All aboard, beer lovers! The lineup for Pint of Origin 2024 is locked and loaded.
Australia's biggest, longest, most delicious and diverse pub crawl returns to Melbourne for a 12th time from May 10 to 19 – and we've got one seriously tasty offering for you.
The 2024 festival features a blend of old #PoO24 favourites – some of them with new host regions, fresh faces, and a couple of past Pint of Origin venues returning after a hiatus.
And, in a festival first, we welcome Whisky and Alement to the fold. The 2023 World Whiskies Awards World's Best Whisky Bar (Rest of World) will become the Pint of Origin Boilermaker Hub, showcasing beer and whisky pairings from around the globe.
The other debutants are Heartbreaker, who will be representing the beers and brewers of Canada, and CoConspirators Brewpub, where you'll find the breweries of the Territories as well as some collabs they're creating with the CoCon brewers.
And, aside from a few regions changing hands, you'll also notice a change in the way home state brewers are represented. Regional Victorian brewers are back at one venue – The Cherry Tree – while those of Greater Melbourne will be split across two pubs. Freddie Wimpoles in St Kilda will be showcasing brewers from South of the Yarra; The Terminus in Fitzroy North will be the place to check out the best of beer North of the Yarra.
VIEW THE PINT OF ORIGIN 2024 LINEUP
The full Pint of Origin website will go live in April, at which point you'll be able to apply for a Pint of Origin Passport, see which breweries will be appearing where, and what events the host venues are planning on top of their ten days of tap takeovers.
We're making some improvements to the Passports for 2024 and have a few other new ideas we look forward to sharing with you as May 10 approaches.
For now, however, mark your diaries, tell your friends, and get ready to travel the world of beer at 21 great Melbourne venues.
James Smith launched The Crafty Pint in 2010, two years after moving to Australia from the UK. He was taken to Mountain Goat within weeks of landing in Melbourne, joined their indoor cricket team, and is still navigating the rabbit hole that is craft beer to this day.
The beers that turned you on to good beer:
- Watching pints of McEwan's 80 Shilling settle when visiting family in Edinburgh.
- Pints of flat Bass from the jug at the Cap & Stocking in Kegworth.
- A first Paulaner Hefeweizen when working in Munich in 1998: “This smells of bananas!”
- Castle Rock Harvest Pale – how could a 3.8 percent ABV beer be so good? (It turns out it was an early example of the three Cs – Cascade, Centennial and Columbus – in an English bitter).
- Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA poured through hops at the Sunset Grill in Cambridge, MA, in the company of a man who turned out to be the Beer Nut (while we were both covering a double murder case at the time).
- Ordering a Mountain Goat Hightail on my first day as an Aussie resident as it was local and I’d never heard of it; “A dark Australian beer; well I never…”
- Murray’s Icon 2IPA at Beer DeLuxe Fed Square, recommended by a guy I’d not long known who's now the main man at Fixation, served by Mik Halse, now head of sales at Hawkers. How could an Australian beer smell as good as that?!?
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Any really good, fresh and balanced West Coast style IPA. Punchy hop aromatics are the most obvious way to capture someone's attention and these IPAs, done well, present the key components in beer (if you're sticking to just water, malt, hops and yeast) in harmony yet with the volume turned up.
- Saison Dupont. Arguably a selfish choice here as I bloody love the broad saison style and dearly hope it will finally take hold in Australia one day. Given a choice, I'd probably crack one enlivened with Brettanomyces like Molly Rose Matilde for myself but, when it comes to turning on someone new, you've got to go with the classic.
- Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. Because if you don't enjoy or can't appreciate this beer, I'll never win you over. And because Filip, the fruit and wood specialist at Rodenbach that designed it, is a beautiful human.
The last beer you enjoyed:
Fixation IPA at The Incubator.
Three things that represent you:
- The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Golden Plains
NB All articles written by James in the first eight years of the site appear as By Crafty Pint. Today, that's used for collaborative efforts by the wider team.
