Increasing consumption of premium beers has been accompanied by a rise in home brewing. It’s been a major force in USA for decades. But in Australia, until recently, home brewing was probably perceived more as an underground, nerdy activity.

It might also have been seen as a neat way to save money – and easy, too, with a Coopers, or similar, home-brewing kit. But saving money appears to be less of a motivation to modern home brewers than the desire to make great beer.

Judging last year at Canberra’s home brewing competition was sufficient proof of that – as the best domestic brewers are thoroughly across all the major beer styles, from wheat ales, to barley wine to lager to stout.

And for some what starts as a hobby becomes a career as we’ve seen with Richard Watkins, brewer for the Wig & Pen, Christoph Zierholz of Zierholz Premium Brewery and now Dan Rayner, archaeologist.
Dan won last year’s home brewing comp, but he’s increasingly well known around town as the guy behind Plonk’s push into premium beers.

Plonk, now located at Fyshwick markets, has quickly carved a niche for itself as Canberra’s beer specialist. We’ll have a closer look at what it offers next week.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Although it skips along the surface, Greg Duncan Powell’s new ‘Beer – a gauge for enthusiasts’ hits a need. Its release coincided with brewer Lion Nathan’s startling news that ninety per cent of people aged over eighteen years don’t know what’s in beer.

In that light Greg’s 20-odd page précis at the beginning of the book could become a useful, friendly primer to ninety per cent of the adult population. It offers in twenty minutes of reading what might take an hour or two to pull together from Google.

The majority of the book (pages 28 to 187) delivers on the subtitle ‘a gauge for enthusiasts’. It presents Greg’s rating out of 100 points of about 150 beers. He groups the beers under metaphorical subheadings – ‘standard’, ‘premium’, ‘diesel’, ‘biofuel’ and ‘ethanol’ – and presents the ratings graphically as a fuel gauge.

I tested the book recently on a few beer-interested (in a casual sort of way) people. They connected with the metaphorical approach and understood the language. But interestingly, they tended to compare the reviews with their own tasting experiences – rather than seeing them as a guide. In other words they used the scores to rate the author’s palate.

Beer – a gauge for enthusiasts, Greg Duncan Powell, Murdoch Books, $29.95

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Having convinced drinkers that wine is best appreciated from fishbowl-sized glasses, another arm of Riedel – Spiegelau– has the beer-drinker’s psyche in its sights.

The press release arrived just before father’s day, accompanied by three very fine, elegant blown glasses – ‘the pilsner’, ‘the lager’ and ‘the wheat beer’. They’re beautiful glasses and certainly add to the sense of occasion when enjoying fine beers.

The wheat beer design, in particular, appeals because its bulbous top accommodates the abundant foam found in the best wheat beers, especially the bottle-conditioned versions, or hefeweizens.

Of course, the power of suggestion deeply affects how we taste and enjoy food, wine and beer – physically as well as psychologically. And the glass spruikers, being acutely aware of this, can lead rooms full of people to a blind faith in one-litre glasses – or a belief that every beverage demands its own perfect vessel.

Branded, distinctively shaped beer glasses have been part of Europe’s bar scene for decades. They’re catching on here with the growth of the premium beer market and certainly add to our pleasure. But part of the Spiegelau message is hard to swallow. Glasses that guide each beer style precisely to the right part of our palates – yeah, right!

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Lion Nathan’s chief brewer, Bill Taylor, says that his company’s ‘natural beer promise’ campaign began as a technical project by his brewing team.

The campaign, launched two weeks ago, promises to remove some additives and to use only five natural ingredients in the company’s key beer brands.

Taylor says that Tooheys New, Tooheys Old, XXXX Gold, XXXX Bitter, Swan Draught and West End Draught meet the new standards.

He says that improved technology, principally an improved ability to suck air from bottles and better use of carbon dioxide, meant the elimination of sulphur dioxide as an additive. It had previously been used at very low levels (around 10 parts per million) to mop up oxygen dissolved in the beer.

Other additives that have been eliminated include colouring agents such as caramel, brewing enzymes and tetra hops.

Taylor added that enzymes would still be used in low-carbohydrate beers – added at the mashing stage to aid extraction of fermentable carbohydrates from grain. And chemically modified hop extracts (tetra hops) that protect beer from ‘light strike’ will still be used in beers packaged in clear glass.

He said that the level of naturalness would ultimately appear on Lion’s beer packages.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Alas, this column’s deadline can’t accommodate the full breaking story. But by the time you read this, Australia’s second largest brewer, Lion Nathan, will have launched a ‘natural beer promise’ campaign.

The brewer’s embargoed press release claims that nine out of ten Aussies don’t know the ingredients used in making beer – a figure based on a September 2008 national survey of 1004 respondents aged 18 years or over.

The campaign, to be led by Lion’s brewing boss, Bill Taylor, promises to dispel the myths about popular, large-volume beers and to promote a new ‘natural beer promise’.

Bill says, ‘we’ve simply taken out some additives, improved the way we do things, and gone back to the basics of brewing with only five natural ingredients’. The ingredients are grain (malted or not), cane sugar, water, yeast and hops.

It’s sort of a sweetened version of Germany’s sixteenth century Rheinheitsgebot, or beer purity law, that allows grain, water and hops (yeast hadn’t been discovered at the time) but not sugar.

Lion claims its popular Tooheys New, Tooheys Old, XXXX Gold, XXXX Bitter, Swan Draught and West End Draught meet the new standards.

Visit this column next week for details of the changes. What are those additives that’ve been taken out?

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

There’s a long history of adding plant flavourings to beer. Hops is the most ubiquitous example, because its aromatic, delicious, bitterness counters beer’s malty richness so perfectly.

But the endless list of plants used by brewers covers everything from the sweet and sour cherry character of Belgium’s lambic beers, to sometimes cloying banana beers, to mildly spicy ginger beers.

I’ve tasted vindaloo-hot chilli beers and more subtle fruit expressions, like Matilda Bay’s grape-meets-grain ale containing Barossa shiraz juice. And only a few months back Chuck Hahn gave our palates the warm tang of Australian native pepper berries in a new James Squire brew.

But Hahn wasn’t the first to use a native plant. Richard Adamson and Scott Garnett of Baron’s Brewing claim that honour with their very good Black Wattle Original Ale and Lemon Myrtle Witbier, reviewed previously in this column.

We’re reminded of this because Adamson is off to the UK as Australia’s first guest brewer at the prestigious JDWetherspoons Beer Festival, rendering prophetic Bruce’s old Monty Python line: ‘This here’s wattle, an emblem of our land. You can stick it in a bottle, you can hold it in your hand’. Indeed you can.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

There’s a delicious slice of Germany in Fyshwick, in the unlikeliest site, just near the Telstra Shop in Kembla Street. Christoph Zierholz begun brewing there about two years ago but recently opened a café next to the brew kettles.

It’s open for lunch and dinner Mondays to Fridays and under chef Cameron Harmer offers a small but solidly German menu to match Zierholz’s equally Germanic brews.

These include a pale, grape-fruit-zesty Cologne style ale a nutty, bitter, sour, idiosyncratic Dusseldorf-inspired amber beer, a crisp northern German Pils style and an extraordinarily fruity southern German style weizen beer.

Christoph brews and matures these, and a few others as well, on the premises and they’re all served on tap. They’re available by the pint, half pint or as a set of seven tasting glasses.

There’s a bar, bench-style tables with stools and an inviting short menu based as much as possible, says Christoph, on local seasonal produce. Starters begin at $8.90 for barley soup with ham hock, spec and bretzel. Mains (like pork cutlet served with mash, red cabbage and sour apple relish) cost $15 to $17. And a Zierholz platter for two (German sausages and pork belly with sauerkraut and bretzels) costs $26.50.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Fat people drink skinny milk and skinny people drink fat milk. Could we be seeing the same paradox with low carb beers– the fatter we get the more we’ll turn to it in hope? By all accounts the style’s going gangbusters under names like Classic Blonde, Pure Blonde, Bondi Blonde and Platinum Blonde.

Giving up flavour in the slender hope of weight loss seems like a big sacrifice. But if you actually like the taste of beer and trade down from a full-blooded brew to one of the blondes, your kilojoule intake may not fall as much you’d hoped.

That’s because the beers tend to be full strength at a little under five per cent alcohol by volume. And alcohol carries a fairly dense energy load of around nine calories per gram.

A low-carb beer might have in the vicinity of 35 grams of alcohol in every litre. And Platinum Blonde, for example, claims to have about 14 grams of carbohydrate per litre, compared to 25 to 40 grams in a standard lager.

For those with weight problems a better solution might be to stick to full, rich, flavoursome beers but drink less. That way, at least, you can savour what you drink.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Canberra is to get a new brewery as part of Dr Jerry Schwartz’s overhaul of Olim’s Hotel, Ainslie. It’ll be Dr Schwartz’s second brewery, and it’ll be about three times the size of his original at the Macquarie Hotel, Sydney, says Olim’s Daniel Gaul.

Olim’s has been selling some of the Schwartz beers for the last few years. But Daniel says that it’ll carry the full range after the completion of renovations to the kitchen and bistro in about six weeks.

He expects construction of the brewery, which is to include a bottling line, to commence some time after that and to be completed by 2010. He says that Dr Schwartz plans to broaden distribution of the beer when the plant comes on line.

At the present eight-hectolitre plant in Sydney, brewer Samara Füss produces five different styes – Wheat Beer, Pale Ale, Bavaria Red Lager, Dark Bier and Pilsner, and has a Porter under development.

According to Schwartz’s website (www.schwartzbrewery.com) these are all brewed using grain only, without sugar or extract, with each batch showing its individuality.

Schwartz’s arrival will give Canberra its third brewpub. It’ll join our great landmark, the Wig & Pen, city, and the recently opened Zierholz Beer Café, Fyshwick.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

In Prost! The Story of German Beer, Horst D. Dornbusch argues that just as France, Italy and China gave the world its three great cuisines, no one, not even the Belgians, have ‘produced such a variety, complexity, and quality of brews as have the Germans and the English’.

Whether you accept that proposition or not – it won’t be a best seller in Brussels – it’s probably one of the most comprehensive short beer books around.

It sprints across Germany’s beer history, from the Bronze Age to the present, in about 150 pages. At full gallop it covers the emergence of European beer, the standardisation of beer making by 500 BC, Rome’s initial rejection of the barbaric beer culture, and how the empire later embraced it, monastic brewing in the dark ages and the later emergence of brewing feudal lords, themselves usurped as brewers by city burghers.

We learn how deeply meshed beer was in the economics and politics of regional Germany – and how local politics influenced regional specialties, for example, Bavaria’s Rheinheitsgebot (beer purity law) of 1516 set the scene for a lager brewing south.

Dornbusch describes Germany’s major beer styles, providing technical detail in plain English. It’s available through www.amazon.com at about $11 plus postage.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008