There will be many new beers launched at Good Beer Week and GABS next week, but none quite like Woods Of The North: it's a blend of barrel aged beers from five Australian brewers. We chatted to two of the brewers involved about the art of blending.
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.
There were plenty of stories within the second GABS Hottest 100 Kiwi Beers countdown, from Panhead holding on to top spot to Garage Project supplying almost one in five beers and Liberty claiming the highest new entry. But we're going to tell three different ones.
A Brunswick warehouse that initially housed Himmel Hünd's brewery has been turned into an incubator of sorts for small brewing companies playing with barrels. Will Ziebell finds out more.
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.
To suggest you could conquer Portland in anything less than literal years is an utter falsehood. If time is limited, the best one can hope for is to tick off beer meccas such as Deschutes or Cascade while hoping to get under the skin of one of the world's best beer cities. Kerry McBride gave it a go.
While the state's bigger names tend to grab the headlines, South Australia has seen a large number of smaller operations come to life in the past couple of years. One of them is the experimental, farm based Ministry of Beer.
Chef Paul Kasten explores the nuances of pairing sour beers with food, and how to work with varying levels of carbonation, sourness and the broad range of flavours to be found in sour beer.