Diggin' The Quarie

February 27, 2012, by Crafty Pint

Diggin' The Quarie

A couple of years ago, The Crafty Pint made a first visit to Freo’s Sail & Anchor. The onsite brewery was no longer pumping out beers and the place felt a little tired, as if it was the end of an era and this pub with a preeminent position in Australia’s craft beer history was on its way out. A few weeks ago, we were back there and the place was alive. Sure, the brewery is still out of action, but there is a huge variety of beer pouring from its myriad taps and the banners proclaiming it the country’s Best Beer Venue hang proudly from the walls.

Much of the turnaround is down to former manager Matt Marinich, as passionate a beer lover as you’ll find, who last year moved on to pastures new at The Quarie. Unsurprisingly, he set to work on the beer list there with gusto, launching a new one earlier this month and giving the people of WA a new option in what remains a bar scene that’s yet to really catch on to craft beer.

Beer writer Jeremy Sambrooks popped in for a jar or two to find out for himself…

Most beer lovers follow a similar routine when going to a new pub for the first time. First our eyes pass over the tap handles, searching for anything remotely crafty, before turning to the bottled beers in the refrigerator. All too often this is followed by disappointment, thanks to a bottled selection that mostly consists of bland, big brewery lagers and perhaps, if we are lucky, a Coopers or Little Creatures Pale Ale.

Fortunately, a number of new venues have been popping up that strive to offer beer drinkers a real choice. Not all pubs can be the Sail & Anchor or The Local Taphouse and have craft beer pouring from all of their taps. For some fledgling venues, economics dictate that tap contracts are a necessary evil, leaving their bottled beer selection as the best way to get craft beer into the hands of drinkers.

Such is the case for The Quarie Bar & Brasserie, a new pub in the suburb of Hammond Park, 20km south of Fremantle. Venue manager is Matt Marinich, formerly of Sail & Anchor and the Belgian Beer Cafe and runner-up Beertender of the Year in 2011. As a self-confessed beer geek, Matt strives to show punters the wide variety of styles, colours and flavours that beer has to offer. With most of The Quarie’s 32 taps under contract, Matt has chosen some of the more interesting beers from the Lion and Foster’s portfolios, including internationals such as Belle-Vue Kriek and Leffe Blond. The latest addition on tap is a local microbrew, Nail Ale, which Matt says is selling extremely well. Also a big seller is Quarie Dry, a dry golden ale that is contract brewed and sold exclusively at The Quarie.

When The Quarie first opened, its bottled beer list was better than most, but evidently Matt was not satisfied with being merely above average. Last week, The Quarie launched its new beer menu, which you can see here . If the old list was good (and it was) then the new one is nothing short of sensational.

Matt has added 42 beers to the list, with a further eight on back order, all of which are available at The Quarie’s adjoining bottleshop. Beer geeks will be excited to see titles from breweries such as Feral, 8 Wired, Yeastie Boys, Green Flash and Cantillon, although the crowning glory of the new menu must surely be “Black Tokyo Horizon”, a 17.2% stout brewed collaboratively by BrewDog, Mikkeller and Ní¸gne í˜.

“We changed the beer menu to help educate both our staff and the public,” says Matt. “It’s rewarding to host beer training sessions, to show patrons that craft beer is the way forward and that we care about the product we are promoting.”

Matt says the menu will be an ever-growing offering that changes with seasonal availability from breweries and suppliers.

As for what else we can expect to see from The Quarie in the future, he says: “We are looking at getting our brand out to the public. Quarie Dry has shown us that craft beer can be accepted in our community and we plan to explore all our options for expressing our passion for craft beer in future.”

The Quarie is at 2 Macquarie Boulevard, 
Hammond Park, WA 6164. Phone: (08) 9414 3500.

Jeremy, who will be helping The Crafty Pint cover the WA craft beer scene, is a freelance writer, teacher and award-winning home brewer who has been writing about beer since 2009. In recent years, he has travelled through some of the world’s most renowned beer regions in the UK, Belgium, Germany and Czech Republic. Jeremy now teaches part time, writes for two magazines and works as a barman for Mash Brewing. You can follow his adventures on Twitter.

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