Red Duck Pale Ale

An English style Pale, this is the most approachable of Red Duck’s regular range and is an easy drinking, thirst quenching ale that combines a touch of specialty malt and malted wheat with enough hops to ensure a gently bitter finish. It’s their biggest seller too.

Style: English Pale Ale
Strength: 4.5%

Red Duck Amber Ale

Scott’s take on the classic UK pub ale, this Amber uses a select blend of malts and low hopping levels using traditional British hops that don’t distract from the beer’s key characteristics – the hints of caramel and toffee that come from the malts. As with the British way, it’s a beer that benefits from being drunk at a slightly warmer temperature.

Style: Amber Ale
Strength: 4.9%

Red Duck Porter

This dark style of beer first came to popularity in London back in the 18th century, with the city’s river and street porters falling for its rich, deep flavours. The Red Duck version is a full-bodied beer, full of complexity due to a wide range of different specialty malts used in the brew, including roast barley, which can lend rich coffee like characteristic. Also lurking within this 6.4% beer are hints of chocolate, toffee, molasses, treacle and liquorice.

Style: Porter
Strength: 6.4%

Red Duck Bengal IPA

IPAs, or India Pale Ales, date from the time of the British Empire when, to ensure beer being sent to the troops on the Sub-Continent didn’t spoil during its long sea journey, brewers boosted the hop and alcohol content to act as preservatives. The Bengal is a traditional recreation of the style given a modern twist with the addition of generous amounts of Centennial and Cascade hops.

Style: English IPA
Strength: 7.0%

Red Duck Overland

This Bright Ale is a light and refreshing beer, crisp and clean on the palate with hints of honey and light caramel on the palate and a subtly enticing citrus and melon aroma. Designed after Scott had completed the Overland Track in Tasmania with friends to be the ideal beer you’d want once you’d taken that final step.

Style: Bright Ale
Strength: 4.5%

Red Duck Pale Rider

Taking its name from the Clint Eastwood classic is the latest release from Red Duck. After playing with Egyptian bread beers, rhubarb, raspberries, honey and beasts from the deep, it’s a return to something approaching sanity for the brewery, an American inspired pale ale with highly hoppy aromatics and bitterness. It’s going to be a member of Red Duck’s permanent range in bottles but, if you’re quick, you might be able to get your hands on it in keg form, with the only three 20l kegs released being tapped at Josie Bones on March 18.

Style: US Pale Ale
Strength: 5.6%
Bitterness: 42 IBU

Red Duck Hoppy Amber

Quite what Red Duck are going to do for a mixed six now they’ve added this, a seventh beer, to their regular lineup, who knows? Perhaps there needs to be a brewer’s half dozen added to the baker’s dozen. In the tradition of a series of British TV ads that had an uncanny ability to stick in one’s head – “Ronseal: It does exactly what it says on the tin!” – here’s a beer that does exactly what it says on the bottle, ie it’s hoppy and it’s amber in colour. To be slightly more specific, the brewer describes it as having “rich, hoppy aromas, moderately high bitterness with rich malt.”

Style: Amber Ale
Strength: 5.6%
Bitterness: 38 IBU

Red Duck Golden Dragon

A Red Duck limited release that hasn’t seen the light of day for quite some time. The Golden Dragon is another that continues brewer Scott Wilson-Browne’s love of big, malt-led British styles. It’s a strong Celtic Ale that sits nicely alongside other Red Duck limited releases such as the whisky barrel-aged Loch Ness and last year’s Red Admiral. A complex bugger that can offer up treacle, caramel, stewed and dark fruit flavours with an earthiness and spiciness too, it’s one to savour.

Available:

Red Duck
Blackhearts & Sparrows
Others tbc

Style: Strong Celtic Ale
Strength: 7.8%

Red Duck Canute the Gruit

Back before Red Duck existed, King Cnut Ale by the UK’s St Peter’s Brewery got Scott Wilson-Browne thinking. A hopless beer that set out to recreate ales as they might have been back in Medieval times, it ultimately inspired this. The label declares: “EXTREME ALE” and with good reason. Featuring a mix of grains, oats and spelt – some of which was “scorched” in the kettle – as well as stinging nettles and homemade hawthorn berry juice, it is as weird as they get; one that most people will probably want to share and experience rather than knock back for mere refreshment. Pouring an opaque, dark brown with a thin, brown head, it boasts a pretty thick body that belies its relatively low alcohol content. The aroma is both smoky and earthy, with dark roast and burnt coffee beans coming through as it warms. There’s a faint whiff of tartness too, but nothing to prepare you for the intense and lingering fruity sourness that awaits once quaffed. Decidedly odd.

Available:

Red Duck
Slowbeer
Carwyn Cellars
Purvis Beer
Blackhearts & Sparrows
Josie Bones
Olinda Cellars

Style: Gruit Stout
Strength: 4.4%

Red Duck Belgian Vanilla Porter

Yet more proof that there are no rules when it comes to brewing these days. Whether it’s Murray’s throwing a tonne of hops at an Imperial Stout, Feral combining Belgian yeast with Japanese-developed hops or people turning India Pale Ales anything but pale, it’s very much a case of anything goes. Here a Belgian yeast joins the malts of a porter in a beer that’s finished off with some organic vanilla extract. The result is a beer that will be familiar to fans of Red Duck, with plenty of chocolate, roast and mocha malt characters at its heart. That said, there’s much to differentiate it from its stablemates, not least the vanilla that’s fairly prominent on the nose and adds a smooth, lingering finish. Speaking of the nose, it’s also reminiscent of the limited edition Cadbury’s Dream bar that featured strawberry bits, but given that was last on shelves six or seven years ago this is probably as pointless a sentence as any to have appeared on The Crafty Pint. The Belgian yeast adds just the merest undertone of funk to this dark ruby beer that throws a little blackcurrant into the mix for good measure and will find favour with those who appreciate something luxuriant at the end of the evening.

Available:

Red Duck
Slowbeer
Carwyn Cellars
Purvis Beer
Blackhearts & Sparrows
Josie Bones
Olinda Cellars

Style: Specialty Porter
Strength: 6.5%

Red Duck Queen Bee

Time for some honesty. Faced with a wobbly table at Crafty Towers, chances are we’d fold up a bit of card, shove it under one of the legs and be done with it. We’re willing to wager such a solution simply wouldn’t do for Scott at Red Duck. After all, any man who refuses to make one of his beers for a couple of years because he can’t get hold of exactly the right type and shade of wild bush honey with which he made the previous batch doesn’t seem like the “No one’ll notice” type. Thankfully, for anyone who’s been wondering where the Queen Bee Honey Porter has been, the right honey was located and the beer is back. One of four dark beers coming out from the brewery this month (although far from the darkest – it’s a slightly cloudy dark amber / brown), it’s another multi-malty release from the soon-to-be-in Ballarat brewery. The honey’s there in the aroma, along with some plummy dark fruits and a touch of sweet alcohol, while once it’s in your mouth you can expect to find everything from toffee, cocoa, chocolate, coffee and even some nuttiness coming through along with warmth from the relatively high alcohol content. As for the name, apparently it comes from Scott’s great grandfather’s champion yacht, which dominated the Norfolk and Oulton Broads racing in the early 1920’s. So there you go.

Available:

Red Duck
Slowbeer
Purvis Beer Richmond
Blackhearts & Sparrows
Josie Bones
Carwyn Cellars
Valley Cellar Door

Style: Honey Porter
Strength: 6.6%

Red Duck The Ox (2011)

If ever the world of beers designed to be sipped and savoured was looking for a poster boy, it could do far worse than give The Ox a call. Whenever a bottle is cracked at Crafty Towers, it’s the only one that needs opening that night; the sort of beer you can happily return to over a couple of hours. It seems only appropriate to enjoy it this way given that, on the rare occasions the Red Duck guys make it, they spend 22 hours in the brewery. Ox by name, Ox by nature, it’s a thick, dark brown beast that’s so gloopy it could almost pass off as spent engine oil. Crammed with so many different malts (and so much of it), you never know what’s coming in the next mouthful: liquorice, chocolate, burnt toffee, roast coffee, molasses; you name it, if it can be described as dark, sweet, rich or mysterious, chances are it’ll make an appearance. Who knows when it’ll next be brewed, so if it sounds like your kind of thing grab some now (before we snaffle it all).

Available:

Red Duck
Slowbeer
Purvis Beer Richmond
Blackhearts & Sparrows
Josie Bones
Carwyn Cellars
Olinda Cellars

Style: Imperial Stout
Strength: 9.4%

Red Duck White Garden

Crafty’s not allowed to drink at the minute (there’s a good reason) so it’s over to the brewer’s notes for the latest intriguing limited release beer from Red Duck. It’s a hybrid beer – a combination of Belgian witbier and the uber-rare Berliner weisse, an acidic, tart style of wheat beer that is deliberately soured – made with rhubarb and raspberry and therefore pink. Scott says: “At Red Duck we wanted to pay homage to Berliner Weisse, but wanted a very light tartiness, no sourness, and we didn’t want to achieve this by adding lactobacillicus or lactic acid.. He started with a wit/weisse beer base, used a soft English ale yeast to avoid spice and extra alcohol formation, and added a lot of Raspberry & Rhubarb Jam. “When the sugars from the Raspberry & Rhubarb jam are stripped out during fermentation, the true flavours are no longer masked by sweetness,” he adds. “The result is a very lightly coloured, soft pinky white ale, cloudy and very slightly tart.”

Style: Fruit-infused hybrid
Strength: 4.1%

Red Duck Burton

It wasn’t until Crafty was sat in a room of home brewers (in Boronia of all places) studying to become a beer judge that the significance of his birthplace in the world of beer became apparent. There’s a term in brewing – “Burtonisation” – which denotes the addition of salts to your water to try and recreate the water natural to Burton-on-Trent, the birthplace of the classic English Pale Ale (and Crafty). As such, this is Red Duck’s version of the beers from that area. Being a strident traditionalist, the brewer has gone for a beer true to the style’s early 18th Century origins with far lower hopping than found in the India Pale Ales (IPAs) that were to follow. As such, the “Bitter” of the title is something of a misnomer for those raised on highly hopped beers with big, bitter finishes. Instead, this is a cloudy, unfiltered copper coloured beer with a nutty, fruity nose (with a hint of alcohol) and a creamy mouthfeel displaying soft malt characteristics.

Style: English Pale Ale
Strength: 5.4%

Red Duck Red Admiral

Another Red Duck beer that looks to the UK for inspiration, this is a Celtic Ale by name, but one which brings much more to the table than that might suggest. Again displaying brewer Scott Wilson-Browne’s love of layering different malts in his beers (with the use of the rarely seen, fairly mild US hop Glacier), this throws up all manner of aromas and flavours: rum-soaked cherries, stewed fruits, sweet caramel, raspberries and chocolate on the nose; plums, dark fruits and cocoa powder to taste. Pouring a deep ruby red, with some sediment and cloudiness, the bitterness is gentle and the alcohol invisible. According to Scott, “the flavours are evocative of a rich plum pudding covered in treacle” while he says it’s a nod to his Anglo-Saxon ancestry in Suffolk and “is hoped to be a worthy tribute to the first King of the Suffolk Angles, Raedwald.” And when was the last time you could say that about a beer?

Style: Celtic Red Ale
Strength: 6.2%

Red Duck Black Heart

Another extremely limited release, most of this has been committed to beer clubs and homebrewers. However, a small amount is available from the Red Duck Provedore in Camperdown and some Melbourne bottleshops. Crafty’s not had the chance to sample with the Microbreweries Showcase getting in the way, so over to Slowbeer’s Chris Menichelli for some guest tasting notes: “Golden pour, darker than you come to expect from the style. Nose has a honeyed malt sweetness from the pilsner malt & a touch of caramelized orange-type esters, certainly not too unlike Duvel. Also displays clove-like yeast characters. Mid-palate has a decent amount of carbonation to balance the sweetness from the malt. On the finish we have a big old whack of phenolic spice, no doubt attributed to both the high ABV & belgian yeast strain used. Finishes with the slightest touch of earthy hop bitterness for good measure. A very interesting interpretation of the style, given the addition of spices. The name is quite appropriate, as this is certainly not for the faint of heart!”

Style: Belgian Blond

Red Duck Loch Ness

Red Duck’s Loch Ness is a dark, malty brew, with rich flavours from chocolate malt, roast barley and other dark malts. It had an extended boil time to boost caramelisation, a slow and gentle fermentation period, then a short maturation period of six weeks in charred former whisky barrels. The result is beer which pours with a tan head and displays rich but subtle flavours: roasted malt and bags of dark chocolate with touches of caramel, oak, stewed dark fruits and, atop the lingering, warming finish, some whisky. Those fruits reappear on the nose, mingling with chocolate and a touch of oak. And, says the brewer: “In case you’re worried that the char would impart a smokey character, it doesn’t. Pure carbon has a cleaning effect – this is not a smokey beer at all.”

Style: Barrel-aged Scotch Ale
Strength: 6.7%

Red Duck Ugly Duckling

Two years in the making, this blend of a mead made with locally sourced bush honey and two 50l batches of barrel-aged strong ale was described by one of The Crafty Pint’s friends on first tasting as “beyond beer”. It’s a recreation of a medieval style called a braggot. At 14.3%, the Ugly Duckling is still in its infancy and will mature “for decades”, according to its maker. Even now, it’s wonderfully multi-layered: viscous, uncarbonated and golden, it boasts a lightly wooded aroma with hints of calvados and toffee apple. Honey, oak, spiced rumkopf fruit and sweet alcohol combine in a slightly tart palate with a dry finish. A digestif to surprise your guests.

Style: Braggot
Strength: 14.3%

Red Duck The Ox 2010

To create a good Imperial Stout demands the maker doesn’t hold back. And that’s the case with The Ox, an appropriately named behemoth of a beer from Red Duck. Its thick, almost tar-like body is apparent the moment it leaves the bottle and crawls down the side of your glass. It’s a beer to be savoured over an evening (just as well given its strength!) and one in which all manner of flavours can be unearthed, from mouth-filling molasses to rich, treacly chocolate. Exquisite.

Style: Imperial Stout
Strength: 9.4%