The Crafty Pint launched in 2010 as an online magazine and resource focusing on the fast-growing Australian craft beer community.
We tell stories from every corner of the local beer world and provide insight and knowledge for anyone interested in beer so they can become better informed and more confident consumers of beer and the culture that surrounds it.
The Crafty Pint remains an independent, family-owned publication which brings an honest, old-fashioned journalistic approach to beer – you'll find no sponsored news or paid-for feature stories on the site.
These days, we also publish a free, regularly updated app that helps users find hundreds of good beer operators across Australia, and we run a beer club, The Crafty Cabal, for beer lovers wanting to boost their beer experience via exclusive events, deals at breweries and venues all over Australia, and regular giveaways.
Hundreds of breweries, venues, bottleshops and other beer businesses have signed up for listings in our directory in order to reach our highly engaged audience – The Crafty Pint has been named Australia's favourite craft beer news source in Beer Cartel's annual survey of beer drinkers every year since it was launched. We have more than 62,000 followers across key social media platforms and our weekly newsletter goes out to 40,000 people.
The Crafty Pint was founded by journalist James Smith, who now heads a team of staff and freelance contributors spread across Australia and New Zealand. James was a founding member of Good Beer Week and its festival director until June 2015. He has written two books on Australian beer, 150 Great Australian Beers – Your Guide to Craft Beer and Beyond, and The Great Australian Beer Guide.
FAQs
Yes, you can, and you'll benefit from it too!
We don't operate a paywall, ask for donations or run a Patreon subscription as we want people to be access everything we produce online and in our newsletters for free.
Instead, we run a beer club, The Crafty Cabal, that gives members access to deals – free beer, merch, tours and so on – at breweries and venues across the country, plus exclusive events and regular giveaways.
You can find out more and sign up here.
Have you checked out our free app? You can download it here from the App Store and Google Play.
The breweries, bars, bottleshops and others listed in our directory are paid for by businesses eager to showcase what they do to our audience. They receive extensive listings in the app too, but we also include a mini-listing for every other good beer operator we know about in the app.
If you spot any missing, let us know.
If you're making or selling Australian craft beer, then head here and enter your details.
If your business is suitable for The Crafty Pint – one that has a focus on making, selling or promoting local craft beer – we can add you to our free app and follow up to see if you'd like a full listing and all the benefits that entails.
If you have a suitably crafty and beer-related business or event to tell the world about then we have a number of options available to help you reach our audience.
Drop us a line at sales@craftypint.com or call Scott on 0438 124 436 and we'll take it from there.
Everyone’s tastes are different so why listen to one person’s view over another? What's more, there are plenty of sites out there that crowdsource drinkers' opinions.
Instead, our approach is to be descriptive, to provide enough information about each beer – the story behind it, what's gone into it, how it looks, smells, tastes, feels – so readers can make an informed choice as to whether it's likely to be one they'll enjoy.
The aim is to be objective too; just because one of our writers doesn't like a certain style, if it's made well then their write-up will reflect its quality rather than their opinion.
That said, if a beer is really good, you might find the descriptions reflect that. On the flipside, if a beer is faulty, our policy is to contact the brewer direct with our feedback, inform them we won't be writing about it, and leave it up to them to decide if they should risk their brand's reputation by leaving it on sale.
The Crafty Pint is run by a small team of dedicated and passionate beer folks. We have a number of contributors scattered around the country but if you can write well and have an interesting story about beer, then we're all ears.
Email us with your story ideas and a bit about yourself and we can take it from there.
Unless otherwise stated, the following rules apply to all competitions run on the website, in weekly eDMs, on social media, or via our membership service, The Crafty Cabal:
- Competition open to over-18s only
- Entrants must be Australian residents
- One entry per person; multiple entries will be disqualified
- Automated entries, bulk entries or third party entries will be disqualified
- In cases where there is to be a winner drawn at random, we will use a random number generator to pick winner(s) from all valid entries at the stated time and date
- Winners will be contacted via email as indicated within the competition
- The Judge’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into
- The Crafty Pint’s policy is such that we will not pass on your details to any third party without your prior consent
- If we don't hear back from winners within 72 hours of sending an email confirming their prize, we will redraw
- Any winning emails will be sent from competitions@craftypint.com
- For Crafty Cabal ballots, members must have a valid membership at the time the competition prizes are drawn to be eligible
Where prizes are to be posted out, the winner must provide a postal address within Australia. Winners living on cattle stations in the middle of nowhere may have to travel to collect their winnings…!
