Monteith’s Doppelbock Winter Ale

It’s probably no great surprise that I’m a sucker for seasonal beers: they’re a key diversion for the neophiliac drinker. They give brewers the chance to bring their wilder experiments to market without the threat of destroying the good name of a brewery. If they’re a disastrous mistake, at least it is fleeting. If the beer is a success, you’ll have an excruciating wait until next year.

Monteith’s Doppelbock Winter Ale is back in season; it is a rich, malty and alcoholic ale that is out of style, if you’re a beer purist. It is not a doppelbock by any stretch of the imagination (a “A very strong and rich lager” according to the BJCP style guidelines), so I’m not sure why the doppelbock deception made its way onto the diminutive 330ml bottle. Frankly, I can’t say the word “doppelbock” often enough, armed with the knowledge that it translates as double-goat from German, so I can understand their conceit.

Monteith’s say: “A profound enveloping winter beer. Monteith’s Doppelbock Winter Ale is a smoothly rich beer with a dense head, a powerful aroma, and chocolatey malt notes ñ the perfect way to cheer yourself up this winter. ”

I say: Is it legal to say that beer cures seasonal affective disorder? In the glass, this faux-doppelbock bears a striking resemblance to Coca-Cola, brownish-black and thin. Dull aroma and a fading head, like an elderly uncle. The flavour is heavy on the malt with a touch of allspice. In previous seasons, Monteith’s was producing a more intriguing and richer brew than this from their New Zealand brewery. They can do better in the coming seasons.

ABV: 6%

ACA goes after faux import beer

Guess what? Blogging can change the food system. A few months back I wrote about faux import beer: the beer that looks imported but is actually brewed locally or by some third party. Yesterday, in The Age:

The Australian Consumers Association is demanding clearer, more prominent labels on bottles of foreign beer made locally under licence, to show drinkers exactly what they are buying.

Beck’s, Heineken, Stella Artois, Kirin, Guinness, Kronenbourg and Carlsberg are some of the foreign brands being made here.

The Sunday Age bought a random selection from a liquor store in St Kilda last week. A 330 millilitre bottle of Heineken ($3.39) was brewed in Sydney and a 330 millilitre bottle of Carlsberg ($3.49), which had “Copenhagen, Denmark” and “by appointment to the Royal Danish Court” on the front, was brewed by Foster’s Australia in Victoria.

Now, lets argue about correlation equalling causality.

Fremantle microbreweries

In 1871, the Australian state of Victoria contained 126 breweries. By 1987, there was effectively one. For all the new micro-brewed beer that has lubricated the gullets of Australians in the subsequent twenty years from 1987, at present two breweries control 90% of the Australian beer market. There are microbreweries who chip at the edges of the CUB and Lion Nathan oligopoly; who run around them in mesmerising circles and win umpteen beer awards.

Microbreweries who have little real impact on Australia’s wider drinking culture.

Australia had a microbrew culture in the mid-1800s, as did anywhere that brewed beer. Beer does not travel well in a hot climate and so there was much impetus to create it as near as possible to where the drinkers were. In the absence of refrigeration, drinking the local ale was the only choice even if a good deal of the beer created was indescribably awful. In 1855, a correspondent for the Herald described beer served at a Governor’s ball as:

..not a nice ale, or any good wholesome malt mixture, but a villainous compound…Poor Captain of the 12th took a bold draught, but when he set down his tumbler he cast a look upwards that was like the beer itself – he seemed thunderstruck

Once again Australia has started to brew more local beers but the real penetration of microbrews into Australian life hasn’t happened yet.

Except for in Fremantle.

The tasting set from Sail and Anchor

The bellwether for drinking culture is the shift worker. What they crack open as their breakfast beer is the best indicator for what the masses drink. When you see fish processors who have barely had a chance to scrape the scales and grime from their hands turn up to the bar at Little Creatures in Fremantle and down a pint of freshly brewed pale ale for breakfast then you know that a revolution in Australian brewing is upon us. Welcome back to the 1800s.

In Fremantle, it is more difficult to find a non-local beer than one brewed in the immediate vicinity. Brewpub Sail and Anchor (tasting glasses, above) had four local brews on: a lager, wheat beer, a bitter India Pale Ale and their dependable Brass Monkey Stout.

Relative newcomer Madmonk brewery put on a display of German-ness with a smoked beer (rauchbier), kölsch, witbier, as well as an IPA and a porter (above) in a Fremantle-appropriate beer garden.

The only thing left to do in Fremantle was order some whitebait and fend off the seagulls.

Locations:
Madmonk, 33 South Terrace, Fremantle

Sail and Anchor, 64 South Terrace, Fremantle.

Little Creatures Brewery, 40 Mews Road, Fremantle

Little Creatures Brewery, Fremantle

Had I forgotten something from the menu at Little Creatures Dining Hall in Fitzroy? Had I made an unfair comparison to its Western Australian brewery progenitor?

In the interests of factual accuracy, I flew across the country to Perth to find out.

Click the image to see full panoramic glory

On the westside, Little Creatures seems to be undergoing an identity crisis. Originally, the Little Creatures brewhouse and restaurant was housed in a set of two identical, adjoining sheds converted from their earlier role housing boats for the America’s Cup. It was a grand building to convert for this purpose: almost central Fremantle; overlooking the harbour with its eponymous medicament breeze; open space aplenty for the stainless tanks of a professional but small-scale local brewery. A thin membrane of plexiglass bisected the two sheds dividing the drinker from the brewer whilst keeping them in close proximity. The men’s urinal even had a chest-high window into the brewery so that male patrons could see the beer come full circle.

The bar and restaurant retained an ad hoc feel of a joint that was built to satisfy the brewers next door rather than the general public. It was packed with pipes, girders, pallets, bare chain link, fairy lights. For all its gleaming stainless steel and cavernous industrial space, the bar and restaurant had an appropriate feel of little-ness and being a bit half-arsed in a way that suggested that the owners were too busy making hand-crafted ale to care where the public drank it.

Little Creatures Brewery, original pair of sheds on the left, new sheds on the right. This is how Perth looks in midwinter. Sunny and laden with cockatoos.

Where once a microbrewery stood (albeit, a microbrewery with an impeccable fitout) now stands an industrial cathedral worship of hops. The site has now expanded into an extra shed and some grain silos. They’ve built a lounge bar next door called The Loft, a name with all the generic urbanity of Ikea. Ikea would probably fit an umlaut in there somewhere, though.

The original bar and restaurant are otherwise unchanged, apart from the old urinal with a view, which has shifted. On my Monday morning visit, my waiter apologized at 11:00am that the table service might slow down because a table of 60 people had arrived, unannounced. Amongst the hundred or so breweries that I’ve seen, I can’t think of another that is getting hammered by customers early on Monday – so my guess is that the bar and restaurant wouldn’t want to change their business, ever.

There is no mistaking that Little Creatures are stepping up from the micro-league and are taking aim at the mainstream drinkers of Australia. The place now feels big. With their extra brewing capacity, they’re now covering as much of the mainstream palate as possible.

They now produce a pilsner as bland as the style requires, a cider (Pipsqueak), an amber ale (Roger’s) and a “bright” ale that has less bold hops and maltiness than their flagship American pale ale. I certainly don’t begrudge them for brewing blander and less complex beers. If they are planning on moving up from a microbrewer to challenge the mid-sized likes of Coopers in Australia (and beginning to export seriously) then it is inevitable that they will brew less challenging beers because that is what the global market currently drinks in vast and unending quantities. As much as I whined about bland Asian pilsners in Cambodia, I did neglect to mention that bland pilsners are the brew that the majority of the world’s drinkers enjoy; the more nondescript, the better. “Interesting” is not an adjective that most people would ever wish to append to their beer. The decision to go blander has seen Little Creatures bright and amber ales achieve double digit growth in the last year.

Little Creatures early success came from doing something that would seem unremarkable if viewed from the perspective of the American microbrew market: brewing consistent American pale ale in Australia. That they managed to thrive from the start by doing so is an achievement and a nice testament to Perth’s preference for drinking locally. We could be drinking any number of floral American pale ales from America (or elsewhere), but we were smitten by the one from Fremantle.

The added bonus of Little Creature’s changing identity from micro to mid-size for Melburnian drinkers is that the old equipment from the Fremantle brewery is headed over east to Healesville.

When brewery logos attack.

According to Little Creatures press release:

Work has commenced on building a brewery in the Yarra Valley town of Healesville…The original Fremantle brew house will be relocated to the site and the first brew of what will be a new national brand will be ready for sale early in the new calendar year.

The brewery is under construction Lot 2/316-336 Maroondah Highway, Healesville, next to the Innocent Bystander winery.

My guess for that new brand: Hoegaarden clone. The last few years of Australian brewing have been awash with cloudy and “blonde” beers, so why shouldn’t Little Creatures follow the pack instead of leading?

A pint of Little Creatures Pale Ale, as delightful as ever

Location: Little Creatures Brewing, 40 Mews Road, Fremantle, Western Australia. A short walk from the Fremantle train station.

Little Creatures, Fitzroy: Invasion from the West

There is only one thing that can turn me off the citrus-y and floral pale ales of Little Creatures Brewery and that is the music of Collette Roberts. Her ode to campanology was blaring across the industrial Viking beer hall that brewery Little Creatures have infested in Fitzroy in Melbourne as I entered.

When did 1987 become cool? Am I getting that old? Or is this just a musical taste of Perth-ness from across the Nullabor?

I had never wondered what had happened to Collette after her career of impersonating Kylie Minogue came to an abrupt end. If you’re keen to find out, you can hire her from modeling agency Real Faces and ask her in person whether it is in Western Australia alone that her music never died.

Along with poor choices of soundtrack, Little Creatures make sublime American pale ales in their brewery in Western Australia; the sort of beers that feel like the hops monster has burrowed into your sinuses and deposited its fragrant and addictive spawn. Their immaculate waterfront brewery is the only valid reason to go to Fremantle, but now that a piece of that has been transported to inner Melbourne, what’s the point of Fremantle altogether?

Their space in Fitzroy bears a remarkable similarity to their converted boatshed in WA: a cavernous open warehouse serving up good value pub food along with their ales. The only thing missing is their stainless brewing tanks and ready access to the sea. I’d swear that the menu and wine list is the same but with the addition of pies. I might be wrong.

So I had a pie, just in case.

Chunky meat pie, peas, mashed potato glue substitute, super-salty coleslaw. Thin gravy.

As for the beer, their pale ale, amber ale, pilsener and bright ale come from the tap as freshly as it does straight from the brewery door. There is no trace of oxidation, the hops are as bright and clean as if the beer was being poured straight from the tank. They come in three sizes: pony ($3), pot ($4) and weirdo-not-quite-a-pint-but-larger-than-schooner ($6.50). There is probably a Western Australian term for this beer size.

I’m going to call it the Collette.

Little Creatures Dining Hall
Address: 222 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne.

Taieri George

Spiced beers generally fit alongside those other joke beers like chili beer or a perfectly-skunked Corona. In the official judging guidelines, they’re relegated to the category of “Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer” to languish amongst the beers that simply don’t work elsewhere. At best, they get passed off as a Belgian specialty ale, a beer with too many characters to characterise.

Most of the people who brew them are certifiably mad; the type of brewer who thinks that the one missing flavor from their porter is pumpkin. I like the hint of coriander and orange peel in a Hoegaarden but don’t really want a beer that boasts that its primary appeal is that it tastes unlike beer but more like garden.

Thus I approached Taieri George with caution. It comes from the brilliant brewers at Emerson’s as a spiced ale, brewed seasonally and released on March 6, the birthday of brewer Richard Emerson’s father, George. It’s also named after a train. A train in New Zealand.

Emerson’s says: “The beer pours a reddish brown hue and offers a delightful aroma of freshly baked hot cross buns with a hint of chocolate…the luscious malt and spice flavours are balanced with just enough hop dryness”

I say: It is much like liquified hot cross bun, pouring with a foamy, dirty brown head at the suggested 8 degrees C. I imagine this is how the Easter Bunny tastes if you put him through the Pacojet. The added cinnamon and the spiciness of the nutmeg aren’t at all cloying and balance with the malt, and the high alcohol content remains slyly hidden. This is a fantastic beer for Winter. This batch, bottle-conditioned since March, would probably hold up to more aging, developing into something even more complex for next season.

ABV: 6.8%

Price: A$10.99 per pint bottle

Beer Flaw Tasting

“T” is for Taint

If there is one thing that evaluating beer in Cambodia has primed my tastebuds for, it is tasting bad beer. I never particularly dwelt upon the reasons behind their badness because I was too busy trying to find synonyms for “watery”. I had never approached badness in a systematic way.

So the opportunity to pinpoint the reasons behind the badness could not be passed up. Tastes and the ability to discuss them with objectivity can be learned.

The key problem with beer is that it is a complex, living animal for at least some period of its existence. The yeast within it breeds and mutates; it acts differently when hot or cold, or in the presence of more or less oxygen. When dead, the yeast cells settle in clumps. Certain micronutrients inhibit the growth of some strains but promote the growth of others. It sometimes competes with other foreign organisms for the sugars used in brewing. The water used matters.

At every step of the brewing process, something can infect the beer: bacillus, clostridium, coliforms, acetobacter, gluconobacter. Other wild yeasts that float upon the breeze can drop in and take charge (in lambic beers, this is actually the goal rather than a problem).

It still amazes me that any two beers ever taste the same.

This weekend a friend and brewer, Ben from pint.com.au, bought The Enthusiast Beer Taste Troubleshooting Kit, a selection of 8 artificial flavors that are identical to the most common flaws in beer and invited a crew over to drink some deliberately and systematically tainted beer. Metal taint, spoilage by acetic acid bacteria, bacterial growth in the mash or fermentation, spoilage by wild yeasts, insufficient wort boiling, poor yeast health, use of old hops were all to be tasted. Often many of these things happen at once to beer but the ability to separate each of these problems out by taste alone is the cheapest way to improve the brewing process.

Some taints were much worse than others.

While most of my friends found the “infection by acetic acid bacteria” as a mild flaw, I thought it to be like drinking a cup of vinegar. The apple flavors of badly boiled wort weren’t right for a beer but nor were they hugely offensive to me. Nobody enjoyed the “bacterial growth in the mash” which I likened to having freshly regurgitated a whole fruitcake; others found it reminiscent of baby vomit. As someone who tastes things for a living, I’m still not sure if it is reassuring that I’ll now be able to identify that the goaty, damp basement smell in some beer is caused by coliform infection during fermentation or that the metallic flavor that I have come to associate with Angkor Lager is the fault of poor quality equipment at the brewing plant.

The full set of beer flaw tasting notes (PDF) is now at Pint.

Jolly Shandy

“Brewer”: Carlsberg

Before people had the option of deadening their palate while getting their booze on with a premixed wine cooler, there was shandy, half beer mixed with half lemonade. It is one of those drinks manages to ruin two otherwise perfect drinks when you make it. I’d first heard of the shandy premix from friends’ trips to Indonesia, where it is available everywhere; there were plans afoot to import a case into Australia for me, possibly to horrify anyone who didn’t believe such a daft miscreant could ever exist.

Carlsberg says: “Jolly Shandy now comes in a great new packaging that is energetic and youthful looking. The Lemon flavour packs a tangy great taste as well as added Vitamin C for that refreshing feeling. Jolly Shandy is the perfect drink for today’s young and trendy who live a lifestyle by the adage ‘Refreshingly Different’. ”

I say: Jolly Shandy sounds like the name of a 1980s bubblegum pop outfit or maybe a character from a Pynchon novel. After drinking it, I was not filled with the jollity that the luminous green can suggested, only with carbonated bubbles of gloom. If there is beer in Jolly Shandy, it is not one with a malt flavour that can be discerned over the chemical lemon-lime concoction. With an alcohol by volume of 1%, fruit juice that has been left for a few days past its best-before date will impart more of an alcoholic kick.

If Jolly Shandy recorded an album with Thomas Pynchon, it would be called: Gravity’s Rainbow Brite

Location:Penang, Malaysia, but available across the whole peninsula.

The Last Appetite

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