Breakfast must be a great time on Bruny Island, at least if you're hanging out with the team at Bruny Island Cheese and Beer. Last year, the brewery's Stoutfast – a beyond hearty stout loaded up with fruits, oats, honey and coffee sourced from across Tasmania plus whey from the dairy – made it into our Best New Tasmanian Beers of the year. And now there's Second Breakfast, not a sequel to that beer but another that features ingredients more typically found on the table at the start of the day.
In this case, it's organic oats and Tasiliquid Gold Honey's Bruny Island Prickly Box. They're added to what we make the fourth saison in a row from the brewery, one that again makes use of a combination of Belgian saison and Brettanomyces yeast strains. Initially, it comes across as the most straightforwardly saison like of the four (whatever that means given how many directions you can take such beers in): hazy and gold with a towering, cloud like head; soft, fluffy, honeyed and fulsome on the palate. Then the drying, haylike, acidic scythe comes slicing through the middle, courtesy of a mixed yeast culture that seems to be settling into a rhythm now. It leaves you with a beer that's more complex and funky than you might initially have expected from one of the most fascinating operators anywhere in Australia right now.
Published March 16, 2018 2018-03-16 00:00:00
