News & Feature Stories
Getting Blind With Crafty: Pilsners
The Crafty Pint’s blind tasting panels are up and running for 2013. The first took place late last year with a panel focused mainly on premium lagers, after we were contacted by Hahn and Malt Shovel…
Brewer Abroad! Nick at Nøgne Ø Pt I
A week ago, Nick Rhodes from Holgate boarded a plane in Melbourne bound for Norway. Coming the other way was Norwegian brewer Ingrid Skistad from Nøgne Ø. We brought you the story behind their brewer…
Good Beer Week Steps Up
The Crafty Pint is hanging with the big boys now⦠Good Beer Week has announced that its print and radio media partners for 2013 will be Time Out and 3RRR. For the first two years of the festival,…
The Cavaliers Are Coming
Next month’s Fed Square Microbreweries Showcase will mark exactly two years since Melbourne’s Cavalier Brewing first announced themselves to the world. All being well, it will also mark the release…
Making Cents
It’s amazing what you can find down the back of the sofa. And even more amazing what you can find when you set fire to a sofa! A couple of years back, three mates who had been homebrewing together since…
Beer Travel: Great Australian Beer Festival, Geelong
Victoria’s summer of beer festivals continued at the weekend with the arrival of the inaugural Great Australian Beer Festival. Taking over much of the Geelong Racecourse, it brought together brewers…
A Taste of Italy
The past year has seen a huge rise in the amount of Italian craft beer arriving in Australia. Where once there was just a handful of the country’s better beers available, since the team at Birra Italiana…
Brewer Exchange
Earlier this month, the Aurora Borealis arrived Down Under. At the same time, the Aurora Australis landed in Norway. The two are beers created on either side of the globe as part of a joint venture between…
Green Beacon Fires Up
With floodwaters rising, there wasn’t much in the way of good news coming out of Queensland last week. But in a corner of Teneriffe, the situation was a whole lot brighter as the Australian craft beer…
Clear As Mud?
On Friday afternoon, while most of us were preparing for the long Australia Day weekend, one man found himself unwittingly in something of a funk. The cause of said funk was an email that had landed in…
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H100 of 2012 Countdown
So who will be raising their glass the highest this Australia Day? Will Brad, Jamie, Ross and their ever-expanding team at Stone & Wood make it two in a row for their all-conquering Pacific Ale? Can…
Hop Hog Is Hottest!
Phew! We don’t have to eat our hat after all… A couple of weeks back, as votes were coming in for this year’s Hottest 100 Aussie Craft Beers of 2012, we responded to a tweet with something along…
The Hottest 100 of 2012 Analysed
By now, you’ll have had time to take in the latest Hottest 100 Aussie Craft Beers poll results. Congratulations to everyone that featured, in particular the team at Swan Valley’s Feral Brewing for…
Going with the Grain
Newcastle punches above its weight when it comes to providing the Australian craft beer world with quality brewers. There’s Shawn Sherlock at Murray’s, Keith Grice at nearby Potters in the Hunter Valley,…
Best Of The South West
It is said that we are a little "backwards" here in Western Australia; sometimes it’s said by our East Coast neighbours and sometimes we say it about ourselves. It’s a hard title to argue since…
Beer Travel: Ballarat Beer Festival 2013
It’s always a good sign when something surprises even the people that are responsible for creating it. And that was the case last year when the inaugural Ballarat Beer Festival attracted such large…
It's In The Can
Craft beer drinkers are all too aware that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. The path to discovering better beer is intrinsically linked with an understanding, or at the very least an appreciation,…
Holgate Takes Flight
Back in the 1990s, as a teenager immersed in the UK’s indie scene, The Crafty Pint was a fan of the short-lived, pun heavy London band Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. Front man Jim Bob had an uncanny…
Good Beer Week Deadline
Anyone taking part in this year’s Good Beer Week in May has until midnight tomorrow (January 18) to finalise their event details. A number of events were registered prior to Christmas with some aspects…
The Hottests' Hottest
Time is running out for this year’s Hottest 100 Aussie craft beers, being run again by The Local Taphouse, The Crafty Pint and Brews News. The deadline for votes is January 15. As in past years, The…
James Halliday Article: The Year In Beer 2012
Upon launching in 2011, James Halliday’s Wine Companion Magazine asked The Crafty Pint to pen an article on the story of Australian craft beer. Since then, they’ve continued to support the local craft…
Cheers to Geelong
For a long time, it always seemed something of an anomaly that Geelong, just a few kilometres down the road from the craft beer hotbed that is Melbourne, was such a craft beer desert. A few micros had…
Crafty's Year In Beer
We’ve been around the houses, gathering the reflections of brewers, beer sellers and writers from around Australia, for our Year in Bear 2012 review. So that means there’s just one place left to look:…
The Year In Beer 2012: Tasmania
As anyone who’s spent time in the bars and pubs of Hobart, in the company of the state’s band of brewers of attended any of the many festivals with craft beer either at their heart or with a prominent…
Merry Christmas!!!
“So this is Christmas / And what have you done?” asked John Lennon back in the day. A more pertinent question to the Australian craft beer world as we all settle down to gorge ourselves, catch…
The Year In Beer 2012: NSW
Is the sleeping giant finally waking? It might seem a churlish thing to say when New South Wales has been home to the Lord Nelson’s brewery for a quarter century (pictured above) and counts the likes…
Lost, But On Purpose
"I’d been homebrewing for close to 14 years. I decided I really needed to do something with it." So spake Peter Philip, founder and head brewer of Wayward Brewing Company, the latest Sydney-based beer…
The Year In Beer 2012: WA
Western Australia: it’s to craft beer in Australia what Iraq is to human civilisation. Home to dozens of craft breweries, including some of the country’s very best, as well as some spectacular bottleshops…
Starting A Brewery: The Boatrocker Story Pt III
Over the past few months, we’ve been bringing you the story behind the development of the forthcoming Boatrocker Brewery. Many of you will know Boatrocker’s beers, such as Alpha Queen and Hoppbier,…
Taking The Pils
In 1988, Australia was busy celebrating its bicentennial, the Ronald Reagan era in the States was coming to a close, Allan Border was captain of the cricket team, the year’s big Aussie films included…
The Year In Beer 2012: Queensland
It’s not too long ago that, during one of our regular discussions with the founder of Australian Brews News, we were admonished for the use of the phrase “craft beer revolution”. Being a generally…
The Year In Beer 2012: Victoria
Where else to start our end of year round up for 2012 than in the place where The Crafty Pint started just over two years ago – not to mention the place that has taken the craft beer baton and run with…
The Year In Beer 2012
With Christmas approaching, the pages of newspapers and magazines the world over are crammed with end of the year reviews. Well end of year reviews and Best Of lists: the Best Albums, Best Films, Best…
Hottest 100 of 2012
It’s that time of year again: the time when the beer lovers of Australia get to select the best craft beers of 2012. For the fifth year running, the poll launched by The Local Taphouse in 2008 is…
Hyper IPA
Right then, readers: sit down and strap yourselves in for a spot of beery education… International Bitterness Units – or IBUs as they are more commonly abbreviated – are something that really…
Win Christmas Cheer!
While the redoubtable Sir Cliff may have serenaded the world with the words that Christmas time is all about mistletoe and wine, we know it’s really about beer. Beery Christmas cheer. So with time…
Growing Pines
As December continues to move swiftly onward, the fragrance of pine increasingly wafts across the land as Christmas trees are erected in anticipation of the bounty of gifts to be lavished at their collective…
Enter Galactic
The year 2012 was a notable one for space matters: Venus transited, NASA put a remote control car on Mars, there was the total eclipse, Neil Armstrong – the original moonwalker – departed for another…
The Perfect Pourer
There are quite a few breweries in the South West with trophy cabinets that have recently become a lot more crowded. Collectively, South West breweries took a total of 29 medals at this year’s Perth…
James Halliday Article: Brighter Shade Of Pale
Towards the end of the month, the next edition of James Halliday’s Wine Companion Magazine will feature an article by The Crafty Pint looking back at what has been an incredible year for craft beer in…
Brew With A View
“In just four steps, I’m standing next to the ocean,” he says. “In fact, I’m walking out there now. I’ve got a marina in front of me and the ocean is just to the west. I live right above the…
It's On, For Young & Old
Next Wednesday, Sydney's incomparable suburb of Newtown celebrates its sesquicentenary. And, in honour of the 150 years that have passed since being proclaimed a municipality, one of its youngest residents…
The Beer Singers Return!
The comedy duo behind “Beer Song” are back with a fresh ode to the wonders of craft beer. Dave and Ern from ElbowSkin have just released a video for “Craft Beer”, a song which they…
D-Day for GBW 2013!
There are just 12 hours to go until submissions close for anyone wanting to be part of Good Beer Week 2013. And that’s only if you’re reading this at the exact second this story went live on…
Canny Operators
Cans have given The Crafty Pint much joy over the years. From Navin R Johnson’s brush with death to Vim Fuego, the drummer in spoof metal band Bad News, and his desire for “more vim in my cans”,…
Here Beer Here
Anything that allows us to (sorta) paraphrase Withnail and I in the title of a news story has to be a good thing. And when that good thing involves the launch of a trans-global brewing partnership, better…
Australia's Best Beer Gardens
With summer approaching, it seems only right to spending one’s every waking moment wishing you were sat in a beer garden with a frothy in hand. As we wrote in a recent piece for Tourism Victoria: “There…
The Crafty Planner: November 26 to December 2
And breathe… The crazy run of beer weeks and festivals drew to a close at the weekend with the final days of Newcastle Craft Beer Week and the Tasmanian International Beer Fest. Now it’s time…
Brew With The Best!
Back in May, on the Monday night of Good Beer Week 2012, The Crafty Pint welcomed Steve Grossman from Sierra Nevada to the launch of the People’s Pint at Temple Brewery & Brasserie. He was there to make…
Boneyard Brews
He’s loved beer, sold beer, cooked with beer, taken beer onto national television and opened a restaurant with more of a focus on beer than any in Australia. So, really, it had to come to this: Boneyard…
