New Beers
Barely a day goes by without another seasonal or one-off special flying out of an Australian brewery (if not ten). Here and in our weekly newsletter, we'll bring you news and, if we've sampled them, our take on as many of them as possible. Happy hunting!
KAIJU! Cthulhu On The Moon Black IPA
Tapped April 7, 2021
Given they launched themselves into the Aussie beer scene with beers that – at the time, at least – would have been one-off or seasonal releases for most of their peers, it's quite striking how infrequently KAIJU! release one-off beers themselves. Sure, there's a few that appear only in kegs each year, and fewer still that appear in cans, such as their Mutation Program beers, but for the most part they keep themselves happy (and growing in volume) with a pretty tight lineup, which makes revisiting… Read more
Black
- Style
- Black IPA
- ABV
- 6.5%
- Stockists
-
Available nationwide
More stockists...
Hop Nation Fresh Hop Ground Control
Tapped April 6, 2021
When Hop Products Australia unveiled the name of their newest proprietary hop, Eclipse, in November 2020, the hop grower teamed up with a dozen brewers and Beer Cartel to mark the launch with a special mixed pack dedicated to the hop. The dozen beers were an impressive showcase too, particularly thanks to the diversity of beer styles brewed to explore what Eclipse can do; sure it's nice to know what flavours a hop imparts on an IPA but its just as exciting to see the tasting notes on display in a… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Fresh Hop West Coast IPA
- ABV
- 7.0%
Hargreaves Hill Pursuit Of Hoppiness No.9 & Fruitopia No.3
Tapped April 5, 2021
Hops – lots of them, mostly added late in the brewing process – have been the unifying factor in Hargreaves Hill's Pursuit of Hoppiness series (the clue is in the name, after all). Yet, across the eight prior releases to date, they'd touched upon a few bases, with a Cryo Oat Cream IPA – No.7 – and imperial red IPA – No.8 – probably my picks from the lineup to date. And it's in similar territory to the former they head as they close in on double figures. Pursuit of Hoppiness No.9 is an… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Oat Cream IPA & Imperial Fruit Sour
- ABV
- 7.0% & 8.0%
DTC & Friends Dankfest 2021 Quartet
Tapped April 3, 2021
Ever wanted to have a party with some mates and celebrate the good old days, but want it to be as fresh as it probably wasn’t then? So do The DTC crew, who've been celebrating all things dank in beer via four collabs created for their Dankfest 2021 weekender: each was conceived by a pair of hop-focused brewers – one East Coast, one West. All Shook Up is a double grapefruit IPA that's an amplified meld of classics from two breweries of Scottish origin, with the internationals from BrewDog lending… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Various IPAs
- ABV
- 9.0% & 8.5% & 7.0% & 7.0%
- Stockists
-
Available from The DTC and online
Balter Brewing Eazy Hazy
Tapped April 1, 2021
Another day, another entry in Balter’s Hazy series. Scott Hargrave, Balter’s head brewer, says Eazy Hazy was the result of a few experiments last year making session beers, including Bunker Buster, Super Sipper, Quaff Bomb and Session Hazy. Each of those was well received in their own right, which says a lot for the final result – low alcohol, low bitterness, plenty of flavour, plenty of drinkability. Would you expect anything less from Balter? This opaque yellow drop is fruity but gentle and… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Hazy Pale
- ABV
- 4.0%
Sunday Road Bigger Enigma & Dust From A Distant Sun
Tapped April 1, 2021
Between the clarity, the craftsmanship, and the awe-inspiring beauty, Bigger Enigma is what I imagine stained glass windows taste like. Sunday Road have hit five years of brewing, and this beer is how they’re celebrating. Since Enigma Ale was the brewery's first to market and remains their flagship, it’s only right for it to become the basis for their birthday beer with Bigger Enigma turning things up by containing twice the malt, twice the bitterness and four times the dry-hop of the original.… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Double IPA & Double Oat Cream IPA
- ABV
- 8.6% & 7.0%
- Bitterness
- 60 IBU & 22 IBU
Sunday Road Over The Bridge
Tapped April 1, 2021
At the end of 2020 Kirrawee Bridge opened and now that it takes pedestrians over the Princes Highway, it’s no longer necessary to play a real-life game of Frogger to get from Sunday Road Brewing to the Prince Hotel. Walking between the two safely now takes just three minutes and twenty seconds (or 436 steps for those of you watching your Fitbits). That’s as good a reason as any to celebrate, right? Sunday Road and the Prince believe it is, so they teamed up to make Over The Bridge, a returning… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Hazy Pale
- ABV
- 4.5%
- Bitterness
- 18 IBU
Dainton Brewing Red Eye Rye 2021
Tapped March 31, 2021
It might be shocking to hear but 2013 was an entire eight years ago. It was the year the word selfie was invented (in Australia, no less), Daft Punk released their last album (which makes you wonder what they’d been doing from then until their breakup last month) and it was a little bit easier to keep track of who was brewing what in Australia. One of the new breweries to appear on the scene in that year was Dainton Family Brewery, a nomadic operation headed up by brewer Dan Dainton and his old… Read more
Red
- Style
- Red IPA
- ABV
- 5.5%
Bridge Road Brewers Harvest Hazy & Dark Harvest 2021
Tapped March 30, 2021
Snap lockdowns aside, March 2021 is starting to feel a whole lot more normal than 2020. For one, beer festivals are back, including The High Country Hop which not only returned at the end of the month but was bigger than ever, having moved from the carpark at Bridge Road Brewers to the Beechworth Historic Precinct Reserve. The festival’s return also heralds the arrival of Bridge Road’s longrunning fresh hop beers, which have been brewed for far longer than other breweries have been exploring… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Fresh Hop IPAs
- ABV
- 6% & 6.6%
Bridge Road Brewers Mango Sour With Lime
Tapped March 30, 2021
A month or so after loading some 500 kilograms of berries into a beer, in the month of March Bridge Road again filled their brewery with the same amount of fruit to create Mango Sour With Lime. Like Very Berry Sour, the “Sessional Sour Beer” really pushes the limits of how beers meant to look, with it appearing far closer to a juiced mango over juiced malts in the glass (I know you don’t quite juice malts: please don’t email). Mango Sour is not quite as syrupy as the path many breweries are… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Sessionable Sour Ale
- ABV
- 4.3%
Boston Brewing Great Southern, Mango Oat Cream & Idaho 7 IPAs
Tapped March 30, 2021
After a summer spent exploring fruit in sours, Boston have moved on to showcase a spectrum of hoppy IPAs, which will no doubt please the many Easter holiday guests at their twin homes in Denmark and Vic Park. First up, if there was ever a beer that I felt qualified to cover, this is it. To be fair, however, the name Great Southern references the vast WA region, a mosaic of farming and ancient forests, that’s washed by the Antarctica-fuelled Southern Ocean, but I’m happy to take a little shine… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- IPA, Mango Oat Cream IPA & IPA
- ABV
- 5.8% & 7.0% & 7.0%
- Stockists
-
Boston Brewery, Denmark
Boston Vic Park
And more WA stockists to follow
More stockists...
Slow Lane Brewing Weka Pale Ale
Tapped March 29, 2021
Weka Island is a 5.8 percent ABV hazy pale ale from Slow Lane and also a tiny island off the coast of another small island which is off the coast of the island nation of Aotearoa. Got it? I’ll get to the beer shortly but first I’m going to write a totally unnecessary and barely relevant bit about our national neighbour and its birds. Weka Island is located off the east coast of Rakiura, an island that sits south of the southern most point of the south island of Aotearoa. Rakiura and the islands… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Hazy Pale
- ABV
- 5.8%
Slow Lane Brewing Threefold
Tapped March 29, 2021
Threefold is Slow Lane Brewing’s take on a no-nonsense traditional Belgian tripel. Tripels are the strongest of the pale Trappist styles, first brewed by the Westmalle monastery in 1934 and now produced throughout Belgium and beyond. Australian made tripels are released at the rate of about 1.3 a year so, if you don’t grab one of these, you’ll be lucky to see another within the next nine months or so, I reckon. Slow Lane’s Alex Jarman has gone for a 100 percent pilsner malt base and, although… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Belgian Tripel
- ABV
- 8.4%
Bad Shepherd Rum Barrel-Aged Piña Colada Sour & Double Choc Hazelnut Brown
Tapped March 29, 2021
When Bad Shepherd's Piña Colada Sour appeared back in September, we noted it was low on the sour and heavy on the pineapple juice and coconut. So what happens when you take such a beer and pop it in former rum barrels for six months? In this case, as well as almost doubling in ABV, Rum Barrel-Aged Piña Colada Sour has pretty much shed the last vestiges of sourness and is certainly more rum barrel than piña colada. There's sweet, honeyed, banana-tinged rum on nose and plenty of sweet rum and toffee… Read more
Rich Brown
- Style
- Barrel-Aged Cocktail Beer & Double Hazelnut Brown Ale
- ABV
- 7.6% & 7.2%
Venom Brewing Kickstart My Heart
Tapped March 28, 2021
From rape, murder, priests and revenge to skydiving naked from an aeroplane, you can't deny Venom have decided to follow an interesting path with their limited releases in 2021. Here, they follow up their hazy IPA tribute to Cradle of Filth with a trip to the West Coast of the USA inspired by Mötley Crüe, the band some male members of the LNP seem to wish they could be. Kickstart My Heart, which I keep wanting to write as Un-Break My Heart – a song you have to feel is unlikely to feature in this… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- West Coast IPA
- ABV
- 7.0%
White Bay Beer Co Jettison IPA
Tapped March 28, 2021
Chatting to the White Bay crew at this month's Canberra Craft Beer & Cider Festival, it's clear that not only do they have grand ambitions but also that they want to see their Union Lager become their flagship. Yet, while they back their tightly wound lager to the hilt, they clearly have a soft spot for the world of IPA too, with new variants appearing every few weeks. The newest of those pouring at the festival (and out widely in cans) is Jettison, a beer they describe as "friggin plush"… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Juicy IPA
- ABV
- 6.4%
Boatrocker La Fleur, Harmonious Funk & Sterk & Donker 2020
Tapped March 27, 2021
The advantages of opening Australia's first brewery barrel room (then adding a distillery) must be manifold, not least when you've got a few years under your belt to amass all manner of barrels and other oak vessels while developing various house cultures – wild and otherwise – as well as base liquids with which to create. In the case of La Fleur and Harmonious Funk, Boatrocker make use of some of the wild ale that started out in their koelschip, aged for three years in a 100-year-old foeder… Read more
Rich Brown
- Style
- Wild Ales & Barrel-Aged Belgian Dark
- ABV
- 6.2% & 6.2% & 11.2%
Colonial Brewing Barrel Projects Brown
Tapped March 26, 2021
They've had a fair bit on at Colonial in recent years. As one of the bigger and faster-growing craft breweries in Australia, there have been major expansion projects at both sites in WA and Victoria, with a way still to go in Port Melbourne. But, in the background, they've been starting a barrel program – and taking their time over it. The first beer deemed worthy of release is Brown, a blend of a dark ale aged in chardonnay and pinot noir barrels for a couple of years before being blended with… Read more
Dark Brown
- Style
- Barrel-Aged Sour Brown Ale
- ABV
- 8.1%
- Stockists
-
Find the beer here
Temple Brewing Hazy #3
Tapped March 26, 2021
Given number two was bigger than number one in the first two beers in Temple Brewing's Hazy Series, we were working on the assumption that number three might dial things up a little further. Instead, Hazy #3 is the lightest yet released in a series of four with brewer Ross creating a rather sessionable hazy pale and looking to see how Motueka, Cryo Citra and El Dorado hops interact with kveik yeast. Cracking it, the first notes to come forward are lemon rind meets orange, while they're joined by… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Kveik Pale Ale
- ABV
- 5.5%
Bodriggy Brewing WaterMelanie
Tapped March 26, 2021
Often, when Australia’s brewers look to America’s West Coast for inspiration, their search is for big, bold and hoppy IPAs but, for Bodriggy's March 2021 release, they’ve instead opted for the fruit-filled and light. WaterMelanie is a watermelon ale inspired by Hell or High Watermelon from California’s 21st Amendment Brewery and has seen the Abbotsford brewers add 2,000 litres of watermelon juice to a base beer that’s heavy on the wheat. Having never tried a Hell or High Watermelon it’s… Read more
Red
- Style
- Watermelon Wheat Beer
- ABV
- 5.5%
