lackbook bottoms up lackbook bottoms up Anticlockwise from top left: enjoying a freshly tapped stout at Perth’s Colonial brewing, home of Gary the White; Soren Eriksen of Blenheim-based 8 Wired; entering Cooper’s Beer in Regency Park, the country’s largest Australia nowned brewery “The brewers didn’t know anything, but now in the last five years the quality is so much beTTer, you’ll find consistency on a par with anywhere in the world” commonplace. But while Coopers is now considered one of the big boys, along with other craft beer brands such as Little Creatures, James Squire and Matilda Bay, it’s the smaller microbrewers who are keeping them honest by continually inventing and experimenting. “Sometimes people are weird for the sake of it,” explains James Smith, who runs Melbourne’s Good Beer Week and craftypint.com, “and I think part of the problem in the early days of Australia n craft beer was that people had no idea about what ales should taste like and what a shit beer was, so they would drink it not knowing if it was good or not. “The brewers didn’t know anything, but now in the last five years the quality is so much better, you’ll find consistency on a par with anywhere in the world. Drinkers are much more knowledgeable, too, so you can’t get away with serving sub-standard beer.” The Australia n scene is generally considered to have kicked off in Western Australia with Matilda Bay, which grew to such a level that Foster’s snapped it up in the early 1990s. But the recent rise has been put down to travelling antipodeans getting a taste of what’s out there and a desire to improve their nation’s lot. Not least because their archrivals from across the Tasman got there first. “At the same time as we were kicking off with Matilda Bay in Western Australia , they had Emerson’s, Harrington’s and a number of other successful breweries,” says Smith about New Zealand’s brewers. “They’ve got 60-odd microbreweries for a population of about 4.4 million, we’ve got about twice as many for five or six times the amount of people. The Kiwi beer scene woke up quicker to ales than Australia . Wellington is absolutely incredible for beer venues and they’ve got greater strength in depth, ones that are as good as any in the world.” That quality is certainly backed up with a passionate following. Head to Wellington in August, and you’ll find the New Zealand capital full of beer aficionados quaffing back the stuff for Beervana – a celebration of just how much better their beer is than Australia ’s (even if they don’t say it explicitly). Approaching its 13th year, thousands of visitors sup their way through some 300 brews from close to 100 brewers, the majority of which hail from New Zealand. Visit New World Thorndon, a supermarket, and you might find as many as 600 beers on sale. To say Kiwis have a taste for beer is a gross understatement. But then they should have, after all, they have history. Captain Cook brewed the first beer here in the 1700s – with tea and manuka leaves apparently – and in the late 19th century, there were 100 breweries. Fast-forward to the 1980s and it was pretty much just the two big boys, clockwise FROM TOP LEFT: © colonial Brewing, Tom Roschi, Jed Soane 42 departures-international.com
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