Pint of Origin 2024 is just weeks away now, and is set to be bigger and better than ever. To make it easier for beer lovers to make their way around venues with their #PoO24 Passports, we've split the 21 venues into five mini-PoO Crawls – each with a prizes up for grabs for anyone that completes a set.
Before the festival kicks off on May 10, The Crafty Pint has teamed up with Konvoy for the Konvoy Kegfluencer Kompetition to showcase the fun that awaits attendees.
We're inviting five Melbourne-based brewery reps who fancy themselves as a bit of a whizz with a camera to film themselves as they visit the venues making up one of the Crawls (see below), putting together a short reel as they go. We'll share the results in the lead-up to the festival, with the best winning a pallet of Konvoy kegs for their brewery.
It's a chance to celebrate their role in beer, the Pint of Origin venues that support craft brewers all year round, and the city in which they work. Reps can work for any Australian brewery, not just those based in Victoria – they just need to work within Melbourne.
The five reps selected for the challenge will each be equipped with a Konvoy Cloud tracker so we can plot their routes between venues and thus show beer lovers where to head between May 10 and 19, and how they can gain entry into the multiple #PoO Passport Prize Draws we're creating for the 2024 festival.
If you or one of your reps is up for the challenge, all they need to do is fill in the form below before April 10. We'll then select the five best entries, allocate each one of the five routes by April 12, get a tracker into their hands and await their reels, ready to be rolled out on socials ahead of Pint of Origin.
The reel judged the best will win that rep's brewery a pallet of kegs – and the glory of becoming the inaugural Konvoy Kegfluencer!
The #PoO24 Crawls
As in previous Pint of Origins, the best way to enjoy the festival will be with a digital #PoO24 Passport. You'll be able to sign up for these later this month.
Once you've got yours, you'll be able to access bonus beers and also enter prize draws as you go. Whereas in past years, the prizes have been drawn for those who make it to every venue, this time around we've created five smaller PoO Crawls, each of which has its own prize pool. Those who make it to all 21 gain entry to each of these plus the main prize draw.
The five mini-Crawls are as follows:
- WEST: Mr West, Benchwarmer, Westside Ale Works, The Lincoln
- NORTH: Miss Moses, The Woodlands Hotel, Carwyn Cellars, CoConspirators Brewpub
- INNER NORTH: Beermash, The Terminus Fitzroy North, Bonny, Near & Far, The Park Abbotsford*
- CENTRAL: Whitehart, Heartbreaker, Whisky & Alement, The Catfish
- SOUTH & EAST: Windsor Alehouse, Freddie Wimpoles, The Cherry Tree, The Royston
* The Inner North Crawl has one more than the others as we figured this is the easiest one to complete.
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.
