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!

Bendigo Beer

Felons Brewing Co Low Carb

Tapped February 4, 2021
With the name Low Carb, an ABV that we call mid-strength but think of as low, and a soft dryness like a fresh towel, this beer is clearly designed to be a light option for beer drinkers. Anything labelled "Low Carb" may not be ideal for carb-loading before you go for a run, but this beer may well be just what you're looking when you arrive back home sweating and looking to cool down. (Drink water first though – that's just common sense.) When it comes to flavour, the Cascade Cryo hops… Read more
Style
Low Carb Mid-Strength
ABV
3.5%
Bitterness
14 IBU

Bodriggy Brewing Here If You Need

Tapped February 2, 2021
Following the release of Good Thanks, Yourself? midway through 2020, Bodriggy are starting 2021 with another hazy limited release named after an equally common (and just as often hollow) phrase. Here If You Need is a spiritual successor to last year’s release where the dial’s been turned up by turning a DHH hazy pale into a DDH hazy IPA and where 5.5 percent ABV has been boosted to 6.4. Here If You Need also seems to have had the citrus turned right up too, shedding last year's light tangerine… Read more
Style
DDH Hazy IPA
ABV
6.4%

Reckless Brewing Summer IPA

Tapped February 1, 2021
Does this beer feel summer-y because it’s called Summer IPA? Or was it named that because it feels summer-y? I don’t know and I don’t care. What I do know is that Reckless’ first limited release carries as much summer as Endless Summer played on loop ad nauseum.† It smells like someone has opened a packet of Starburst Chews, unwrapped every individual lolly, and then thrown them all at your head. If you like the idea of drinking overripe stone fruit, juicy blueberries, tangy passionfruit… Read more
Style
IPA
ABV
6.5%

Pioneer Brewing Co Kolsch & Summer Wheat

Tapped February 1, 2021
See the liquid sittin’ in the glass now In the evening on a Friday night A little light-a-shinin' through the glass now Lets me know everything's all right. Summer Wheat† makes me feel fine Blowin' through the grain fields in my mind… Kolsch and Summer Wheat are two seasonal releases from Pioneer Brewing that’ll let you know everything’s all right. They’re both a pleasant gold (though the Kolsch is brighter while the Summer Wheat carries a little natural haze); they’re both traditional… Read more
Style
Kolsch & Wheat Beer
ABV
Both 4.8%

Temple Brewing 888 Mandarin Ale 2021

Tapped February 1, 2021
Now enjoying its third iteration, Temple Brewing’s celebration of the beginning of another Chinese New Year, the 888 Mandarin Ale, continues to change with the passing of another lunar year. The first 888 was a lion-backed saison – which you can read about here – while the next saw Temple switch the recipe to a pale ale for the year of the rat. Now, for 2021, the Brunswick East brewery has marked the start of the year of the bull with another mandarin pale ale, though with changes beyond a… Read more
Style
Mandarin Pale Ale
ABV
4.5%

Mismatch Brewing Pink Lemon Ale

Tapped January 31, 2021
When the Mismatch team was looking for inspiration for another limited release, they turned to co-founder Marc Huber who suggested a refreshing lemonade-inspired beer to service drinkers' needs in the sizzle of summer. Head brewer Ewan Brewerton and his team got to work, designing a sour base recipe in which lemon juice was added to lower the pH levels. In keeping with the lemon theme, Lemondrop hops were added alongside lactose and raspberry purée to give the beer a light, dusty pinkish tinge not… Read more
Style
Fruited Sour Ale
ABV
6.0%

Hargreaves Hill Passion Fruit Summer Pale Ale & Hill To Home IPA

Tapped January 31, 2021
If you know anything about the star of the contemporary Aussie hop breeding program, Galaxy, it's likely to be that it's the beer that helped Stone & Wood Pacific Ale become the game-changer it is, or that it's known for its citrusy, peachy qualities, with passionfruit oft cited as its most olfactory-tickling characteristic. So, what happens when you add passionfruit to a summery pale ale featuring Galaxy hops? Well, in the case of Hargreaves Hill's Passion Fruit Summer Pale Ale, you get a deeply… Read more
Style
Passionfruit Pale & Hazy IPA
ABV
4.5% & 6.5%
Stockists

Hops To Home

And Hargreaves Hill stockists nationwide

Modus Operandi Wax Flower Sour

Tapped January 29, 2021
Native ingredients were used by craft brewers in Australia well before the current climate of anything goes (and why not try that too?). Barons were using black wattle in a beer back in the Noughties and these days, while there are brewers better known for playing in such realms than others – the fearless foragers at Sailors Grave, the growing band of wild ale brewers, the part-Aboriginal-owned Spinifex, Northern Beaches-based Nomad, Beerfarm in their Fervor collabs, to name but a few – it does… Read more
Style
Geraldton Wax Sour
ABV
6.9%
Stockists

Available nationwide from Modus stockists

Burnley Brewing & Good Heavens Tropicana Sour

Tapped January 28, 2021
La Niña might be assuring Melbourne’s summer isn’t as crisp as it can be but there’s still been some blissful days for drinking in the sun and hopefully, February will bring us a few more. That’s what Burnley Brewing and Good Heavens are counting on with their collaboration Tropicana Sour, a beer designed to be cracked on that Melbourne bar's rooftop and anywhere else there's sun which, at the moment, seems like any other state. It’s towards the lighter end of the sour scale, with the… Read more
Style
Sour
ABV
3.8%

Akasha Project Talus IPA

Tapped January 27, 2021
We know 2020 may have been a pretty awful year all round but, for weird beer freaks like me, at least there was an unprecedented bonanza of new hop varieties getting a full commercial release. There’s been a bumper crop coming out of the US with a lot of experimental breeding of the neomexicanus stock resulting in hops with intense and distinct aroma and flavour profiles that seem to be perfectly suited for the ongoing lust for big tropical fruit flavours. Formally known as HBC 692 – first coming… Read more
Style
Single Hop IPA
ABV
6.2%

Young Henrys Bowlo Bitter

Tapped January 27, 2021
How good is a bloody bowls club? Pots of sub-zero Tooheys Old, crumbed snags, walls positively heaving with memorabilia and photos of the Queen, bizarre decades-long political beefs between Gavin, the newly-elected president, and Shirley, the long-term Treasurer. The bowlo has got it all! And it's in this theme that Young Henrys have continued their series of collaborations with Australian musicians with a bowls club-inspired beer brewed in harmony with alt-country/folk band, Caitlin Harnett &… Read more
Style
Aussie Pale Ale
ABV
4.4%
Stockists

Petersham Bowling Club

Head to Wombarra Bowlo on Jan 29

Or The PBC on Jan 30 for a launch party gig featuring the collaborating band

And look out for the beer on tap elsewhere on the East Coast

More stockists...

Otherside Brewing Co Tipo Pilsner

Tapped January 27, 2021
Otherside have kicked off 2021 with this tight expression of a niche beer trend, one whose origins are driven by the appreciation of a single beer, Birrifico Italiano’s Tipopils. A secret society of sorts – a cabal, if you will, of brewers – began releasing beers in its likeness over the past decade, with Firestone Walker’s Pivo Pils one of the most notable. So, what is an Italian pilsner? In a through-the-looking-glass moment, American brewers became intrigued by the floral and earthy characteristics… Read more
Style
Italian Pilsner
ABV
6.0%
Stockists

From the brewery

And Otherside stockists nationwide

Deeds Brewing One Standard Drink, Fortune And Glory, Intergalactic Lovechild Vol.3 & DKAT Amarillo

Tapped January 25, 2021
By my calculations, in releasing four new beers within the first three weeks of the year, Deeds are on track to unveil around 70 new brews in 2021. Two of this quartet are hazy double IPAs, so their fans can potentially hold out for 35 such beers this year too! Starting in a rather different place, however, we have One Standard Drink; no prizes for guessing what it is... Very pale and deeply hazy with a finely-beaded cloudy head when given a swirl, this might be borderline light beer in terms of… Read more
Style
Mid-Strength, Hazy DIPA, Sour Hazy DIPA & Hazy DIPA
ABV
3.0% & 8.0% & 8.0% & 8.5%

Moon Dog & Run The Jewels No Save Point IPA

Tapped January 22, 2021
When it comes to favourite Run The Jewels tracks, I’d have to say mine is Lie, Cheat, Steal. Sure, Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck) is the undeniable banger that still gets dropped late at night for the poor souls still at a party where I've managed to secure an AUX cord, but Lie, Cheat, Steal has the flow, lyrics and bombastic build-up that perfectly captures the essence of what makes El-P and Killer Mike such a wonderful force. You may well wonder why you’re reading about this on a beer… Read more
Style
Hazy IPA
ABV
6.5%
Stockists

Available online here

Then select bottleshops nationwide

Boston Brewing Julius Squeezer

Tapped January 22, 2021
Namesake Julius Caesar was revered for his political and military savvy, as well as tidying up the calendar as we now know it, and criticised for shady methods in getting what he wanted – let’s start a riot in Rome, and then force some reforms through while no one is paying attention. Equal intent may be assigned here with Boston’s sour orange NEIPA. Julius Caesar's agrodolce, fruity orange leads throughout, with subtle tang, juicy body and a bitter, citric twist. However, this acidity balances… Read more
Style
Sour Orange NEIPA
ABV
6.0%
Stockists

Available from the Denmark brewery and Victoria Park venue

Plus regular Boston stockists

Beerfarm Save the Harvest Strawberry Sour 2021

Tapped January 22, 2021
Beerfarm’s Save the Harvest Strawberry Sour has made an annual appearance since the 2018 strawberry needle crisis. In 2021, it's the Metricup brewery's first hotly-anticipated limited release for the year, an reiteration complete with a couple of tweaks that are, in part, due to a particularly trying year for Australian fruit farmers. Save the Harvest is now a beer brewed around the rejected and unwanted strawberries from Australian strawberry growers, with the goal of not only producing a quality… Read more
Style
Strawberry Sour
ABV
4.9%
Bitterness
8 IBU

Black Hops California Love

Tapped January 20, 2021
For their first limited release in 2021, Black Hops have looked to a sunshine state that isn’t their own to brew California Love. The West Coast IPA is in tune with an earlier time in America; not in a MAGA or Trumpian sense (see ya!) but more to an era when America’s big hoppy beers were lean, clear and all about the notes you’d get from the “Three C’s” of Cascade, Centennial, Columbus. In the case of California Love, it’s resin and pine that leads the charge, with enough of it it… Read more
Style
West Coast IPA
ABV
7.2%

Stomping Ground Into The 'Wood Barrel Aged Gose With Lemon Myrtle

Tapped January 20, 2021
It’s probably thanks to the sheer number of kettle sours that keep getting released but when I receive a gose featuring native lemon myrtle, my first thought isn't "I bet this is barrel aged". But Stomping Ground’s first can of 2021 is a far cry from a sour made quickly, instead, it’s part of the brewery’s Into The ‘Wood series and Barrel Aged Gose with Lemon Myrtle spent 15 months ageing in French oak wine barrels. That time in barrels has given it many layers of complexity… Read more
Style
Barrel Aged Gose
ABV
4.5%

Dainton Beer Peaches & S'Cream

Tapped January 19, 2021
Dainton Beer’s first limited release of 2021 is part Edvard Munch painting and part a reflection of what many of us spent 2020 doing. OK, so maybe the Peaches & S’Cream design is pretty much all Munch, although I for one did spend plenty of last year screaming inside my heart. I also spent a lot of it wondering if there were too many IPA variants and if too many of them contained lactose, only for Dainton to welcome the new year with what they’ve dubbed an “Oatscream IPA.” The inclusion… Read more
Style
Oatscream IPA
ABV
7.5%

Swell Brewery Lagundri Bay Tropical Session Ale & Southport Sunset Blood Orange Sour

Tapped January 19, 2021
Lagundri Bay is a popular tourist surf beach located off the island of Nias in Sumatra, Indonesia. Several years ago, Swell founder Dan Wright spent time there surfing, reading brewing books and drinking Bintang. The Lagundri Bay Tropical Session Ale has been brewed as a beer he wished he'd had available to him: a session IPA that smacks of lazing on the beach in the summertime sun. The tropical vibe has been harnessed well, with juicy mango, pineapple, some lychee and a little papaya on the nose.… Read more
Style
Session IPA & Blood Orange Sour
ABV
4.2% & 3.2%

The Crafty Pint is an independent online magazine and resource for anyone interested in craft beer in Australia. We bring an honest, old-fashioned journalistic approach to beer's brave new world, telling stories because they're worth telling not because someone is paying us to write them.

Like many of the people who have changed the face of beer in Australia, we believe in authenticity, integrity, enjoyment and love. We hope to play a role in helping good beer, brewed by good people, find its way into the hands of more drinkers.

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