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!
Bodriggy Brewing Space Milk Vo. 1
Tapped October 15th, 2018
Now that Bodriggy’s brewery is firing on all cylinders we can expect to see a steady release of new and quirky tinnie releases leaving Abbotsford. Among them is a new series going under the Space Milk banner that will feature a rotating range of lactose-laced sour beers. Volume 1 is a kettle soured wheat ale in which the lactose is joined by cascara (the dried skins of coffee cherries) and wild Australian raspberries. That combination makes for a beer that pours a pinkish-orange hue with a soft… Read more
Red
- Style
- Fruit Cream Sour
- ABV
- 3.0%
- Stockists
-
And select good beer outlets in Victoria
More stockists...
Sailors Grave Blood and Sand & Grapefruit and Yuzu
Tapped October 12th, 2018
On a recent stop to see Gab and Chris at Sailors Grave, they revealed they had one new beer a week coming out at the minute (although hope to slow things a little after the current rush of madness). And these are two of the newbies seeing the light of day for the first time this spring. Blood and Sand is a collaboration with Lark Distillery, albeit one far removed from that announced by Wolf of the Willows around the same time. While the latter features an imperial smoked porter, here the former… Read more
Red
- Style
- Cocktail Ale & Fruity Farmhouse Ale
- ABV
- 5.7% & 5.4%
Modus Operandi Pittwater Premium Draught
Tapped October 12th, 2018
It’s funny how things come full circle. When Modus Operandi opened in 2014, it felt like a limitlessly exciting time in the beer world, one where small breweries were popping up with a frequency that allowed time and space for intrigue. They were becoming, to borrow parlance assumed by the tech world, disruptors. There wasn’t enough competition for them to be especially competitive with each other so more or less everything that came from a microbrewery was enough to cause a ripple in its own… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Beer
- ABV
- 4.4%
Wayward Brewing Raspberry Berliner Weisse
Tapped October 12th, 2018
One of the unexpected but unbridled success stories of the Wayward Brewing Company, in all its forms, has been its Raspberry Berliner Weisse. It first came out in 2012, when company founder Peter Philip was a still gypsy brewer making his beer at breweries in and around Sydney, and was released very sporadically under the name Sourpuss. When Wayward got its own brewery in 2015 Sourpuss moved right on in, became part of the furniture and a platform for a gamut of sour beers over the ensuing years.… Read more
Red
- Style
- Fruit Berliner Weisse
- ABV
- 3.8
Wayward Brewing India Pale Ale
Tapped October 12th, 2018
For more than three years Wayward’s flagship India Pale Ale was Oatis, an oatmeal IPA the brewery had debuted at the 2015 GABS festival. It wasn’t a beer that necessarily got people vocal about but it nonetheless had legions of admirers, meaning that when brewery decided to overhaul its core range in the latter part of 2018 there was little chance it would lose it place. It did, though, lose a couple of other things. For starters they sought to remove any confusion on the label by taking away… Read more
Golden
- Style
- India Pale Ale
- ABV
- 6.0%
Wayward Brewing Everyday Ale
Tapped October 12th, 2018
The only clue you need about Wayward’s Everyday Ale is in the name. It’s meant as a go-to beer for every day and situation. They must’ve been mighty tempted to just call it a pale ale (because, at its heart, that’s exactly what it is) but there’s also a sense they’re trying to push people a bit beyond the ordinary, to not have you settle for the status quo and get you dreaming of being the one astride the motorcycle on the label artwork, riding a road to who-knows-where as long as its… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Pale Ale
- ABV
- 4.2%
Wayward Brewing Pilsner
Tapped October 12th, 2018
When the Wayward range was rejigged and repackaged towards the end of 2018, the Pilsner was one of two new recipes to be debuted. And after a couple of sips you get a sense they’d put a lot of effort into getting this recipe right. After all, there’s a common line in the brewing world that beers of this ilk are the toughest to make, their lighter body and character limiting the ways a brewer can hide a potential flaw, so you really ought to get it right. This one’s hard to fault. Being an… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Pilsner
- ABV
- 4.2%
Wildflower & Mike Bennie Foudre #1
Tapped October 11th, 2018
You’ll notice, if you care for such details, that there are two especially large oak barrels at Wildflower. They’re called foudres and each holds around 2,500 litres of liquid. One of them belongs to Wildflower. The other belongs to drinks writer Mike Bennie who realised a promise made in the early days of Wildflower to, one day, stake out a small corner of the place to be his own. In December of 2017, both were filled. Wildflower’s would go on to house the Solera series. Bennie’s would produce… Read more
Golden Yellow
- Style
- Foudre Beer
- ABV
- 5.2%
Beerfarm & Clancy's Gose From The Black Lagoon
Tapped October 11th, 2018
While the Beerfarm may be landlocked, their collaborator’s affinity with the ocean has manifested in a quirky take on one of the most enduring renaissance styles of the past half decade. To think that only four years ago gose was nigh on extinct and, yet, here we are with a playful creativity that is normally reserved for styles with a rich history is somewhat mind-bending. Mind-bending is also a term likely to crop up when describing this black gose with lobster. Lobster, you say? In a beer?… Read more
Dark Brown
- Style
- Lobster Gose
- ABV
- 4.8%
- Stockists
-
Available now from the Beerfarm and all four Clancy’s Fish Pub venues.
Wolf of the Willows & Lark Distillery Imperial JSP
Tapped October 10th, 2018
In a world in which the release of barrel aged beers seems to be a weekly occurrence, The Barrel Exchange Project is a meeting of malts with a difference. The collaboration between Wolf of the Willows and Lark Distillery saw the Wolf brewers head to Tasmania to select six Lark barrels to be shipped across Bass Strait. Once they arrived in Cheltenham, within seven days the freshly emptied barrels were filled with an imperial version of the brewery's JSP and left to mature. When the beer was ready,… Read more
Black
- Style
- Whisky Barrel Aged Imperial Smoked Porter
- ABV
- 11.2%
- Stockists
Loch Brewery Cask Aged Boilermaker Stout & Boilermaker Stout
Tapped October 10th, 2018
It takes something to stand out from the crowd in the ever-busier local beer world, but Craig and Mel at Loch Brewery & Distillery in South Gippsland manage to. Not only do they brew English style beers and produce gins, gin liqueur and whiskies but they've been blending their various wares too. These two Boilermaker variants – of which you can read much more here – are, in many ways, a summation of their story. Both take their stouts and add a portion of the new-make malt spirit with which… Read more
Black
- Style
- Stout-Spirit Hybrids
Endeavour Kolsch & Red Rye IPA & Dessert Stout
Tapped October 10th, 2018
As he prepares to move on from the Endeavour Tap Rooms to pastures new, head brewer John “JB” Bogan is leaving a lineup of new beers that are a fair representation of the journey both he and the little brewery in The Rocks have been on in the past 18 months. The first is a Kolsch, a beer that nestles comfortably in the realm of easy-drinking styles with which Endeavour first rose but whose early reputation is being slowly shed thanks to the brewpub releases. As with the Rauchbier and Altbier… Read more
Red
- Style
- Kolsch & Red Rye IPA & Sweet Stout
- ABV
- 5.2% / 6.1% / 6.4%
Wildflower As It Were
Tapped October 10th, 2018
To know what this beer is is more about knowing what it’s not. Rather, we’ll never truly know what it’s meant to be and only what it is, as it were. This is Wildflower’s salute to a classic Old World saison, the kind they, the peasant toilers, would drink or might have drunk “back in the day” but which we cannot, but for the development of time travel, truly confirm. Certainly, some highly regarded examples exist, occupying the upper reaches of the unimpeachable pantheon of classic beers,… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Saison
- ABV
- 5.0%
Capital Brewing Summit Session XPA
Tapped October 9th, 2018
The Summit XPA from Capital Brewing has been around a fair while, at least relative to the brewery's still short existence. Initially a draught only pour, a short run was canned last summer exclusively for the Secret Garden Festival. Its popularity means it's now graduated to the brewery's core offering in time for summer 2018/19. While it may bear the name XPA, which as a category locally seems to be gravitating towards pale, light-bodied, hop forward pale ales around the 4.5 percent ABV mark, this… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- Mid-Strength XPA
- ABV
- 3.5%
Prancing Pony XPA
Tapped October 9th, 2018
Lawnmower beers, session ales, summer smashers, XPAs ... call them what you like, but such beers are brewed for one purpose above all: to quench thirst. While you'd be advised to seek the advice of an accredited medical professional before attempting to cure your sunstroke with beer, there's no doubt a nice, tropical beer at the end of a tough, hot day makes starting a chore that much easier. And it's here that Prancing Pony’s XPA has come to play. A bright yellow straw colour invites the hot… Read more
Pale Yellow
- Style
- XPA
- ABV
- 4.1%
Bridge Road Brewers Mayday Hills Jam & Yuzu
Tapped October 9th, 2018
The Bridge Road brewing team continues to plunder the bounty of its local region for the Mayday Hills series, with JimJam Foods and Mountain Yuzu the latest co-conspirators welcomed aboard. The former provided strawberry jam, which was added to a light farmhouse ale that had been fermented with Brettanomyces in the brewery's foeder; lactose (milk sugar) was introduced along the way too. Little surprise, then, when you're met with big, sweet, sugary jam aromas, supported by a little citrus. There's… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Foeder Fermented Fruit Beers
- ABV
- 5.9% & 6.5%
- Stockists
-
Grape and Grain Liquor Cellars
More stockists...Beer DeLuxe Albury
Sovereign Liquor
Westgarth Liquor
Vin Wine and Spirits
Cellar and Pantry
ACT
Page Bottler
Plonk Fyshwick
Plonk Belconnen
Candamber
Hops and Vine
SA
Belair Liquor
Highway Cellars
Goodwood Cellars
CoConspirators The Undertaker
Tapped October 9th, 2018
CoConspirators Brewing’s latest colourful – or, perhaps more accurately, rather drably dressed – offering has been brought to life as The Undertaker. It's a rye IPA featuring a mix of Simcoe, Idaho 7 and New Zealand’s Kohatu, a fact you might be able to ascertain if you get your hands on a can and manage to crack the code on the beer’s side. Alternatively, you could stare at it blankly for a minute and then ask CoConspirators’ graphic designer what it all means, as this beer writer did. The… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Rye IPA
- ABV
- 6.0%
- Stockists
-
Grape and Grain Liquor Cellars
More stockists...And select good beer outlets in VIC
Rocky Ridge & LS Merchants Rosé Gose
Tapped October 8th, 2018
For Rocky Ridge and Margaret River rouseabout Jacob Nesbitt, the chance to blend grape and grain was a dream come true. Having assisted with LS Merchant’s 2018 grape harvest – as well as working on the farm brewery's packaging line – when winery owner Dylan Arvidson offered Jacob the chance to make a project wine with him, he saw the opportunity instead for a unique collaboration. As luck would have it, Dylan had been experimenting with salted rosé blends and Rosé Gose was born. Using the… Read more
Red
- Style
- Beer-Wine Hybrid
- ABV
- 4.0%
- Stockists
-
Rosé Gose is the smallest Rocky Ridge release yet and initial demand has been fierce.
If you're keen, seek it out quickly from independent WA retailers.
More stockists...
Ocho Happy Place
Tapped October 8th, 2018
If there's something new to play with, or perhaps unusual, recent history suggests Stu Grant at Ocho will be itching to get his hands on it. And so it is with kveik, a Norwegian farmhouse yeast strain that first passed our lips a couple of months back courtesy of Lightning Axe from Tallboy & Moose. It's a strain that can be pushed to ridiculously high temperatures and can, in turn, fire out pretty dense fruity characters. In Ocho's case, it's been applied to a mid-strength that's cloudy as all… Read more
Golden
- Style
- Mid-Strength Farmhouse Ale
- ABV
- 3.5%
- Stockists
-
Order Happy Place from Ocho direct
4 Pines Keller Door: New England IPA
Tapped October 8th, 2018
The brewers at 4 Pines have released more than their fair share of IPAs over the years, many of them as part of the limited run Keller Door series. Red Rye IPA, Imperial IPA, Citrus IPA, New Season IPA and on it goes. They've also put out the odd draught only beer bearing the name New England IPA and now such a beer has been given a wider release in 500ml bottles. They used big-hitting hop varieties Citra, Mosaic, El Dorado, Idaho #7 and Simcoe from the US in what they say is "their most heavily… Read more
Golden
- Style
- NEIPA
- ABV
- 7.5%
- Bitterness
- 40 IBU
- Stockists
-
Available in limited release from good bottleshops nationwide
