G'day. If you're new here, and you are interested in the Melbourne food and drink scene you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or the email newsletter below. Thanks for visiting and enjoy eating and drinking in Melbourne. Cheers.

Check out locally made craft brews at Federation Square. This is an opportunity to meet the brewers and discover the secrets of the state’

s great beers. Try not to get bladdered, please.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Check out locally made craft brews at Federation Square. This is an opportunity to meet the brewers and discover the secrets of the state’s great beers. Try not to get bladdered, please.

Popularity: 9% [?]

This place is only 5km from my front door by foot. But it is hard to find. Walk down Clarendon Street and turn first right after Market St. I know you are worried about ducking down a dark alley in South Melbourne. With its proximity to the Crown Casino this is brothel territory where winners celebrate (so the legend goes).

But fear not. Down the alley on the left is a small non-descript warehouse with a roller door. The only sign of life is a small lit sign above a door. Welcome to the Emerald Hill Brewery (20 Ross Street, South Melbourne, Vic 3205 +61 3 9696-5491). And it is my entry to the Session#4 local brews meme hosted this week by Gastronomic Fight Club.
Bushy beards aren’t mandatory here although there are a few hanging around. We arrive at 5.30pm and there are only a handful of people sampling the two award winning beers on tap, a pale ale and a wheat beer. Soon the places fills up with women as well as men.
In the far corner are four large stainless steel containers. Near the rollerdoor an old sofa and there are some stools and small tables attached to the wall. This is a deconstructed pub in all its perfection. Plain brick walls, beer brewed on the premises. It’s about quality, not quantity although A$5 pints are very attractive.

Apparently, a batch of stout is on it’s way which is welcome for what looks like being a cold southern winter.

Our only gripe with this place is the name.

While Australia is famous for producing a popular abomination known as Fosters nobody really drinks the sweet fizzy brew here. Most people drink VB – Victoria Bitter – or the real hard nuts Melbourne Bitter.

My mates reckon the Emerald hill Brewery should produce South Melbourne bitter. Something for the simple beer nuts.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Politically correct ginger beer: what’s wrong with this picture? 

Well Jeremy Clarkson is in trouble again. This time for describing a car as being “very ginger beer”. It didn’t matter that an audience member of Top Gear said it was a bit gay. Just that he used the rhyming slang.

Well there is plemty of political correctness on this blog and this ginger beer here is straight up and down with one major twist – alcohol. In fact, it is very beer ginger.
At the age of 14 I spent months perfecting this kind of stuff and selling it at school. My brew looked more like the Bluetongue in the middle rather than the traditional style to the right. They never figured that it had 5 per cent alcohol in it or looked at the colour. All three of these are available from Swords at South Melbourne Market but no doubt their other branches stock it.

1 Ginja 3% ABV
Not too fizzy with a nice bitter, malty beer flavour. Tastes more like the ginger beer handies I made mixing bitter and the non-alcoholic stuff. The best of the bunch. WINNER
2 Blue Tongue 4% ABV

Very hoppy and very subtle. Sharper and more sour than the others. Good.

3 Stones Ginger Beer 4.8% ABV

The strongest of the lot in terms of alcohol but also the sweetest. In terms of colour it looks more like the fizzy pop style of ginger beer made for kids. Too sweet for me.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Beer not only tends to create fools but is meant to be foolproof. You know, just crack the can or bottle and swig it down. Or just visit a pub.
Then this 5 litre monster lands on my doorstep. Wow, that reminds me of my student days although I never did manage ten pints – about five litres – in one session.
I pull out the knob, twidle the thingy and the beers only dribbles out. I’m meant to piece a rubbery bit at the top but my skewer pushes it into the beer.
party time! Actually it wasn’t and I plugged the hole with a sparklet. Everytime I poured a glass it left a yellow puddle on the floor of my fridge. Also you need a bloody massive fridge to fit this in.
These things are probably best for parties than everyday drinking and the beer is good and under $30. Also there is less fizz than in bottled beer.
Because of my balls up it lost some fizz over a few days. And that made it taste like Fresh Beer, which I really enjoyed in the backstreets of Hanoi earlier this year.

Popularity: 9% [?]

There is no copyright on recipes (in most of the world) as there is on words or software. Still, this was no barrier to the Copenhagen-based art collective Superflex to release an open source recipe for beer.
Writing in Wired, Laurence Lessig the father of the Creative Commons license says: “What makes Free Beer free is the same thing that makes free software free: Its recipe is open and licensed freely. Anyone can make improvements. But anyone who distributes an improved version must release the changes as well.”
Every six months the brewery will cook up a new version of the recipe and put it on sale.
I’d love to see one our local microbreweries join this social experiment. Come on guys.

Popularity: 7% [?]

more on microbreweries here.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Well big and little m’s efforts at World Cup and Plate of matching food and drink through the world cup put my efforts to shame. Of 32 countries they ate 24 different cousines in 31 days.

Australia vs Italy. Italy wins.

Lucky beer and the swollen liver. I’m losing it.

Japan pisses all over Australia.

England’s barmy beer too much for Paraguay

Argentina’s beer fest overshadows Ivory Coast

Trinidad and Tobago field a man’s beer against Sweden.

I’ve still got some Polish beer in my fridge and it makes me feel ill to drink it. I think I picked the wrong winner here and it should have been Ecuador.

Germany annexes Costa Rica.

The original challenge.

Popularity: 7% [?]

The trouble is that Australia just didn’t perform and for once the winner of this stage of the FIFA (Fuck I can’t Face Another) Beer World Cup.
For this match I pitted Australian microbrewery drops with some mainstream Italian. First the Holgate Brewhouse Mt Macedon Pale Ale (4.5 per cent),a great local beer. But despite resting on it’s side for four hours since shooting (the pic) shot its load. Most of its contents frothed out of the bottle leaving less than half to drink. Plus it tasted a bit odd. I think it may have been (crown) corked.
Then the Mountain Goat Pale Ale (4,5 per cent) which is, apparently, “Bottled but not tamed”. Well, it was tamer than the Mt Macedon. But the yeast was floating wild. I’m not just talking about a cloud of yeast drifting through the glass but nasty brown clumps of the yeast making this quite unattractive to drink.
For Italy I first fielded Birra Moretti. At 4.6 per cent, it was brewed by Heineken in Milan and imported by the Heneken Lion joint venture into Australia. It’s a perfectly refreshing generic lager style beer. But to be quite honest I may as well have been drinking Heineken, which is now brewed locally.
Finally, the Peroni Gran Riserva coming in at a hefty 6.6 per cent. The extra alcohol gave the hops extra kick. It had flavour. The winner? Italy, of course.
I didn’t see that one coming.

world cup, beerAustralia, Italy

Popularity: 7% [?]

The pressure of trying to match beers to the FIFA World Cup football is taking its toll. Remember I’m in the city that Jerry Seinfeld described as the arse end of the world - geographically speaking.
Watching the world cup in Melbourne means very late nights and early mornings. My face is permanently embossed with the pattern of sofa fabric while somehow I have to remove a week’s worth on congealed drool from what was once a desirable object.
And my liver? Slightly swollen and aching. More to the point my expanding beer belly is pushing my jeans down towards my knees while I can’t keep any shirt tucked in any more.
And these are the high points.
So much bad beer and only a few that are any good. The problem is that only the big multinational brands are easy to buy here in Australia. To summarise, although all tasting of hops in someway or other, I’d describe them as being a homogenous category of fizzy drink. Very fizzy, hoppy, yes, but with chemical overtones and, thanks to preservatives, I now have sinus. I may as well be drinking Coke or Pepsi.
Here are some of the more memorable beer matchings:
Budweiser vs Budweiser
Or more accurately speaking Anheuser-Busch vs Budvar. There is no doubt the Anheuser-Busch sponsorship of the cup has been a PR disaster from the start, in Europe the home of pure, additive free Pilsner, namely Budweiser Budvar, the original Budweiser. It is named after the town Budweis, which has been in existence since the 14th century.
For the record the Budvar is at the raw end of 40 legal disputes and 70 administrative proceedings in patent offices around the world from its namesake.
The Czech version is in beer terms pure nectar, especially when drunk from my branded glass. The former that fizzy, tasteless chemical thing.

Winner: Budweiser Budvar
Anheuser-Busch: down the drain
Link thanks to Corporate Engagement.

Finally, it’s back to Australia. I’s hoped a Lucky beer (made in Sydney) costing $5 and in a buddha-shaped bottle would help both the socceroos and me. Sure it tasted a hoppy but was too sweet. A bit crap really. It didn’t do justice to our team.
So what for Australia vs Croatia? I’m pulling out the big guns having been lucky to have tasted the complete range at the local boutique Red Hill Brewery, 90 minutes drive out of town in the Mornington Peninsula wine region.
All the beers are good and authentic here. They have deep flavours and aftertastes. They are everything beer should be. I’m fielding the award winning Golden Ale.
In this case little needs to be added to the PR:

“Pale and crisp light bodied ale, fruity with a restrained hoppy dryness created by our own Hallertauer & Tettnanger hop flowers. This beer is fermented at a cool temperature to create a crisp, clean finish and uses the best quality imported German Pilsner Malt. We also add a touch of Australian grown Wheat Malt to improve head retention on this beer.”

world cup, beer

Popularity: 9% [?]