The beer industry is in a funny sort of spot lately. The average consumption of beer is decreasing, but yet the growth in craft beer has never been more active than it is now. There has been more craft breweries pop up over the course of the last few years than there are pimples on a teenage school boy. One of my mates recently said it was kind of like the music scene during the late 70’s and earl...
I like Australian-isms, I really do. I have a tendency to use sayings, most of them inappropriate, call people by names, and use a lot of rhyming slang for things. I was even trying to bring back the word “cobber” there for a while….till I heard KRudd use it whilst being interviewed. But it was this that made me stop a few years ago and notice the beers from Mildura Brewery, one of their reg...
BYRON BAY…famous for its beaches, the laid back lifestyle and their HUUUGEE Blues Fest…which has become more of a rock fest, but that’s beside the point. But if the stuff from Stone & Wood is anything to go by, it should be equally well known for its beers. Back in 2008, 3 guys set up Stone & Wood Brewing, leaving their corporate worlds behind and settling into a life of making...
My how things have changed. I remember when I first started sneaking into the back bar at the Centenary Hotel for a beer. Those days it was pretty easy, it was VB, XXXX or Gold on tap. It made it a little easier to not get busted. Gone are the days of only having XXXX Bitter or Gold on tap, these days you ask for a beer menu. And, the beer-toff in me, think it’s for the better, especially if you t...
I went to a 40th on the weekend and amidst all the plate breaking, gyros eating and watching my mate’s uncles do the zeibikiko dance (Google it), I was introduced to a new Greek delicacy, Mythos Hellenic Lager. Mythos beer as it turns out is Greece’s third highest selling beer; the brewery in Thessaloniki is the second largest in Greece. It hasn’t been available in Australia for that long, but it...
Beer is remarkable. It can raise emotions and opinions in the same way as politics and religion. People who drink beer generally have a view on the it. Sometimes it’s the ad’s, more-often it’s the over-all brand or price, often quite oft handed responses like “oh they make shite beers” Last year I reviewed Summer Bright Lager, that column was criticised, labelling my reacti...
Gee, the big boys of brewing must spend some money on marketing research. Working out when to release a beer, how to market it, what to make it look like and so on. The team at XXXX for example couldn’t have got their new low carb release “XXXX Summer Bright Lager” any more spot on for timing and appearance… perhaps they should have spent the same amount on creating a better taste though. T...
I put in some long, hard gruelling hours on Sunday at the Blue Sky Brewery doing literally hours and hours of quality research. Combine that with several hours of research on Friday night at a function for the Minister for War and Finance’s work, and you can probably start to see why I was having trouble getting my legs to work for me until about lunchtime on Monday. I was anxious about going down...