capita consumption of alcohol in beer declined marginally from 4.57 to 4.55 litres.

In that two year period we drank more full strength beer (greater than 3.5 per cent alcohol)– up from 60 to 63.6 million litres of alcohol; less low strength (down from 5.9 to 4.9 million litres); and more mid strength (up from 8.8 to 9.5 million litres).

What the raw statistical figures hide, of course, is the explosion in popularity of full-strength, low-carb beers and the continuing growth in premium products – now made up of locally brewed, imports and, increasingly, locally-brewed international brands.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Growth of the premium beer market, a corresponding explosion of contract brewing of international brands in Australia and a strong Australian dollar, set the scene for the unprecedented volumes of parallel importing we’re now enjoying.

This is the practice where large retailers and independent wholesalers bypass the official importers, or contract brewers, and import popular brands direct. They then sell the genuine article that they’ve imported alongside the locally brewed facsimile. It’s a kind of arbitrage, exploiting international variations in wholesale prices.

It’d be a highly profitable venture if only one party did it. But as it’s on for young and old, parallel importing tends to drag down prices for everyone in the distribution chain. Drinkers will never complain about the practice. But you can be sure there’s much tut-tutting at Lion Nathan and Foster’s as their locally brewed Becks and Stella Artois battle it out with the genuine articles imported by third parties.

While drinkers benefit from greater choice and lower prices, there is a trade-off between authenticity and freshness. This is because many parallel imports travel the world for some time before arriving in Australia. And with beer, freshness is crucial. A travel-weary Becks from Germany, for example, may be no match for its fresh facsimile brewed in Sydney.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

At its annual general meeting late last year, Adelaide-based Coopers claimed to have 3.4 per cent of the Australian beer market – after growing its total volumes by one per cent and interstate sales by 6.3 per cent in the previous year.

At the meeting, Coopers also announced plans to release a new product in the ‘dry beer low carb segment’ in January 2010. It said that this was partly to offset the loss of distribution rights for Budweiser to Lion Nathan, which had previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to buy Coopers.

Coopers had reportedly invested six million dollars in anticipation of producing Budweiser at its Regency Park brewery. But the acquisition of Anheuser Busch, owner of Budweiser, by InBev (now A-B InBev) in November 2008 led to the change of Australasian distribution from December 2009.

While the rapid growth of Australia’s highly-fragment premium beer market creates opportunities for Coopers – something it’s exploited profitably to date – it also presents a marketing challenge.

With a reputation so solidly rooted in the wholesome, wholemeal goodness of its bottle-fermented ales, could the development of relatively bland beers (like its 62 Pilsner, released last year, and entry into the inherently insipid low-carb market this week)  targeted at different drinkers, alienate the established customer base?

Extending old brands is inherently risky, especially when the brand extensions seem to offer values totally at odds with the old.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Late last year Byron Bay Brewery released its Premium Ale in PET plastic bottles – targeted at NSW venues now obliged by law to keep glass out of the hands of violent drunks. But protecting people from drunks and drunks from themselves is only one motive in the growing search for glass alternatives.

While public safety concerns drove Foster’s use of PET for wines sold at the Melbourne Cup in recent years, its larger scale adoption for exports of Wolf Blass wines in PET to Canada resulted primarily from Canada’s environmental laws.

Similarly, environmental concerns drove Lion Nathan’s release of three PET-packaged Mitchelton wines in Europe in late 2009.

In our carbon-conscious times, it’s hard to see how we can ultimately resist packaging with one-seventh the weight of glass. The savings, and presumably lower emissions, of handling and shipping promise to be enormous.

We’ve embraced plastic almost universally for soft drink and mineral water. But consumer acceptance of wine and beer in plastic depends on the product being in good condition. And it seems that earlier problems of gas permeability (air getting in, carbon dioxide getting out) have been overcome, for short-term storage anyway, by the development of multi-layer PET containers.

Currently beer in PET has a shelf life of about six months – compared to nine or ten months in glass. It may be a while before PET becomes mainstream, but the shift is underway.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Scotland’s BrewDog brewery recently launched Tactical Nuclear Penguin – a 32-per-cent-alcohol beer it claims to be the world’s strongest. The limited production of 500 bottles sold out in a blaze of publicity. And the web site no longer takes advance orders for batch two, at 35 pounds a bottle.

But I suspect the beer’s almost certainly more collectible than drinkable. I’m attempting to buy a bottle for review, but still have strong memories of a 17 per-cent-alcohol triple bock produced in the late nineties by America’s Samuel Adams brewery.

With other judges at International Beer Awards, Ballarat, I didn’t know how to rate an amazing curio that smelled and tasted more like vegemite than beer.

But if brewing a beer to 17 per cent alcohol pushes yeast to its limits, how did the cunning Scots achieve 32 per cent? Not entirely by brewing. They brewed an imperial stout to 11 per cent, and after maturing it in oak for eighteen months, stuck it in a cool room at minus 20 degrees. As the water in the beer froze, they decanted what was now an uber imperial stout away from the ice crystals – voila.

To view the process, Google ‘tactical nuclear penguin’ and select the ‘vimeo’ link.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

The late Max Lake wrote that taste begins with sight – and when you see the Moo Brew packaging, designed by John Kelly, you anticipate great beer. The expectation heightens when you visit the magnificent glass and steel Moorilla Estate building, fifteen minutes drive up the Derwent from Hobart.

In the ceiling above, as you ascend stairs to the restaurant and wine and beer tasting area, stretches the imposing, six-metre, John Olsen painting, The Source; while underfoot stands the beautifully preserved mummy case of Heryshefembat, circa 730–528BC.

These art works are precursors to the central attraction of the Moorilla complex – David Walsh’s museum of modern and ancient art, scheduled for opening in 2011.

In the two-story, elliptical glass and steel brewery, tacked on to the restaurant end of the building, Owen Johnston makes the Moo Brew beers.

The packaged versions have been consistently outstanding since their Canberra release in 2006. But if you’re in Hobart, you can savour absolutely fresh draft versions at a number of outlets, including the New Sydney Hotel and, of course, at Moorilla’s cellar door and restaurant.

The beers are complex but beautifully balanced and very, very drinkable.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

For a cold brew on a hot day there are few nicer spots than the Old Sydney Hotel in Bathurst Street, Hobart, if you happen to be down that way. The front bar has the cosiness of an English pub – a watering hole where people of all ages sip and chat comfortably against the background of live acoustic music.

On a recent visit, the bar offered sixteen beers on tap, ranging in style from wheat ale to stout, with selections from several microbrewers as well as Australia’s brewing giants Lion Nathan and Foster’s, owners, respectively, of Hobart’s Boag’s and Cascade breweries.

The local selection included the hearty, malty Winter Willie Warmer Dark Ale from Willie Simpson’s new Seven Sheds Brewery, located at Railton, near Devonport on the state’s north coast; and its pale and delicately fruity counterpart, Moo Brew Wheat Ale, from just up the Derwent River at David Walsh’s extraordinary Moorilla Estate complex.

What a pleasant surprise, too, to find delicious, fresh draught beers from distant Stone and Wood Brewery, Byron Bay – the exuberantly, fragrantly hoppy Draft Ale and zesty, light but complex Pale Lager.

Judging by the Saturday afternoon crowd and range of beers being pulled, the drift to interesting beers is alive and well.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009