Australia's biggest, longest, most delicious and diverse pub crawl returns to Melbourne next month. From May 10 to 19, attendees will be able to travel the world of beer at 21 of the city's best venues as Pint of Origin notches up twelve years of beers in the Victorian capital.
The full website has now been flicked on, meaning you can apply for your #PoO24 Passport and start planning another beer-filled adventure. The 21 venues have been listing their featured brewers, who come from every Australian state and territory, plus the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Japan and New Zealand.
There are classic styles from some of the world's oldest breweries, madcap beers from some of its youngest, collabs galore – many of them featuring brewers on opposite sides of the planet, heaps of rarities and beers that have never been seen here before, plus plenty of your old favourites from local breweries old and new.
On the events front, there are masterclasses, meet the brewers, exquisite dinners, trivia, tastings, flight nights, tap takeovers, and brewery face-offs. Expect more to be added as May 10 approaches too.
We've also welcomed our first Pint of Origin Boilermaker Hub in the shape of Whisky and Alement, one of the world's top-rated whisky bars. They're creating a lineup of boilermaker pairings from across the world, and have a pretty special launch event lined up too; if cocktails and spirits are your thing, you'll find much to love at other venues too.
VISIT THE PINT OF ORIGIN WEBSITE
New, Improved Passports
The concept for Pint of Origin has never really changed since it debuted in 2011, but the festival does evolve. And that's no different in 2024.
Alongside the addition of the Boilermaker Hub – not to mention things like a new flavour of Chappy's Chips inspired by the UK – the biggest change is with our Pint of Origin Passports.
They're still free, they still offer attendees the chance to gain bonus beers along the way, and there's still a prize draw at the end. We've just souped up the benefits.
Bonus Beers
If you're one of those particularly avid Pint of Origin travellers, there's now a bonus beer awaiting you when you buy a beer at your sixth, twelfth and eighteenth venues. Just buy a first beer when you arrive at each of them, scan the venue's QR code to get your Passport stamped, and ask for your bonus beer.
As ever, please note that venues have discretion over which beers are available as the bonus beer. In most cases, it will be a pot, but certain rare, limited or high price / ABV beers are likely to be excluded. And, if a venue only has high value beers on tap – which does happen during Pint of Origin due to the festival's very nature – they are within their rights to offer a smaller pour.
Remember: it's been a really tough few years for the beer and hospo industries so please respect the decisions of venues and their staff.
Passport Prize Draw
In past years, we've offered prizes at the end of the festival to attendees who "complete" Pint of Origin – in other words, collect stamps at every venue across the ten days. However, we're making it easier to enter the prize draw this time around.
We know few people have time to make it to every venue, so we've broken the 21 venues down into five Mini-Crawls:
- WEST: Mr West, Benchwarmer, Westside Ale Works & The Lincoln
- NORTH: Miss Moses, The Woodlands Hotel, Carwyn Cellars & CoConspirators Brewpub
- INNER NORTH: Bonny, Near & Far, Beermash, The Terminus Fitzroy North, & The Park Abbotsford*
- CENTRAL: Whitehart, Heartbreaker, Whisky & Alement & The Catfish
- SOUTH & EAST: Freddie Wimpoles, Windsor Alehouse, The Cherry Tree & The Royston
Complete any one of those and you're entered into the prize draw for that region. Complete two and you get entry into two draws, and so on. Make it to all 21 venues and you'll gain entry to the five Mini-Crawl draws plus the big kahuna.
We're amassing some epic prizes, which we'll be unveiling as the festival approaches, so make sure you sign up then keep an eye on the Pint of Origin site and Crafty socials and newsletters. You can also look to the efforts of our five Konvoy Kegfluencers for inspiration. They're brewery reps who are filming themselves taking on the Mini-Crawls in the hope of winning kegs for their brewery, with their efforts hitting our socials before the month is out.
Given the very real challenges facing the beer, hospitality and events worlds, with many festivals cancelled or on hiatus, we're excited to give the beer community a chance to get together and celebrate during Melbourne's traditional big week of beer. The Australian International Beer Awards judging runs into the festival's opening weekend and the awards dinner runs in the middle of it, so there will be plenty of brewers around too.
What's more, Pint of Origin is something of a perfect cozzie livs beer festival: there's no cost of entry and you can attend as little or as much as you can afford. Plus there's the bonus beers and tastings with brewers too.
So, mark your diaries, grab a #PoO24 Passport, start plotting your route, and we'll see you at the bar(s). Cheers!
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.
