It’s little over 18 months since the Victorian Women of Beer took to the stage at the Thornbury Theatre during the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. Since then, some of those on stage have helped get the Australian wing of the Barley’s Angels beer appreciation society off the ground, others have launched their own brewing companies and they’ve joined forces with beer loving ladies (see above) to create the Ninkasi’s Angel beer – a spiced Belgian style tripel.
And now they’re back for more. On October 7, the Women of Beer will gather at Matilda Bay for their second collaborative brew. The members have changed slightly: one of the original team is now brewing in North America and there’s a new female face at Matilda Bay, but the premise remains the same. As indeed does the direction of their collective gaze when it came to choosing a beer style to brew. Over a series of “meetings” at which they carried out “research”, they decided to brew a Biere de Garde – a farmhouse style of beer with origins in France and Belgium.
“We chose a Biere de Garde because we wanted something that would drink well around Christmas time,” says Tiffany Waldron, of Beer Girl Bites. “It will be great on hot days and features spicy characteristics reminiscent of Christmas.”
As with the last brew day at True South, guests are invited to join the crew on the day. Alongside Tiff will be Matilda Bay’s Chloe Lovatt, CUB’s Aine O’Hora, Old Salt’s Sam Fí¼ss, Red Hill’s Karen Golding, Two Birds’ Jayne Lewis, Hargreaves Hill’s Beth Williams, Beer Girl Bites’ Tiffany Waldron and the Beer Diva, Kirrily Waldhorn.
“We all attended the first meeting to decide on the beer style,” says Tiff. “Then the recipe was the work of Sam, Jayne and Chloe.”
It’s a recipe that includes the use of French oak chips as well as French Triskel hops (never used commercially in Australia before, apparently). The intention is to produce 2,000 litres of the rustic Biere de Garde (French for âbeer for keepingâ), twice the amount brewed by the collective last year. Proceeds of the brew will be put towards a number of initiatives to support women in the Australian beer industry, through the Australian Pink Boots Society. There will also be a number of sessions through the day, each of which includes a look at great beer and food combinations.
The running order looks like this:
9am – Doors open
9am to 11am – “Mash-In Zweites Frí¼hstí¼ck” (German for second breakfast). $25 gets you two Redback Pale Wheat beers and traditional German weisswurst sausages.
12pm – Brewhouse BBQ
$40 includes a BBQ lunch and two Matilda Bay beers
3pm – Doors open to the public
If you plan on joining one of the sessions before 3pm, bookings can be made for 9am, 12pm, 1pm and 2pm here.
