Tag Archives: from Australia

Post-GABS Afternoon Taphouse Mooch

June 28, 2012 Phil 1 Comment

When you’re waiting for your plane home to Wellington, when you’ve been staying with friends in the near-Southern suburbs of Melbourne, when you’re in a post-Spectapular state of beery bliss mixed pleasantly with mild lethargy — and when, perhaps, you’re me — there really is no answer to “what shall I do this afternoon?” other than: wander down the road to the Local Taphouse and mooch.¹

I do love the Taphouse; it’s just so completely my kind of pub in a bajillion different ways. And to make matters even better, a good friend of mine (and former colleague from two crappy bars here in Wellington) had transplanted there and had the day shift. She fixed me a medically-necessary coffee, ordered an equally-mandatory stonking great big burger and poured a terrifically mood-improving beer in the form of a little glass of Mountain Goat ‘Hightail’, an old favourite of mine. I first met it at Beervana one year, then the leftover kegs joined us at Malthouse, and its easy-going, surefooted and balanced nature admirably coped with the rather unusual “go-with-this-breakfast” task I set.

We sat, we rambled, and we had a few little tasters of various beers. It was a perfect little afternoon at the pub; an ideal dose of simple hospitality after our grand and busy weekend. The Brooklyn East India Pale Ale caught our eye — hailing, as we do, from a country where that style term is famously abused by one of the nation’s biggest-selling mass-market sweet brown lagers² — and charmed us with its very old-school marmaladey Englishness, as did a bottle of Moon Dog ‘Melon Gibson’, a slightly-sour fruit beer from a “Marvellous Mullets” series (together, brilliantly, with ‘MacGuava’ and ‘Billy Ray Citrus’) and a welcome case of swagger and silliness accompanying worthy and interesting beer, rather than the former being used as a substitute for the latter; Moon Dog seem refreshingly capable of both.

It’s hard to resist a tasting paddle when you’re at the Taphouse,³ so before I realised how little time we had before we needed to head to the airport (through some combination of my lousy memory and being too accustomed to my little City, perhaps), I picked a fairly-random collection of things from the Big Board. Brew Boys’ ‘Ace of Spades’, my first of theirs, would’ve made even better sense with my coffee (but the burger, probably not so much) and was wonderfully fat, full and roasty. The Holgate ‘Temptress’ which followed was a fantastic contrast, with obvious chocolate and vanilla sweetness and the lovely smoothness that Nitrogen can give — and all the niggling dispense issues it can cause, which just kept K.T. happy supplied with a steady stream of leftovers.

Changing favour gears rather drastically to 3 Ravens ‘Ale Noir’, a smoked-and-Pinot-barrelled dark was rather confusing and confronting, but the beer seemed potentially quite interesting — not that I’ll get another chance with it; the brewery seems to’ve closed between then and now, sadly. After all that, Mornington’s IPA, perhaps inevitably, came across as outrageously fruity, almost to the point of absurdity. Generously hefty in the flavour department, it was full of citrus-peel bitterness that crackled across my brain. Those to in combination set me up nicely for the Australian Brewery’s Smoked IPA, which turned out surprisingly accessible; the smoke in ‘Ale Noir’ had that baconny, Rashuns-ish edge, but this had the sparkly notes you get if you squeeze orange peel into a candle flame, which made all the sense in the world given its citrussy pale ale base.

And then, pretty damn sated, we bid farewell and made our way to the airport and back home to Wellington. It was a freakin’ excellent weekend in the dear old Melb, and the Taphouse team deserve a lot of credit for GABS and their utterly-lovely home base. I’ll definitely be back next year, and hopefully considerably sooner than that.

Original Diary entry: Post-GABS Taphouse Afternoon Mooch 14/5/12 with Dom + Dave, and KT behind the bar. Coffee + Hightail + a sublime burger to start, then little tasters of Brooklyn EIPA + Moon Dog Melon Gibson. Before a near obligatory paddle: Australian Brewery Smoked IPA (5.9%), Mornington IPA (6.2%), 3 Ravens ‘Ale Noir’ (Smoked, 5.4% — Their Dark, aged in Pinot Noir barrels), Holgate ‘Temptress’ (Choc porter, 6%), Brewboys ‘Ace of Spades’ (Nitro stout, 5.9%). Going backwards, since nothing really seems strategically obvious. AOS: Big, fat + full roasty bitterness. HT is crazy smooth, vanilla evident (and a bitch to pour, so KT gets plenty of dregs) AN: Weird, a little confusing, but intersting. MIPA: Ludicrously fruit nose, after all those. Big citrus peel bitter body, afterward. SMIPA: Surprisingly accessible, given all that. AN is definitely baconny + Rashuns-y, this just has a little of that burning squeezed-pith sparkle.

Diary II entry #218.1, Post GABS Taphouse Afternoon Mooch

Diary II entry #218.2, Post GABS Taphouse Afternoon Mooch

1: Possible idiosyncratic dialect alert: I tend to use mooch in the lesser-but-still legit intransitive sense of “to loiter / wander about aimlessly” rather than the more-pejorative transitive one of “to obtain freely, esp. by subtle begging”. But it also does bear pointing out that Dom (owner of Hashigo Zake^a and fellow GABS volunteer) did pick up the tab for all three of us, which was a bloody lovely thing to do.
— a: Coincidentally, I’ve just made another potential-conflict disclosure — because I’ll be joining the Hashigo staff as an occasional fill-in to ease the squeezier weeks in their roster, earn me a little more beer money and keep my bartending muscles from atrophying — so I should get a few words of praise out of the way now, since the following thoughts were ultra-confirmed over GABS weekend. Hashigo really do genuinely invest in their staff (in ways varying from the mundane, like generous staff discount, to the spectacular, such as bringing his second-in-command along to Melbourne most-expenses-paid or arranging staff to go visit breweries and join in making one-off beers), and it shows. Their staff turnover is incredibly low, in an industry famous for high rates but a sector wherein accrued product knowledge and familiarity with regular customers and craft beer notables is absolutely key. The Fork & Brewer, which opened late last year and still hasn’t quite found its feet, is teetering right on the border of complete (i.e. 100%) turnover of its front of house staff — the last time Hashigo had a “new guy” was a year ago. Therein lies a difference worth watching, and worth learning from, if you ask me; it’s a pretty key symptom and cause of the health of any given bar in this scene.
2: Style-wise, Tui is really a “New Zealand Draught”, and (deservedly) cleans up in that category at the local beer awards. D.B., who produce it, are typically proud to shout awards from the hilltops (with a decades-old trophy still boasted on Export Dry’s label, and Tui’s ‘Blond’ sibling crowing about its more-recent successes), but they just can’t quite bring themselves to celebrate Tui being an award-winning something when it’s marketed as a something-else. Given how freely they bullshit about style on all other occasions, that’s frankly a pathetic lack of conviction. (I’d also go further and suggest that beer awards should have a little more muscle on the issue and just bar beers from being entered into categories that are contradicted by their presentation to the public.)
3: I assume. I’ve never tried.

Actual Diary entries

GABS Glass #4: Moo Brew ‘Belgo’

June 15, 2012 Phil Leave a comment

Reading the Big Book while waiting for my Food Coma to subside and my brain to ramp back up to some semblance of walking-and-talking ability, I noticed that I’d missed out a sessionable beer from what I thought was an exhaustive set of five. Shamefully so, since it was from Moo Brew, who’ve made any number of worthy things — including beers that comprised the bulk of a huge shipment which made its way over to the Malthouse and gave me my as-yet Greatest Ever Kegtris Challenge.

So — no better way to say Sorry than to buy a glass of beer, I suppose. ‘Belgo’ turned out to be a genuinely charming little bugger; deliciously quaffable at the magic four-point-five mark, and a perfectly endearing little mongrel¹ from mixed American Pale Ale and Lightly-Funky Belgian parentage. Hoppy-x is a still-ascendant trend, in new-beer-style terms, and most “hoppy Belgians” seem, to me, to’ve leapt to the higher ends of booze and flavour intensity — big fat Belgian meets overblown and brash American. But not this. This is just quietly doing its thing, doing it well, and not making a fuss; the contrast was truly welcome and appealing.

It was so calmly done, in fact, that the skeptical circuits of my brain (of which there are many) were fired up and beeping and buzzing. Together with the weirdly understated and underexplained tasting note in the Big Book — “Moo Brew simply asked us to let the punters be the judge of this…” — and the existence of their similarly-pitched (but non-Belgian) Pale Ale, this seemed to be one of those Happy Accidents with which the craft beer industry is not-infrequently blessed but rarely comfortable openly talking about (for no properly worthy reason).

Rescued mistakes — of pitching the wrong yeast, or slightly buggering-up the recipe, or of unexpected brew-to-brew sequence effects — have given us Yeastie Boys ‘Red Rackham’ (essentially a Belgianised ‘Hud-a-wa”), Invercargill ‘Men’n Skurrts’ (a slightly smoky scotch-ale-esque thing of pure joy inadvertently caused by the Rex Attitude brewed before it on the same gear), Liberty Brewing’s ‘Alpha Dogg’ (a mildly mangled brew of ‘C!tra’), and West Coast’s Amber Ale (a contracted beer that wasn’t quite what the contract-ee intended) — purely to name my favourites and the ones that leap most-readily from my broken memory. This happens a lot, and there is literally no point in dumping a drinkable-but-different beer entirely down the drain. Making beer is expensive, and there are many ways to non-fatally fuck it up.

‘Belgo’ has, post-GABS, joined the official Moo Brew range and been given its own little piece of that utterly-gorgeous label art that its definitely-non-bastard siblings possess, so I’m entirely happy to take Moo at their word that this is something entirely intentional and a stroke of genius rather than of luck. But fundamentally, I don’t mind. Whether ‘Belgo’ has its origins in one or not,² I like these Happy Accidents; craft beer is ripe for occasional doses of evolution-by-grand-mutation rather than over-cautious design — I just wish we were more open in talking about them when they happen.

Original Diary entry: GABS Glass #4: Moo Brew ‘Belgo’ 13/5/12, with sincere apologies for missing it off Paddle #1. ($8, 4.5%, 380ml) Rich golden colour, surprisingly. Nice easy funk, great quaffing mongrel¹ ale. Weirdly understated tasting note in the book — late sub-in? Not what they planned? No idea, but the result is unarguably just kinda nice. After-work Belgian. Can’t shake the suspicion it’s a rescued mistake.

Moo Brew 'Belgo', looming large under the Big Dome

Moo Brew 'Belgo', tasting note — The Big Book's tasting note for Moo Brew 'Belgo'

Diary II entry # 217, GABS Glass #3: Moo Brew 'Belgo'

1: It’s probably obvious, but perhaps worth underscoring,^a that I only ever use the word “mongrel” in a positive way. I am very much a Cosmopolitan, in political-philosophy terms,^b and a big fan of anything that causes a happy breakdown in overly-defended boundaries.
— a: Hence the two footnote anchors pointing to the same clarification (above).
— b: That Wikipedia article is totally worth a read, not-least because it starts from an Apollo Program photograph of Planet Earth and winds up talking about Art Deco architecture and thereby nicely encapsulates just the kind of Mongrelism I’m talking about.
2: [Swooping in with a late-breaking footnote mere minutes later to add:] Through the magic of the Twitters, I’ve since heard from Moo Brew that this was indeed an completely-intentional piece of cleverness (in my praising terms, not their own) rather than the Happy Accident I wondered about at the time and above. I really should’ve asked, in hindsight, but the idle ponderings were in my original Diary and I do like to keep these write-ups firmly in its spirit. (He says, partially attempting to excuse the journalistic failure, but also completely sincerely.)

Actual Diary entries

GABS Paddle #2: Random Favourites

June 15, 2012 Phil 2 Comments

The final Sunday-afternoon session of GABS was considerably lower-key than the ones which came before. There were fewer attendees (a shade less than the Friday afternoon session, perhaps would-be visitors were off being dutiful offspring for Mother’s Day), and the whole machine of the thing was running with now-practiced smoothness such that I, an early duties / backup volunteer had a particularly-early knockoff. Time, then — this not being rocket science — for a beer or several.

My first paddle was everything I could find from the ‘sessionable’ weight class of ≤ 4.5% ABV — I inadvertently overlooked the sixth on offer, Moo Brew’s ‘Belgo’, but I’ll get to that next — and for my second set of five, I decided simply to round up the beers from places I knew and was fond of for one reason or other. It did wind up rather a rag-tag collection, style-wise (though skewing heavily ‘Belgian’), and a sensible drinking order took some figuring-out, again. But I think I managed it; this was a fun little ride.

Starting with Bridge Road’s ‘God Save the Lager’ was daunting — since it’s a 7.5% Imperial Pilsner and I hadn’t really eaten breakfast before heading in to town — but made the most sense, style-wise. A return to tasting paddles made it re-obvious that a little / warmish / plastic sample only ever gives you a hint of a beer’s real character, but ‘G.S.T.L.’ seemed a nudge drier and ‘spicier’ than Epic’s ‘LARGER’ — though it definitely shared the element of being potentially very dangerous indeed. Also, “Imperial Pilsner” seems now to be well and truly a thing; it’ll be interesting to see how it goes, as a (sub-)style. Then, Doctor’s Orders ‘Plasma’ White IPA looked to be an obvious second, and shares the quality of having a style-name with an unexpected adjective in front of it. But really, where else to go, after Black IPA,¹ Red IPA and good old-fashioned — what do we even call it, now? — Regular / Middlingly-Brown IPA. The hazy-and-pale body makes you think “white” in Belgian-Wit-esque way, and the hops come through with enjoyably-peculiar notes that made me wish I’d given it a proper-glass try. I’ve had many glasses of Doctor’s Orders ‘Iron Lung’ black pilsner, so he’s got an obvious fondness for the stylistic colour-curveball and certainly seems to have the knack.

I’d had a little sip of the ‘Bob’s Farmhouse Ale’ from Murray’s when I understudy-hosted the ‘Beerista’ seminar during Friday night’s session but it was all a little lost in my personal bewilderment and hurry. It was, at this more-civilised pace, delicious. Cleverly named for both their original location (before they moved the brewery to a headland North of Newcastle and put a charming little pub on Manly Beach) and its super-saison(ish) style, it’s alarmingly drinkable for its massive dose of booze, and genuinely fun and funky while it’s at it. The Little Creatures / White Rabbit ‘Little Rabbit’ that followed, however, was a little more vexing. A collaboration between my long-loved Fremantle favourite and their (also fondly regarded) country cousin, it just seemed to fall well short of its promise. From the outset, it was — for its style — unsettlingly, needlessly clear (that’s it on the far right end of my tasting paddle, above, glowing much like Bridge Road’s souped-up pilsner) and seemed way too strong given its stated inspiration was Westmalle’s table beer. And even if that latter reference was just them reaching / being a bit generous / fudging things for the sake of ‘marketing’ and standing out in the Big Book of Many Blurbs, its strength just came across as too unbalancingly hot. It was nice, but still kinda sad, in context.

Then finally, the black sheep of the paddle: Seven Sheds ‘Black Elephant’, which I reached just as I noticed brewer / beer writer Willie Simpson on a nearby table. A few of his books were instrumental in the transitioning of me from Clueless Drinker to Something Of A Beer Geek and now — as you know, if you’ve made it this far — Part-time Beer-related Rambler. So I just had to embrace the moment of geek-out and say Hi, and am relieved to report (as I always have been able to, so far in this industry) that he turned out to be a lovely chap and very approachable. Fittingly enough for a writer-brewed beer, the Big Book’s tasting note — “a complex riot of roasty notes” — was bang on. ‘Black Elephant’ is apparently a blend (recipe-wise, I believe, rather than just piping two tanks together) of two Seven Sheds regulars; a Belgian strong ale (‘Elephant’s Trunk’) and a spiced strong dark ale (with the throw-back-ish name ‘Willie Warmer’).² And it tasted like just that; hugeness, spice, richness and the charming eccentricity of a mad old codger in a quiet pub.

Just to repeat myself, this tasting paddle was early in the Sunday session after almost no breakfast. And, to repeat praise from my general post-GABS ponderings, food at the festival was frequently fantastic. None moreso, to my mind, than the ‘Beef Debris’ Po’ Boys from the fine young folks at Gumbo Kitchen. I liked it so much I had one each day, and treated myself to this feast (he says, gesturing sideways) for the final day. There was a fried shrimp option for the po’ boy, but I could never tear myself from the sure-fire deliciousness of the beef. So I asked for a side of fried shrimp with my sammich, resulting in a glorious pile of omnomtastic goodness. After a boozy tasting paddle and this epic heap of endorphin-crackling delight, I had quite the happyface firmly affixed to my skull for a good while into the afternoon.

Original Diary entry: GABS Paddle #2: Random Favourites. 13/5/12 Happy Mothers Day. Quiet Sunday session, but a nice mood. (32) Bridge Road ‘God Save the Lager’ (7.5% Imperial Pilsner) Spicier than ‘LARGER’, though temperature and plastic make comparison tricky. Nice and dry. Could be deadly. (20) Doctor’s Orders ‘Plasma’ (7% White IPA) Nicely ‘white’ — cloudy, pale, like a witbier — peculiar hoppy nose (but again; limitations). Nice flavourful bitterness. Would be worth a shot. (25) Murray’s ‘Bob’s Farmouse Ale’ (9%) Pete Mitcham told me the name refers to the new location. Oak-aged, hazy + nearly as pale as #20. We had this at Beerista and it’s great fun(k). Love it. (57) Little Creatures / White Rabbit ‘Little Rabbit’ (6.9% Belgian) Similar colour as prior, but unexpectedly clear. Strong, given the stated inspiration (Westmalle’s table beer), and quite ‘hot’. Big round fruit from Noble hops (probably). (50) Seven Sheds ‘Black Elephant’ (7.8% Black Trappist) Willie Simpson! (Minor geek-out impending…) Fittingly, the note is bang on. “A complex riot of roasty notes.” Hell yes. Weird + good. Soy-saucy. [And he was perfectly nice about the geek-out.]

Diary II entry #216.1, GABS Paddle #2: Random Favourites

Diary II entry #216.2, GABS Paddle #2: Random Favourites

1: There are a couple of them in my Diary on upcoming pages — local boys Funk Estate put out a new one I’ve been liking / drinking a lot lately which whole-heartedly embraces the contradictory style-term — so I’m sure I’ll have a proper re-airing of the sometimes-vexed issue of “Black IPA”.
2: It gets the okay, I think, simply because his actual name is Willie. Otherwise, it’d be just so appallingly worth of an entry on Pumpclip Parade (well, if it had a pumpclip) — the label test even has the very Dad-joke-ish note “Guaranteed to warm the extremities”.

Actual Diary entries

GABS Glasses #2 & #3: Bright ‘Resistance Red’ and Wig & Pen ‘This Beer’s Not Real Craft!’

June 4, 2012 Phil 4 Comments

Well, there stands before you a blog-post-title-length record unlikely to be challenged for a while. I’ve no real idea why I ran two beers into one entry at the time, and I couldn’t figure out a fair way to abbreviate any of it; these were both lovely beers, and they deserve their name in lights. I can only manage blinky little LED lights here, but it’s a start.

After my near-delirium-inducing visit to Josie Bones, I walked back to the Exhibition Building for my pre-session duties and wound up meeting Jon Seltin,¹ brewer of the Bright ‘Harvest 150’ I’d had with lunch. He was back and forth through the queue several times, trying to track down his ticket, his “GABS 2012 Brewer” hat, and to locate some friends. I nerded out about the beer I’d just had, the Fainter’s Dubbel that impressed me so much when I was last in town, and the mild irony involved in being a brewery called “Bright” that only sells unfiltered beer.² He proved to be a thoroughly lovely chap indeed — and sports a magnificent beard, which always earns bonus points with me — and so there was no other plausible candidate for my late-session beer than his ‘Resistance Red Ale’.

And, even with geeky circumstantial motivations aside, it was a genuinely excellent thing. On the colour spectrum, it occupied proper red — a richly alluring siren-ish red-red still uncommon among “red ales” — and so it continued on the nose, in that marvellously synaesthesia-esque way that was so much fun when you first met 8 Wired’s ‘Tall Poppy’. It’s a big, jovial bastard, crammed with summery berryfruit flavours but blessed with the unstodgy agility of something considerably lighter.

Then: more beer! As I noted in passing while talking about my GABS Paddle #1, it was genuinely heartening to see beers from the Sour & Funky corner of the pantheon generating the kind of talk that the Truly Hoptastic had monopolised for a few years. I took it as a good sign of health and diversity in the scene and opted for a glass of this (he says, gesturing invisibly at the other photo) in equal parts celebration and nostalgia — the latter because it hails from my one-time local, the Wig & Pen in Canberra.³

Canberra, to side-track a moment, is a weird town. It’s tiny, relative to the nation of which it is the official capital, it’s one of those weirdly-contrived artificial cities, and the man who designed much of it seems to’ve lived in one of the shallower ends of the sanity bell-curve. I was at the Australian National University for a while, studying Philosophy with all sorts of marvellous people,⁴ and living on a decent scholarship right on campus near the center of town. The City was designed for a million residents, but still (after a century) only has a third that many, and the CBD gets particularly empty on the weekend — perhaps because such a chunk of the populace is comprised of sensible public-sector family-types hiding in the sparse suburbia. Couple that with the distance from the coast and the elevation above sea level causing temperatures to swing from 40° summer days to -4° winter chills and it frequently feels like you’re living in some recently-abandoned colony on the fucking moon.

But there was the blessed Wig & Pen — mere minutes from my bedroom — to save the day many, many times, and to help give me an appreciation for real beer. I loved the Wig, was utterly delighted to see them win Best Small Brewery at the AIBA, and am now feeling massively nostalgic for Canberra — of all places — partially just because I really want to visit that pub again. It’s a cute and cozy little place, with a non-obnoxiously contrived British Boozer kind of feel which, if anything, just makes perfect sense in an artificial city. They do a wide range of beers, all brewed on-site in a seemingly-poky little corner, which don’t bother adhering to any mindlessly-English-traditionalism the look of the place might suggest. It’s their brewer, Richard Watkins, who built most of the Hopinators in Australasian beer bars, after all. There was a story about it being up for sale last year, with the owner expressing a desire to retire, but I’m honestly not sure what came of that and I hope that if it does sell, someone just keeps it running as is and keeps Richard there making his lovely beers. (May we should chip in and buy it for him…)

Anyway, this thing — this bright golden, face-puckering, deliciously cleansing little thing. It’s just what I needed to end the day, despite being basically the opposite of what I usually think of when I think “nightcap”. My weekend’s days were long, and I was fading steadily, but this little bugger perked me right up. I grew up with a ~~crapabble~~⁵ crabapple tree in the front yard and developed a fondness for that perky-but-easy kind of sourness, and T.B.N.R.C.⁶ had a nose on it that made me think of those, if they hadn’t been red but rather green and Granny-Smith-ish. The body rounded out a little from the nose, and the result was just bloody good fun, pleasantly challenging but ultimately rather deliciously quaffable. Getting cheerfully tipsy on it some bakingly-hot Canberra summer afternoon would sure leave an impressively-puckered bliss-grin on your face.

Good people drink good beer, as Uncle Hunter reminds us. Jon and Richard are (further) proof that lovely people brew damn fine beer, too. Cheers to them both.

Diary II entry #215, GABS Glass #2: Bright 'Resistance Red Ale' & GABS Glass #3: Wig & Pen 'This Beer's Not Real Craft'

Original Diary entry: GABS Glass #2: Bright ‘Resistance Red Ale’ 12/5/12 7.2%, 380ml, 5 tokens ($10). Sirenny red, paler head than the wet-hop. We met Jon in the interminable queue — several times, poor guy. Couldn’t find his hat. Utterly lovely chap, great beard, patient with geekouts. Smells “Red!” like Tall Poppy did, that first time. Berryish + summery fruit flavours. Quite nimble for its strength. — and GABS Glass #3: Wig & Pen ‘This Beer’s Not Read Craft’ sour blonde @ 5%, 380ml, 5 tokens. Like Granny Smith crabapples on the nose, were such a thing to exist. Rounder in the face. Great combination of tart + fresh. Good fun. Nicely cleansing, with a puckering sideline.

1: If you head to Bright Brewery’s website around-about the time I post this, there should still be a superbly-disturbing-and-brilliant American-Beauty-esque poster for Harvest 150, featuring Jon.
2: “Bright beer”, by the way, is what you call it when the yeast is no longer in suspension, whether you just let it drop slowly (maybe with some finings to help) or filter it out. The brewery, in fact, is named after the small Victorian town in which it operates. I was, as will surprise few of my friends, unable to resist the geeky pun of it all, however.
3: Their website was, for the longest time, a glorious relic of mid-nineties Microsoft FrontPage-era delights. But I’ve just looked again, and it pretty-much looks like they’ve been taken over by a particularly-resourceful domain name squatter, which is both weirder and sadder.
4: And, for a good chunk of my time, in a fucking marvellously whacked-out building. The Coombs Building, home of the Research School of Social Sciences, is a triple-interlocked-honeycomb oddity with differing floor levels from octagon to octagon. It was an easy beast to get lost in, and made for brilliantly-productive philosophy-contemplating-wanderings if I needed to hide from the heat.
5: Oops. Thanks to Stu for catching that delightful typo. “Crapapple” is one of my idiosyncratic expletives, and I swear a lot more often than I reminisce about my childhood — “crapabble” is apparently what happens when I attempt to transition from doing the former to doing the latter while typing at a fairly decent rate.
6: I’m still not sure quite why the name, other than the pure cheerfully counter-trend nature of a weird little sour coming after those years of the hop-fashion. The notes in the official GABS booklet weren’t much help on that score, but do note the awesome titbit that the beer is a blend of 18-month, 18-week and 18-day old batches.

Actual Diary entries, Location notes

Josie Bones (and Bright ‘Harvest 150’)

May 26, 2012 Phil Leave a comment

Bright Brewery 'Harvest 150' at Josie Bones — Bright Brewery ‘Harvest 150’ (with a predictably-frequently-used meat slicer, and co-founder Chris Badenoch)

If I go missing one day, if you can’t find me for a while and have no idea where I’ve gone, check the cupboards and crawlspaces at Josie Bones in Melbourne. I’d only been there an hour before I was casing the place, looking for a place to stowaway and secretly live — emerging in the dead of night to drink lovely beer and feast on delicious leftovers.

Like my now-beloved Local Taphouse, Josie Bones was one of those amazing-sounding places that opened shortly after I moved back to Wellington. But despite occasional trips back, I’d never managed a visit until the Saturday afternoon between GABS sessions three and four. Hashigo’s David Wood and I met up with my Melbourne-resident friend Toby, and we seized the chance.

It was freakin’ awesome — as I may have telegraphed by suggesting I might disappear there some day. It’s a cute little place (smaller than I, for some reason, thought it’d be), charming and welcoming, well-presented but completely unpretentious. We took a seat at the bar, and quickly realised we were being served by the two founders — recognisable to those People Who Watch the Teevee Box as former Masterchef Australia contestants.

Josie Bones is a massively uncommon thing; a place that properly ‘gets’ food and beer. The beer menu is a gloriously fat clipboard of helpfulness (backed-up by the knowledge and enthusiasm housed in the brains of the staff), and there’s a healthy range available from the taps and/or the fridge. They’d done a wet-hop beer dinner just a few days prior, and several survivors were still pouring. I opted for Bright’s ‘Harvest 150’, since I couldn’t stop yammering about their Fainter’s Dubbel at a mini-beer-fest in Fed Square a few weeks previous. It, too, was exactly what I wanted — fat, rich red malt and plenty of fresh-hop zing and zip around the palate; full-on, but self-assured, rather than desperately clamouring for attention. I (a currently-unemployed person who’s lately been earning meager bartender-money, as I said before) splashed out on some stupidly-delicious food, and the combination of sensory delights nearly crippled me with joy. (And left me, not to belabour the point, idly planning how to move in.)

The overwhelming sensation — of the people, the place and the beer — was of welcome. Which is remarkably rare, in the “hospitality” (quote-unquote) business, but gleefully and glaringly obvious when done right. It’s a (deservedly) famously “meaty” place, with back-bar art and even door handles that seem to scream “Vegetarians: Fuck Off”. But that’s not it at all. I have it on very good authority from a non-omnivorous friend that, if you stand your ground and ask for things other-than-flesh, they have plenty and it’s just as mind-meltingly delicious. So the trotter-handles and the carcass-painting aren’t a prohibition; they’re just a friendly warning. Ditto the broad beer spectrum. It’s there if you want it, and if you’re remotely curious or just vaguely open-minded, you’ll be helped towards finding something you’ll cherish without scorn or harangue. They’re proud of their ability to match beer to people and people-and-beers to food expertly derived from former animals; they present it forthrightly and with justifiable pride. But it’s not all they do — though if they do bring you into their fold, you’ll become a tally-mark on their wall. I’m told they started keeping track of people they made recant their former “I don’t drink beer” self-identification — and that the smaller tally represented de-converted vegetarians.

Original Diary entry: Josie Bones 12/5/12, inbetween sessions. Finally made it here, and I already want to secretly live in one of their cupboards. Smaller than I thought, nicely kitted out, friendly and welcoming. I’ve got a Bright Brewery ‘Harvest 150’ (7%, $10, 330ml), which is stunning. Gorgeously red, smooth tan head, big fresh hop presence. Like what Garage Project were going for (and mostly got) with ‘Oldham’s Farm’. I splashed out, in hunger and excitement, and got Crackling of the Day (Pork, $4), Fries with Thyme + Prosciutto Salt + Chiptole Aioli ($9) and Crispy Beer-marinated Quail with Pickled Quail Egg ($9). Now, I’m rather satisfied, I must say.

Josie Bones' "May the pork be with you..." receipt

Actual Diary entries

GABS Paddle #1: Everything ≤ 4.5% ABV

May 20, 2012 Phil Leave a comment

As I’ve mentioned a few times when talking about GABS, my Friday was very sleep-deprived; I only had two hours sleep on Thursday night — my nocturnal nature meshes not at all with early-morning flights — and wound up awake for some twenty-six hours. So I took it very easy, those first two sessions.

I’m a dedicated flag-bearer for midstrength / sessionable beer, and was delighted to see that in a festival of (mostly…) one-offs, I was still able to assemble a paddle-worth of beers at-or-under 4.5% ABV.¹ They were pleasingly varied, style-wise (though that did make figuring out a drinking order rather perplexing), which I took to be a good sign of the increasing health of this corner of the industry.

I started with Croucher ‘ANZUS’ — as did the festival, since this was officially beer #1 on the Big Board, and a fittingly trans-Tasman² way to begin what really was a genuinely Australasian festival. The Little Country wasn’t just there in a tokenistic way; a quarter of the beers were from over here, and from what I’ve read, a lot of Australians had a pleasingly eye-opening experience with New Zealand craft beer. ANZUS is a 2.7% hoppy pale ale, which puts it in the same family as Hallertau ‘Minimus’ and Liberty’s ‘Taranaki Session Beer’, and if that family is determined to have more offspring then I’ll gladly give them all the oysters and tax breaks I can to encourage the activity. Minimus was my ‘Beer of the Year’ for 2011, together with its brothers-from-other-mothers, so I’m positively delighted to see more of them around. It was delicious, and well-balanced — no easy trick at that ABV — and refreshingly bitter. So far as one can tell from a festival-thimble, at least. It’d make a cracker addition to their full range — hint hint, Paul, hint hint.

Next was the Sarsaparilla Stout from country-Victoria’s Grand Ridge, a brewery I have some extra fondness for after a particularly-excellent birthday evening-and-morning spent there years ago. I didn’t notice the mention of licorice in the book until after my first sip — and man do I hate licorice — so the very-much black jellybean nature of the thing was an unpleasant surprise. But if that’s your thing, this’d be a damn-handy four-percent sweet stout to have lying around for wintery afternoons. The Mash³ ‘Koffee Stout’ was only a touch stronger (or 0.3 of a touch, depending on how you calibrate these things), and muchmore my speed, caffeine-fueled organism that I am. Sessionable coffee stout sounds like perfect Writing Beer, to me.

I finished with a Pair of Weirds, one minor, one major. Hargreaves Hill’s ‘La Grisette’ was a bit of a history lesson, in both beer-style and words-of-French-origin terms. The basic idea seemed to be of a blue-collar after-work Belgian; a less-funky old-style Saison, perhaps. The flavours evoked a lot of sweetness, at first, but it dried right out at the back of the palate and could indeed make for a wonderful hot-day restorative. But then, damn. Feral’s ‘Watermelon Warhead’ was one of those beers that was the talk of the festival — in the “no, fucking seriously; try it” sense. An intensely sour Berliner Weisse, dosed with Watermelon juice and fermented in Chardonnay barrels, it was face-puckeringly surprising and brain-tinglingly fantastic. Alice Galletly likened it — in this growd of nearly-five-dozen beers — to a palate-cleansing sorbet, and that’s bang on.⁴ Making things even more impressive, it transpired that the ABV in the booklet (2.9%) was essentially a work-in-progress guess / estimate / number read of freshly-rolled dice; the beer was more likely around one point nine, making it handsomely the most flavourful — and most charmingly odd — “light beer” I’ve ever had within grabbing distance, or been tempted to grab.

Diary II entry #212, GABS Paddle #1: Everything ≤ 4.5% ABV

Original Diary entry: GABS Paddle #1: Everything ≤ 4.5% ABV 11/5/12 in this absurdly gorgeous building back in the beloved Melb. (1) Croucher ‘ANZUS’ (2.7%) A little warmer thant I’d like, but still. In the Minimus mold, obviously, more bitter? Hard to tell from 85ml. (34) Grand Ridge ‘Sarsparilla’ Stout (4%) ~ and licorice root really evident. Black jellybean. Subbed for a hop addition, so rather sweet. (58) Mash ‘Koffee Stout’ (4.3%) Much more my speed. Tasty, but subtle. (36) Hargreaves Hill ‘La Grisette’ (3.8%) A style I’ve never heard of, but kind like. Feels like it’ll be sweet, but dries right out. Weird, but worthy. (55) Feral ‘Watermelon Warhead’ (2.9%) My first Berliner Weisse, and it’s exactly as sour as I’d like. Tart and indeed Watermelonny. Still nicely round.

1: There were actually six in the book, it turned out. I missed one — Moo Brew’s ‘Belgo’ — entirely. But, to atone, I had a whole glass on the Sunday. You’ll see it here soon.
2: Let’s just ignore, provisionally, the rather-fraught third (‘US’) member of that Treaty and focus on the ‘A’-‘NZ’ relationship for a moment — my guess is that Croucher are referring, all at once, to being a New Zealand beer at a festival in Australia, brewed in a vaguely-American style.
3: This being from Mash Brewing in WA, not from the Mash Collective which operates out of Stone & Wood in NSW (which also had a beer in the lineup). It’s probably a very good sign that breweries are proliferating rapidly enough that their names are starting to collide.^a
— a: See also, for example, New Zealand’s plural ~Dog beers: ParrotDog, Rain Dogs, Black Dog.
4: Watermelon Warhead was also tied — with a Wig & Pen beer that became my GABS Glass #3 — for the lowest-posted official IBU rating, at a ‘paltry’ 6. Which just goes to show you, among all the hop-fashion and bitterness-chasing, that sour beers really can deliver intensity from a whole ’nother direction.

Actual Diary entries

Little Creatures Single Batch Oatmeal Stout

April 16, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

It’s hardly a secret: I loves the Little Creatures, I do. It continues to pain me greatly that only the Pale Ale is available over here in New Zealand — as much as I freakin’ adore it, they’ve long make other brilliant things and have relatively-recently started doing these ‘Single Batch’ runs.

Coincidentally, I was just (before writing this up) listening to the first episode of Radio Brews News, a new podcast from some fine folk over in the Big Country. One of the topics of conversation was another Creatures ‘Single Batch’, a recently-released Märzen. Apparently it wasn’t overly well-received, with the general sense among some of the Beer Geek Crowd (not really shared by those on the podcast) that one-offs should be over-the-top, and anything shy of crazypants is a disappointment. Which, frankly, is bonkers. Firstly, there’s a solid case to be made that a Märzen which knocks your socks off is, at least, not quite right; they’re pretty easy-going things, by design. And secondly, I do tire of that undercurrent of thinking that only the big-and-brash are worth celebrating. There’s a lot to be said for well-made pieces of relaxing and restrained loveliness. Like this.

Also rather coincidentally, I’d recently been talking about Beer-and-x Matching. I know basically nothing about food,¹ so I’m all at sea when it comes to the finally-fashionable field of beer-and-food matching. Perhaps to compensate as much as for the inherent fun of it, I was recently talking about beer-and-music matching on the Twitterthing — so I’m listening to Talking Heads while writing this, for reasons that’ll be apparent if your Music Trivia skill is high enough² — and Pete Brown also brought up the subject of beer-and-books matching with excellent timing and linking it to a discussion of the broderline-synesthesia I sometimes try to hide behind when my ‘tasting note’ comparisons get particularly-loopy. But the best x is as true as it sounds twee to say: good beer goes best with good people.³

And this beer was linked to several. My friend Kirsten bought it for me when she was over in Melbourne for work, going so far as to lie about not being able to get any to bring home and leaving it to send me all geek-giddy when I just discovered it in her fridge. We didn’t get around to drinking it, distracted by good bars and good food as we were, so I thought it’d make a good bar-warming thing to split with Scott at his new pub — though it took us a few months to finally have it. Good thing I’m an alarmingly-patient fellow, sometimes; I was dead keen to try this. But it all worked out nicely; we had some good stories to share, and were joined by my flatmate (and our mutual friend and former colleague) Megan, and my friend KT. Just bloody marvellous.

So it was in good company, but it didn’t rest and try to coast on that advantage; it was delightful all of its own doing, as well. It was a wonderfully deft stout — only 4.2%, and with a light, silky body that still managed to have a real smoothness to it (presumably thanks to the oatmeal). The coffee-in-a-chocolate-milkshake flavour is delicious and not overblown — but still easily enough to warrant the sip-and-savour that a much heavier beer normally calls for or demands. I say in my notes that I was on a good stout run — which I am, and which I can tell you (from flipping forward a few pages) continues a good while yet — but that’s a two-edged thing; this could’ve been eclipsed by other recent beers, if it wasn’t something special. But it was just what I was looking for, exactly what I was hoping it’d be, and totally worth waiting for. Now I just have to find a suitable occasion for my second bottle…

Verbatim: Little Creatures Single Batch Oatmeal Stout 16/4/11 @ HG with Scotty, at last. Related a Good Story About Malthouse, so it seemed apt. 568ml — “pint-sized!”, 4.2%, and that [is] apparent in its lovely-lovely lightness. Deliciously smooth coffee / choc-milkshake wave a few seconds in. Just what I wanted, again. I am on a good stout run. Scott’s bottle-opener, “Freddie”, went well, given Pipsqueak’s logo. It’s deft, and confidently-understated. Plus I got to split it with KT, as well!

Little Creatures Single Batch Oatmeal Stout, brewers' scribble

1: Dinner tonight was scrambled eggs. That’s just about as elaborate a meal as I have ever prepared, or ever realistically aspire to prepare, on my own. Though, in my defence: they were excellent; the Three Boys Wheat I had complemented them wonderfully; and I’m not terrible as a sous-chef, so long as you find enthusiastic ignorance amusing, rather than irritating.
2: If not: Talking Heads released an album called Little Creatures, back in 1985. It and the live-in-the-bottle nature of their first and flagship product combined to inspire the name of the brewery, so the story goes.
3: Helpfully, good people drink good beer, as Hunter reminds us.

Actual Diary entries

Little Creatures Pale Ale on Australia Day

January 26, 2011 Phil 2 Comments

Ordinarily, I have a fairly ‘involved’ Australia Day. Especially given that I’m not, you know, Australian. But it’s basically my favourite National Holiday, and I do wish our own Waitangi Day were more like it — something I’ve tried to implement, occasionally, with moderate success (if I do say so).

My first Australia Day was in 2001, when I was a summer scholarship student at the ANU in Canberra. And it was freaking awesome. Blisteringly hot weather (which I’d usually vote against), the Triple J ‘Hottest 100’ on the radio from 10am onwards, wading pools to sit in, barbequed food aplenty — and, on that initial occasion, a case of Coopers Sparkling Ale. Now, I usually take the day off, buy some good Australian beer, and mooch around somewhere sunny (but with shade nearby), listening to the ‘radio’ over the internet. Owing to an overload of Extraneous Stuff this year, my plans were somewhat mucked-about, but I still made sure to get myself well-stocked with lovely Big Country beer — and was moved to note it in the Diary at least, if I couldn’t have myself a proper Day.

I’ve said it many times before, but I really do love Little Creatures Pale. Coopers Sparkling was my first good Australian beer, but Creatures Pale has become probably my favourite, full stop. “Favourite” is always a tricky title to hand out, especially when you’re a Big Nerd. But when you are the Big Nerd at a Big Beer Bar, people do ask. Often, and pressingly. And I think that if push came to absolute shove, Creatures Pale would be it. It’s just so reliably lovely, nicely middling between ‘flavourful’ and ‘mellow’, and it also — keeping the situatedness of beer firmly in mind, as I always insist — just has, for me, so many brilliant memories densely packed into the brainspace around it.

The actual photos on this post are from about a month later, when I’d finally gone and splashed out on a new camera. I’m enough of a weirdo about these things that I did pretty much insist to myself that the new gadget’s first beer photo be the beloved Creatures. You have to get these things off to good starts, you do. It’s a lovely piece of kit, and still enjoyably baffling as I get to know the nearly-innumerable bells and whistles.

There is some bloody marvellous beer-related photography going on at the moment, and if you’re not already acquainted with the work of Aaron Caruana, Jed Soane, and Robert & Kim from ‘Beer Lens’ (just to pick my three most-frequented favourites, which helpfully also manage to hit the Big Country, Little Country, UK and US buttons between them), you damn well should be. I know that good gear isn’t even half of what makes for good photos, but those are the sorts of people who make me want to lift my game.

I’ve always loved the plea to use a glass for your Creatures, too, so was instantly presented with an excellent opportunity to take the macro settings for a spin, as well. I really like the result, with its awesomely-blurred Background Peter looking on. And seriously, folks, if a beer is worth drinking at all, then it’s worth drinking from a glass. That’s the rule.

Verbatim: Little Creatures Pale Ale 26/1/11 $20/6pk @ GG 330ml 5.2% Happy Australia Day! Though this is basically my tamest, since my first. Too much extraneous stuff, this year. But this stuff is just mandatory. And there’ll be a Cooper’s Sparkling, later. It’s just bloody lovely. That’s the word. This is always my arm-twisted citation for all-round favourite, when people ask here at work.

Little Creatures Pale Ale, serving suggestion

Actual Diary entries

Matilda Bay ‘Fat Yak’

January 10, 2011 Phil 1 Comment

It does seem to me that (though the traffic in both directions is still painfully slow) the Australians are having better luck at getting good New Zealand beer available over there than we are with the vice-versa, over here. We do manage to get some goodies at work, though, and have more in the pipelines…

Matilda Bay are one of those little-sibling operations owned by one of the giants (Foster’s, in this case), though it as originally an independent West Australian operation — its founders went on to start my beloved Little Creatures (itself part-owned by the giant Lion Nathan). It’s a hotly-disputed brewery in Australian beer geek circles when the “what is — and what is not — ‘craft’ beer, anyway?” definition comes up, as it cyclically does. And when we got this on tap at work, the local beer geeks were typically not massively enamoured of it, to say the least, usually finding it too mild. But I think you have to remember that the hoppy-hoppy end of the pale ale spectrum has been less explored in Australia than over here, and that Cooper’s Pale Ale exerts a massive gravitational effect on the term. So this exists as a Gateway Beer, and is very well suited to that admirable and necessary job — especially when you remember that the same company produce a “proper” APA, ‘Alpha’.

Which reminds me that I really should upload the entries from my October 2008 & April 2009 Melbourne trips; those were my introductions to all sorts of lovely Australian beers.

Verbatim: Matilda Bay ‘Fat Yak’ Pale Ale 10/1/11 on tap @ MH. Fairly sure I had it as part of my paddle @ Taphouse. Not popular with the Nerds — too mild. But I like it since it’s more Aussie stuff making the trip. And it’s inherently worthy enough as Baby’s First APA, which is necessary over there, given Coopers’ gravitational pull on the term. Plus, there’s always ‘Alpha’.

Actual Diary entries

Croucher ‘Hef’, Burleigh ‘Hef’ and Red Hill Wheat Beer

December 22, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

I’m not crash-keen on wheat beers. I mean, I do like several of them very much (Three Boys Wheat is a stand-out example), but I’m rarely quite in the mood — if I want something this light, I usually reach for a golden ale. But that’s just me. It was a stinking hot day, so I indulged myself in a side-by-side(-by-side); I bought the foremost after the Croucher ‘October’ confusion, and had the latter two thanks to my Australian friend Glenn and his duty-free allowance.

I also couldn’t help but put two identically-named beers against each other. I’d have thought that the hefeweizen / Hugh Hefner joke was a common one, but I could only find two others on BeerAdvocate.com.¹ I’m torn, deciding a winner on that score — Burleigh put a stonking great moustache on the label, which is awesome, but I thought the Hef himself was pretty much always clean-shaven, which seems to me like Points Off, then.

The variance among the three was quite striking and made for a pleasantly-random scattergun sequence of sips from each — although what amounted to three standard-sized regular-strength beers in quick succession did catch up on me in the heat. Croucher’s was the darkest, tending towards banana cake rather than the habitual-for-hefe fresh banana note. On occasions that side of it seemed too much or just slightly off, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker. Burleigh’s was much more in that ‘classic’ mode with light, fresh fruitiness, and then Red Hill’s threw in what I thought was a pretty noticeable hop sideline — possibly dragging it out of the traditional form, but interestingly so.

My absolute favourite factoid about German-style wheat beers centres on that banana flavour. Learning about how the yeast just coincidentally made that very-familiar ester was an early Beer Nerdery moment for me (tutored by my biochemistry-majoring friend Toby, out on the balcony of the original Malthouse with a Tuatara tasting tray), but the best bit is that the Germans have been making hefe since long before they ever had bananas imported. So where we normally meet the fruit first and then think that the beer tastes like it, there must’ve been a point in history where Germans would first try this odd exotic fruit and say to themselves “damn, this tastes like wheat beer“. How wonderfully odd. I really must try to track down a historical reference.

Verbatim: Croucher ‘Hef’, Burleigh ‘Hef’ & Red Hill Wheat Beer all 330ml + 5%, latter two from Glenn, so I couldn’t resist a comparison on a muggy day. 22/12/10 I should’ve really done a bright sunny day photo, but I’m hiding inside. I wonder how many other tokens of the Hef/e trope there are… But Burleigh get extra cred for the silly ‘tache on their label. Croucher’s darkest, ambery even, then RH, then Burleigh. Taste + smells go: funky (too much?) banana cakey; then lighter, fresher banana: smoother; then light + with a more-present hop sideline (they grow their own Tettnanger @ RH). This is basically science now, right? Amelia’s right that Croucher’s cakeyness is as if the cake has been in the sun too long — a slightly past-it-ness. I’m still not entirely a wheat beer guy, but they do have their place — hot days. Which I usually just try to avoid entirely. And then, nearly a litre of wheat beer inspired some Proper Science; a 3:2:1 blend. Turned out superchoice.

1: And even then — one (‘Head High Hef’ from Breakwater Brewing) hardly seems an overt reference, and the other (‘The Hef’ from Gardner Ale House) isn’t even made any more. More are quite-possibly lurking on RateBeer.com, but my advanced-search-fu was insufficient to bring them out.

Beer Diary

Tag Archives: from Australia

Post-GABS Afternoon Taphouse Mooch

GABS Glass #4: Moo Brew ‘Belgo’

GABS Paddle #2: Random Favourites

GABS Glasses #2 & #3: Bright ‘Resistance Red’ and Wig & Pen ‘This Beer’s Not Real Craft!’

Josie Bones (and Bright ‘Harvest 150’)

GABS Paddle #1: Everything ≤ 4.5% ABV

Little Creatures Single Batch Oatmeal Stout

Little Creatures Pale Ale on Australia Day

Matilda Bay ‘Fat Yak’

Croucher ‘Hef’, Burleigh ‘Hef’ and Red Hill Wheat Beer

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot