New Beers
There has never been a time like now: more breweries releasing more new beers than ever before. Here, in The Crafty Cuppa, and in our weekly newsletter, we'll bring you details – and, if we've sampled them, our honest, independent take – on as many of them as possible. Enjoy!
Aether Oak & Organisms: Intertwined & Severance
Tapped Today
Aether’s latest entries in their Oak & Organisms series are delicately nuanced liquids with disgustingly creepy artwork. As someone who’s been trying more and more natural wines recently, I’m finding beer-wine hybrids more and more interesting. Intertwined incorporates heavy skin contact pinot grigio pressings, which were blended with wort and soured before being left for seven months in French oak to round out the flavours. While pinot grigio is generally a crisp style of wine, all bets… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Barrel-Aged Beer-Wine Hybrid & Truffled Witbier
- ABV
- 6.8% & 6.5%
Cheeky Monkey Oat Cream IPA & Pastry Sour
Tapped Today
As is the way in the Cheeky Monkey camp, new (and adventurous) beers aplenty are order of the day, making it a challenge to keep up – even for seasoned pros like the Crafty WA team! With summer 2021 arriving, the creative South West brewers dropped two "fresh is best" releases for thirsty punters. Oat Cream IPA, as the name suggests, is an oat heavy IPA loaded with 25g per litre of American hops. A textbook creamy mouthfeel and exceptionally long finish pair well with a juicy and slightly… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Oat Cream IPA & Mango Passionfruit and Cinnamon Portuguese Custard Tart Pastry Sour
- ABV
- 7.8% & 7.0%
Beerfarm Royal Standard
Tapped Today
Beerfarm have been enjoying great success with the hazy, hoppy releases, not least Royal Haze which made the top 20 of the GABS Hottest 100 in 2020. They've gone bigger in booze than that flagship IPA, and with Royal Standard head in the other direction. It’s the Metricup brewer's entry into the sessionable hazy arena: a cloudy, straw-coloured pour tipping the scales at a modest 3.5 percent ABV – precisely one standard drink, of course. Initially a collaboration with The Royal and The Standard,… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Mid-Strength Hazy Pale
- ABV
- 3.5%
Dainton Beer Rogue Triiipa
Tapped Today
Dainton Beer’s limited releases for the last couple of years have been so constant and frequent that it’s occasionally felt like you could ditch your watch or calendar and just measure time by one of their new beers making it into the world. It means they've got a lot of favourites to choose from, so to mark the end of 2021, the brewers have returned to the hazy well and plucked out one of the biggest in Rogue Triiipa, a 10 percent ABV triple hazy IPA from about a year ago. The can comes complete… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Triple Hazy IPA
- ABV
- 10.0%
Moo Brew XPA
Tapped Yesterday
They've enjoyed a fine 2021 at Moo Brew, releasing a series of quality limited releases, resurrecting old faves, and picking up more silverware at the Indies – a sign that the brewery's DNA has survived the transition from Dave Macgill to current head brewer Jack Viney, just as it did from Owen Johnston to Dave beforehand. They're closing the year out with another short run release. It's called XPA rather than Pacific Ale, but if their pre-release promo for it is any indicator it's the latter they… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- XPA
Tumut River Brewing's December '21 Quartet
Tapped Yesterday
The new releases keep flowing at Tumut River. Let’s start with Staring at the Sun NEIPA. TRBC first brewed this beer at the end of 2020 as a way of looking forward to a bright future in 2021. We all saw how that turned out. So they’ve had another crack at the end of 2021; while we’ve gone through half the Greek alphabet of COVID variants since then, there’s still a chance that 2022 will be slightly brighter than the two preceding years. And, if it is, we’ll all be staring at the figurative… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Various Styles
- ABV
- 7.2% & 7.0% & 4.5% & 5.0%
Sailors Grave Squid vs Whale V & Grapefruit & Chrysanthemum Flower Ale
Tapped Yesterday
It's fair to say that a beer loaded with a "maelstrom of hops" that weighs in at 7 percent ABV isn't the sort instantly associated with Sailors Grave, yet Squid vs Whale has proven so popular it's now up to its fifth edition. V comes in a smaller can than its predecessors, but packs no less character. If memory serves correctly, it doesn’t seem as dense visually but delivers familiar oat cream characters. It's all about rich, creamy oranges and apricots from start to finish, with said… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Oat Cream IPA & Fruited Farmouse Ale
- ABV
- 7.0% & 5.4%
Akasha Projects Summer Slice IPA
Tapped December 7, 2021
If I’m going to be honest, should I never drink another fruited kettle sour again, I don’t think my life would be any worse off. There was a period there six or seven years ago where I couldn’t get enough. But I think eventually I worked out that using fruit in beer can be wonderful, but the base beer itself has got to have something else going on in the first place. The reason you don’t see any straight-up, unadulterated kettle soured Berliner weisse around is because it’s just lactic… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Watermelon IPA
- ABV
- 6.0%
Hop Nation & Blackhearts Old Dog New Trick
Tapped December 7, 2021
Common sayings can be terrible places to look for advice. A fool and his money are soon parted? Tell that to Donald Trump. Curiosity killed the cat? Don’t they have nine lives? Likewise, it feels like whoever said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks probably didn’t spend much time around dogs or maybe had a desire to blame previous owners for bad behaviour. Sure, beer names are potentially no better a place to go when seeking sage advice, but Old Dog New Trick seems, at the very least, a… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Hazy Pale
- ABV
- 4.2%
Coaster Beer
Tapped December 7, 2021
As many of the country's craft brewers look to entice more drinkers away from mainstream brands, we're seeing a growing number of easy-drinkers with sharp price points hitting retailers. And, as of summer 2021/22, you can add South East Brewing Co to that band of brewers. If the name doesn't sound familiar, their other brands will, as they're the folks behind KAIJU! beers and Golden Axe Cider. It shouldn't take too much detective work to figure out what they have in mind with Coaster Beer either.… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Bright Ale
- ABV
- 4.2%
Molly Rose & Strangelove Radlers
Tapped December 7, 2021
Radlers are one of those drinks most people will only have come across when travelling through Germany (or the UK in the shape of shandies). Typically a mix of beer and lemonade, they're rarely seen in Australian craft beer circles, even though Burnley Brewing (whose head brewer trained in Germany) have one as part of their expansive oeuvre. Molly Rose founder Nic Sandery reckons there's a market for them, however, and with the non- and low-alc beer sector experiencing huge growth he may be onto… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Radlers
- ABV
- 2.8% & 2.6%
Moon Dog Fresh Quince Of Bel-Air & Lemon Haze
Tapped December 6, 2021
There are times when you have to wonder whether the brewing team at Moon Dog gets much of a chance to pitch beer ideas or whether it's the marketing department – more specifically, whoever loves puns and pop references within the marketing department – calling the shots. Case in point: The Fresh Quince Of Bel-Air. That said, it's a pun that works on more than one level; there's the obvious – the addition of quince – but also the subtle, as it's fermented with Lallemand's WildBrew Philly Sour… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Philly Sour ft Quince & Lemon XPA
- ABV
- 6.0% & 5.0%
Blackman's Brewery Cold IPA & Incredible Haze
Tapped December 5, 2021
Looks like there's been a fire sale on pastel colours in the Torquay area recently as two rather different modern IPAs make their pitch for a space in your fridge this summer. Cold IPA was first released in spring but has proven popular enough to get a second run, and given it featured in our first post-lockdowns four, five and six blind tasting (results on the site December 6) we figure it should get a run on the site. For those new to the new IPA variant, you can read more here. In simplest terms,… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Cold IPA & Hazy DIPA
- ABV
- 6.5% & 8.5%
Molly Rose & Blackhearts' 2021 Festive Sours
Tapped December 4, 2021
They play nicely at all times do Molly Rose and Blackhearts & Sparrows, but seem to get on especially well when it comes to Christmas. And 2021 is no different as two more collabs appear with season's celebrations in mind. Tingle Bells is a "Festive Breakfast Sour", albeit not a repeat of the delicious Mimosa-mimicker of a couple of years back. [Note to self: don't forget to order a large bag of oranges and grab some bubbles before the 25th...] The label tells you it's brewed with pineapple… Read more
Dark Brown
- Style
- Festive Sour Ales
- ABV
- 4.8% & 5.2%
- Stockists
-
Blackhearts & Sparrows Braddon
Blackhearts & Sparrows North Hobart
Molly Rose brewpub & online
And other Blackhearts stores
More stockists...
Bad Shepherd New World IPA (2021)
Tapped December 3, 2021
The Bad Shepherd brewpub isn’t a place where there's any shortage of experimentation, with the Cheltenham crew regularly taking their recipes to beer's outer edges, whether it's in the direction of cocktails or desserts. So when it came time to brew up a beer for their sixth birthday, you might expect something cake-inspired to mark the occasion; instead, you’ll find a classic Bad Shepherd beer that's been revamped. (OK, so technically they served multiple beers at their street party and a few… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- West Coast IPA
- ABV
- 6.8%
- Bitterness
- 68 IBU
Bright Brewery That's Fresh
Tapped December 3, 2021
It might be hard to believe but back before everyone was sharing their Spotify yearly wraps, there was only one possible way to listen to popular music: So Fresh CDs. Four times a year these delights would be released, gracing the ears of Australia’s teenagers with the latest hits from across the world. But no release was ever better than So Fresh: The Hits of Summer because not only were you able to enjoy the latest hits but there was also an entire second disk that included songs from the previous… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Hazy Pale
- ABV
- 5.4%
One Drop December '21 Triple Drop
Tapped December 3, 2021
It ain’t easy keeping up with One Drop's releases. But dammit, we’re always keen to give it a shot. It’s been over a year since One Drop’s first Double Take release, and after five variants they haven’t gotten any more sensible. Double Take Strawberry has a ridiculous 420 grams of fruit per litre of beer, which apparently works out as 15 strawberries per can. This vibrant hot pink liquid with a candy pink head smells like you’ve just cracked open a punnet of fresh strawberries. Sourness… Read more
Red
- Style
- Imperial Fruit Sour, Hazy IPA & Raspberry Sherbet Sour
- ABV
- 10.1% & 5.8% & 9.8%
Akasha Projects Dream Juice
Tapped December 3, 2021
It’s been just over a year since Sydney’s Akasha Brewing Co completed a total rebrand, and their Akasha Projects series of special releases shows no sign of abating. At the time I stupidly thought to myself, there’s no way they’re going to be able to come up with a new hop-focused beer every fortnight or so to keep this thing going. I mean, how many different kinds of IPA are there? The answer, of course, is: "Heaps". This Project release is Dream Juice NZ Hazy IPA. By my calculations,… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- NZ Hazy IPA
- ABV
- 6.2%
Otherside Nelson Sabro IPA & Belgian Amburana Ale
Tapped December 3, 2021
With a little festive imagination, Otherside’s December '21 experimental releases have opposing hemisphere’s Christmas tables in mind. Nelson Sabro Oat Cream IPA serves up an Australian meal with its dense mango colour holding the hop and adjunct illusion of a vanilla and coconut cream panna cotta – one sprinkled with mint and splashed with white wine. As for its intent... imagine the last spoonful in the bowl washed down with the remainder of a wine glass as the sea breeze arrives. [OK, I'll… Read more
Rich Brown
- Style
- Oat Cream IPA & Spiced Belgian Ale
- ABV
- 7.4% & 6.2%
- Stockists
-
Available from the brewery
Otherside online
And stockists nationwide
More stockists...
Nomad Art Series: Cucumber & Mint Pale Ale & West Coast IPA
Tapped December 2, 2021
1822 – Convicts began building the walls of the Darlinghurst Gaol.† 1922 – The National Art School moved into the sandstone buildings of the former Darlinghurst Gaol site. 2022 – To mark 100 years of residence at the site, NAS teams up with Nomad Brewing and the Art Series is born: five pieces of art featured across five beer labels.†† The first in the series is a Cucumber and Mint Pale Ale, featuring artwork by Georgia Murray. Titled "Pool Party", this vibrant picture shows… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Cucumber & Mint Pale & West Coast IPA
- ABV
- 4.9% & 6.0%
