Strings 'N' Tins

April 16, 2014, by Crafty Pint

Strings 'N' Tins

It may have taken them an interminable length of time before they were able to construct their brewery and brew their first beer but, since Six String Brewing poured that first dark red IPA, they have hit the ground running.

Last month, the Central Coast brewery celebrated its first birthday with a sell-out dinner and marked the occasion with the release of a double malt, quadruple hop version of their flagship IPA. They are steadily spreading their beers throughout New South Wales, with Queensland next on the agenda, then Melbourne. The limited releases keep on coming, with two plus the anniversary beer out now and another a week away. And, in just a few weeks, they will be installing their very own canning line.

“It’s going from strength to strength,” says Cameron Flett, the latest addition to the Six String team as self-titled ‘beer pusher and jack of all trades’. “The beers are going everywhere at the moment.”

Among them is the aforementioned first birthday beer, called simply One.

“The dark red IPA was the first one that Chris brewed here,” says Cameron. “It’s our flagship beer so to celebrate he thought why not make a double version of it. He doubled the malt, quadrupled the amount of hops and ended up with a 10.2 percent monster.

“It’s a sleeping giant, though. It’s so smooth in terms of alcohol. The hops are dominant as you’d expect but it’s not bitter, despite being 90 IBUs.”

The One is the brewery’s first packaged beer, presented in rather impressive 750ml bottles with, of course, an axeman giving it some with his guitar on the front. But it won’t be the last.

“We are getting a canning machine sent over from the States,” says Cameron. “We decided to go for cans instead of bottles for environmental reasons and also the impact on the beer itself. There’s also an increase in interest in cans too. Not just here, but in American market.

“We saw that trend over there and figured it would start here in Australia. We know of a couple of others that are moving into cans as well.”

They will be the fourth Australian microbrewery to start canning beer. First was the Australian Brewery in Sydney then, late last year, Melbourne’s Mountain Goat began canning Summer Ale offsite – a move that proved so popular they have now followed it up with Fancy Pants, while Mornington Peninsula Brewery recently released its Pale in cans too. Discussions at Six String have centred around which beer or beers will receive the package treatment. And it seems it might be a fair few.

“I had lunch with the head brewer to push for a definite answer on which beers would be going into cans,” says Cameron. “He says definitely the Pale. And then added that we should do that one. And that one. And that one.”

In other words, the entire core range – Hefeweizen, Golden Ale, Dark Red IPA and Pale – are all potentially up for a guernsey.

It’s not just the beer side of things that is going well for the music-lovin' brewers. The brewery’s tasting room, where they host dinners and guests can tuck into the chef’s “American tapas” on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays when the live music is on, is now the number one rated restaurant in the area on tripadvisor and is “kicking off every time it’s open” says Cameron, with guests unable to get enough of the sliders, pizzas, softshell crab and the like.

With strong support locally, as well as in the bigger Sydney and Newcastle markets, the Erina-based brewery looks well set. The Indie, a British IPA made entirely with British malts, hops and yeast, and Celtic Fusion, an oatmeal stout that has been infused with coffee from local legends Onyx Coffee, are out now, while a rerelease of Torhout – Werchter, a Belgian dubbel that first saw light of day in 2013, will follow soon.

Having had to wait three years to get their doors open, there’s little doubt they are making up for lost time.

“For a brand new job,” says Cameron, “I’ve got a lot of things to do!”

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