Like a cruel twist of fate, just when you really start to forget about your holiday a beer comes along and makes you miss it all over again. That beer is Inner North Brewing’s Drink Pray Love, which may well be Australia’s only beer blessed by monks (if you know of others please get in touch). Brewery founder Zack Skerritt was inspired to brew the beer by his time Railay and Tongsai in the south of Thailand and while making it, Zack’s Thai in-laws were in town and had secretly arranged for three Thai monks to visit the Brunswick brewery. Following a brewery tour and some tea, they blessed both the brewery and the beer.
This brings us to both the holiday and the beer, with my time in Thailand spent enjoying plenty of the sweet delight that is mango stick rice and Drink Pray Love couldn’t have done a better job of transporting me back. It uses some 20 percent rice in the malt bill plus mango, coconut and the fragrant pandan leaves. On the nose, that fruit comes across in all its sweet glory while the coconut adds further dessert-like aromas and a savoury edge. Although quite rich on the nose, to drink it’s far leaner than a big bowl of mango, rice and coconut milk, with the aromatics of pandan leaves balancing the sweet fruit and the beer’s crisp and dry finish making it the kind of beer I wish I had to fight back against Bangkok's humidty.
Will Ziebell
Published November 24, 2023 2023-11-24 00:00:00
