Articles by James Smith

While working on a cattle station outside Alice back in 2001, I told one of the farmers I was going to become a music or sports journalist on returning to the UK. Instead, it ended up being news and feature writing before, back in Australia seven years later, I quickly got sucked into the nascent craft beer scene.

Realising, on the one hand, there were bugger all opportunities in the collapsing world of print journalism and, on the other, there was little in the way of accurate, up-to-date coverage of the local beer scene, I set out to fix the first problem for myself by addressing the second.

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.