It's time to reveal the lineup for Pint of Origin 2025. The unique festival is set to return to Melbourne for a thirteenth time from May 9 to 18, taking over 23 of Melbourne's best pubs, bars and breweries for a ten-day celebration of the best of the beer (and boilermaker and beer cocktail) world.
Once again, it's the perfect chance to choose from hundreds of beers sourced from hundreds of breweries located all over the planet, while grabbing your mates and hitting up venues in all points north, south, east, west and central.
As well as the weeklong, rotating tap showcases, you can expect all manner of special events – beer launches, meet the brewers, beer and food pairing – plus the chance to score bonus drinks and prizes via the ever-popular Pint of Origin Passports and this year's Mini-Crawls.
The 2025 festival lineup features plenty of familiar faces as well as a bunch of Pint of Origin newcomers: Bridge Road Brunswick, Far Side Beers, Molly Rose Brewing and The Sporting Club. And, following the successful debut of a Boilermaker Hub at Whisky and Alement in 2024, this year sees Captain Melville return to the fold as the festival's Beer Cocktail Hub.
You can check out the host venue lineup on the Pint of Origin website.
The full program, including featured brewers, events, passport signups and more, goes live in early April.
So, mark your diary, tell your friends, and get ready to travel the world of beer when the unique Pint of Origin Festival returns on May 9.
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.
