Is there a bigger week of beer events in Australia than this one? Perhaps next week, but let’s not get bogged down in semantics. Let the feast of festivals begin!
The Big One
This Friday, the official Good Beer Week opening party (which, for the pedants, is actually the night before the official week begins…) is happening at the festival’s hub, The Terminus. The event acts as the metaphorical keg tapping of Melbourne with 200 beer events flowing over the subsequent nine days and featuring a great many of this country’s finest beers, breweries, bars, restaurants, bottle stores and – of course – beer people.
A bunch of events have already sold out and plenty more are on their way – see here – but there are loads of great things still available or not requiring a ticket. If you don’t blunder into a good beer event in Melbourne over the next two weeks, you’re doing something wrong.
Check out the full program here.
Five Days in Thebarton
A brand new brewery in one of Australia’s very finest pubs, brewers from six breweries and six countries, five collaboration brews, four tap takeovers, Skunks, Punks, Spooning and one hell of a good time. Make sure you’re there when The Wheaty Goes Yeastie.
A Bit on the Side
If you’re not able to make it to Good Beer Week or the Wheaty equivalent, don’t just switch off your social media and wallow in pity. One of the bonuses of having so many international beer people coming to Australia is that it’s a long journey, so they tend to make the most of it by travelling âround a bit.
That means the GBW festival is bookended with events across the country involving the likes of USA’s Sixpoint, Denmark’s To íl and the UK’s Magic Rock who are involved in events and brews in Sydney through to Luke Nicholas from New Zealand’s Epic who’ll be having An Epic Good Time of Awesomesauce Proportions at Brisbane’s Scratch Bar. To íl is also calling in for dinner at Adelaide’s Earl of Leicester.
For details on these and other events as they pop up, see the events page.
Quasi-fest for the Inner West
It’s hardly official, but there’s enough happening in Sydney’s Inner West this week that you’d think it could be a festival. It all starts tonight at the Humiliation Celebration featuring Rocks Brewing’s owner getting comeuppance for being overly optimistic about opening a brewery.
Then Young Henrys hosts a beer, whiskey and soul food degustation at the The Marlborough Hotel before backing it up the following night at the same venue when they and Marrickville’s Batch Brewing do an Americana-style launch of their collaboration cream ale; The Great Cornholio. On Sunday, the two will be doing a second, family-friendly launch at the wonderful Petersham Bowling Club, complete with the great game of Corn Hole – which is best explained by the brewers here. Meanwhile, The Union Hotel is putting on 16 massive beers for a Behemoth Tap Takeover and, down the road, you can get 16 more good local beers at the Lord Raglan Hotel in Redfern after it was given a crafty makeover by the Rocks Brewing team.
Details of all of the above events can be found here.
Seek enlightenment
If you can’t make it to any of the above, fear not because there’s another fantastic festival on the horizon – and this one comes with the bonus of overseas travel. Wellington, the Coolest Little Capital in the world [Where is it you hail, from Nick O? – Ed], plays host to Beervana on August 22-23 and will once again be utterly awash with the very best of the New Zealand beer scene (not to mention food that’s worth the admission in itself). With the festival only three months away, now’s a good time to book flights and accommodation and start drafting that sick note for work.
As if you needed extra motivation, The Crafty Pint will be there looking to reclaim our title in the hotly contested Media Brew competition. Having blitzed the field in 2012 with the infamous Auld Bulgin Boysterous Bicep, we’ll again be teaming up with Murray’s, this time on a beer with the working title âThe Bogan Belgian’.
