Anything that allows us to (sorta) paraphrase Withnail and I in the title of a news story has to be a good thing. And when that good thing involves the launch of a trans-global brewing partnership, better still. Since hooking up with Northdown to bring his beers to Australia, Beer Here’s Christian Skovdal Andersen has travelled Down Under on a couple of occasions. We’ve already reported on collaborations he completed with Red Duck and Moon Dog, but it turns out they weren’t the only brews he’s been working on.
While touring Australia and New Zealand with Northdown founder Adam Betts (above left), himself a keen home brewer who had always planned to move into commercial brewing, they began discussing collaborations. And, within no time at all, they were making them. First up was a beer brewed while they were at the Taste of South Australia in Adelaide, a beer that was never released commercially, followed by brews at Invercargill in New Zealand, Southern Bay and Prickly Moses.
The beers are based on a combination of both brewers' recipes and a desire to use all Australian and New Zealand ingredients, with the first release, Victoria’s Secret – a wheat beer with the hopping regime of a double IPA – out this week. Two more, Cool Hops and RyeFix, will follow soon.
“It started when Christian came out the first time,” says Adam. “We’re always chatting on Skype so he knows what I’m brewing all the time and there were a couple of things that excited him. When he came out, he said we should brew together so we did one in Adelaide and had fun working together. So when he came back for the Australian National Homebrewing Conference we agreed we should do more collaborations together.
“There was a choice to contract brew Beer Here beers here, but I didn’t want to confuse the brands and also because I’d always been looking to get into brewing anyway. Christian has some amazing skills and we get along great as friends. I’d always brewed with Australian and New Zealand ingredients and that [opportunity] really excited Christian.”
Thus they set to work. Cool Hops, an Australian lager, is based on one of Adam’s home brew recipes and made with all Aussie ingredients. RyeFix, which was brewed in Invercargill, is a Southern Hemisphere version of Beer Here’s HopFix – a single hop rye ale using Stella – and Victoria’s Secret is a combination of the pair’s ideas. Victoria’s Secret is the name of a new hop variety from Hop Products Australia that has been used only rarely, including in the Good Beer Week collaboration between Nøgne Ø and Moylan’s at Hargreaves Hill.
“It was a bit of an experiment as we’d never used the hop before,” says Adam. “It’s a super hoppy wheat beer featuring 12kg of hops in the ten hec [1,000 litre] brew. That’s double IPA hopping – it’s pretty insane!”
Bottles are making their way across the country now, with a handful of kegs appearing in bars soon, starting with the Junction Beer Hall in Newport on Sunday when they open the next part of their venue.
“It’s exciting but also feels like a natural progression really. It’s more a release to finally have some of my beer out there,” says Adam.
“After these beers, we’re definitely going ahead with more. Cool Hops will be an ongoing release and we’ve got some big and crazy beers coming up. I’ve been working on the perfect release for summer: an imperial stout with wattleseed… We’ll also look to replicate the brew we did in New Zealand as the original plan was to bring that back here but we ended up selling it all over there.”
For now, the beers are being released as Beer Here / Northdown collaborations, but ultimately a new brewing company will be launched once they’ve whittled down their shortlist of six or seven names.
