Balancing salt, sourness and citrus in a beer; balancing technical precision and a creative desire to keep improving; balancing constant changes and consistent quality. Everything comes back to balance with Esker's Charlie Claridge.
When the family that owned the Clifton Hill Hotel decided to move it from being an Irish pub with TAB to inner-city brewpub, we doubt they envisaged it would lead to the development of a sour beer program. We caught up with the brewer that started taking it in that direction.
For our first blind tasting of 2018, we lined up a pretty eclectic selection of beers that form part of the beer world's current fondness for sour styles. And the year got off to a fine start with a winning beer from a brewpub few readers will yet have visited.
For our first Getting Blind With Crafty tasting of 2018, we're going to embrace the broad church of beers that might be tagged "session sours" – Berliner weisse, gose, kettle sours and so on. And now is your chance to help us decide which to feature.
For the first Getting Blind With Crafty of 2018, we've decided to focus on all things acid. Alongside NEIPAs, at the pointier end of the beer world, sours have started appearing in ever greater numbers so we figure we should give them a blind taste test.
A brewery’s first beer can tell you a lot about how the owners want to present themselves, acting as a marker of what's to come. Kerry McBride chats to three brewers about the nature of what comes first, and how it sets up all that follows.
Time for one final look back at the year in craft beer that was 2016. This time, instead of reflecting via the prism of its best new beers, we gather together some of the most read stories on the site over the past 12 months.
Each year, we assemble panels of experts around the country to come up with lists of the best new releases to come out of Australian breweries in the previous 12 months. This year, we kick off in Victoria, home to the most brewing companies in the land.
Perhaps nothing should surprise in the contemporary beer world, yet the rise of gose is still an unexpected development. We chat to a couple of gose brewers and also look back into the history of the style in Germany.
Sailors Grave is a brewery breathing fresh life into the historic former butter factory in Orbost. Its core range includes a gose featuring locally harvested seaweed and its beers will start hitting Melbourne this month.
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Is anyone better placed to tell you what's hot in the beer world than the beer gurus at the country's best venues? Today, we kick off Behind Bars, a series that asks bar staff around Australia what their customers are digging.
Join us on a colourful journey through Iceland's craft beer world as Tasmanian storyteller Bert Spinks is guided along the way by an etymologist polymath, local brewers and his own love of dark beers...