Beer – Page 6 – Beer Radar

Work Christmas Party

Beer Radar

By John Krüger

Work Christmas Party Edition (Originally published in Wine Business Magazine in 2010)

It happens every year. You end up at your work end-of-year shindig and you realise you’ll be drinking white wine and bubbly all night, thus getting hammered way quicker than expected. The problem is the beer options. In theory, the plan was to slowly sip on some malty yet cheekishly bitter beers. In reality the options are usually a light beer that tastes like it’s been shandied with soda water, or a full strength beer that has a taste like slightly bitter washing up water. So you abandon the beer idea and lose the plot, again. Have a word in your barman’s ear and see if he can grab you one of the following beers that have popped up on our radar this year instead.

Gage Roads Atomic Pale – Zap these down like spaceships in a 60’s sci-fi movie. Fruity hop brightness with a medium backbone. Fragrant delightful hoppy beer.

Gage Roads Sleeping Giant IPA – For the gentleman who has someone keeping a count on the beers consumed, a knockout beer for the sipper. Heavy toffee structure supports another delectable hop fruit salad.

Vale Ale – New and improved. Easy drinking floral beer made for warm nights and cool lawn between the toes. A gateway beer that introduces the world of hops without hurting anyone.

Stone & Wood Draught Ale – Hoppy, floral, fruity and clean. A beer made to be enjoyed, not waved around restaurants like a status symbol by men in suits. Great beer.

Löwenbräu – German sweet smelling dry straw meets soft malt that you can roll around your mouth. Soft, not sharp like a pilsner.

Pilsner Urquell – Pilsner perfection. Sharp refined bitterness and quenching bright satisfaction in a dinky bottle. Find one that hasn’t gone stale and cheesy sitting in a window all day.

Peroni – Well made Italian lager if you can find it. Buy a fresh imported carton while you still can. Word is, this great imported beer is getting an approximation made locally instead. Make sure you get imported beer if you’re asking for it. Remember crisp refined Becks? We rest our case.

Local beer – That’s right, micro-brewery beers. There’s heaps of them. Try a new beer conceived by the brewer, not the accountant. There’s a lot more great beers popping up every day and some are absolute favourites of ours: Lobethal Bierhaus Double Hopped IPA, Barossa Brewing Company Victorville Ale, Steam Exchange Truffles to name but a few in our area. We also wish we were living around the corner from Feral Brewing in WA or Mountain Goat in Victoria. Have a look, buy some beer made with heart and enjoy truly great beer during your festivities this year.

Cheers and beers,

John and the Beer Radar team.

Orana Auction

Beer Radar

By John Krüger

(Originally published online in The Week That Was October 22nd 2010)

Brewers and winemakers have shown their willingness to support a worthy cause with significant donations being accepted by Orana for their silent auction, which will occur during their upcoming 60^th birthday celebrations on Friday 3^rd of December.

While Swanee and Amity Dry rock the South Australian Jockey Club, guests and supporters will be able to bid for a vast range of collectables such as a magnum of 2007 Vintage Ale from Coopers Brewery signed by Dr.Tim, Glenn and Melanie Cooper, or a Growler (2 litre bottle) of special edition Lobethal Bierhaus double hopped India Pale Ale.

The wine industry has also been extremely generous with the following items a small selection of what is being offered for silent auction:

Lot No.	Description of Items
1	Ballast Stone 2007 Shiraz in a Jeroboam signed by John Loxton—Winemaker
2	Shingleback 2004 ‘D’ Block Shiraz Magnum signed by John the Winemaker
3	Wirra Wirra 2007 Catapult Shiraz Voignier Magnum in a wooden display box
4	Maxwell 2008 Silver Hammer Shiraz Magnum signed by Mark Maxwell in a display case with notes
5	Mr Riggs ‘The Gaffer’ 2007 Shiraz Magnum signed by Ben Riggs—Winemaker
6	Fox Creek 2006 Reserve Shiraz signed by Scott Zrna—Winemaker
7	Parri Estate 2007 Cabernet Shiraz, 12 bottles signed by John Phillips, Limited Edition, numbered bottles
8	Charles Cimicky Mixed Shiraz Half Dozen includes 2 x 2007 ‘The Autograph’ Shiraz, 2 x 2007 Reserve Shiraz and 2 x 2008 ‘Trumps’ Shiraz
9	Skillogalee 2010 Riesling signed by the Winemaker

Orana provides people with disabilities with the opportunity to work in a happy, safe environment and become valued and productive community members. Orana has been a long-term provider of business services for beverage industries.

Booking details for the event are here: http://www.oranaonline.com.au/content/custom/card/orana-60th-anniversary.html

Mild Sales

Beer Radar

By John Krüger

Mild sales in mild weather. (First published in Wine Business Magazine in 2011)

Talking about the weather is about as boring as it gets but let’s apply weather to our favourite subject, beer. We all know that this year’s weather has been arse-about-face. We don’t know if we’re in drought, flood, or a bit of both. Cold spells in the middle of summer confuses the shit out of consumers and department stores are in disarray not knowing if they should be flogging sunscreen or umbrellas. Take pity on the poor bottle-shop attendants. They know as a rule of thumb that for every degree the weather heats up, beer sales increase by 2% but with weather all over the place, is it swilling style beers or strong dark sippers that the punters desire? Australia’s mild start to summer has had the beer drinkers in a quandary. Coopers Marketing Director Glenn Cooper says the states keenest on mid-strength beers, Queensland and Western Australia have been hitting the Coopers Mild Ale hard. “Sales of Mild Ale in cans have been particularly strong and are up 79% on the previous year. However, we have also recorded a 7.7% increase in sales of Coopers Best Extra Stout. Stout is normally a winter drink, but we think the cooler start to summer has extended its season and people have been enjoying it later in the year.” says Glenn.

While we’re talking Coopers, they’ve re-launched the old homebrew system with a slightly different fermenter and are pushing it as the perfect gift for a loved bloke on Valentine’s Day. We think they’re an excellent way to start exploring the hobby of home brewing, but it does have its pitfalls. Let’s face it, you’re not going to make anything like Coopers Pale Ale at home using a tin of goo and a kilo of sugar unless you have your taste buds situated nearer to the ground. As a rule of thumb, the darker the beer, the better the extract cans work. Coopers brown ale, and especially the stout are swillingly good beers for extract homebrew, especially if they’re given 3-6 months to mature in the bottle in a cool dark place. For lighter coloured beers like pale ale and lagers, there’s no way to get rid of that extract taste apart from getting rid of the extract to begin with and brewing with malted grains. The good news is the Coopers home brew fermenter and bottles will still work perfectly if you decide to take the step into all-grain brewing.

We requested a taste of the 2010 Vintage Ale from Coopers and were surprised when a few samples of the 2009 arrived. We were confused, but stoked to try the aged beer. We had been a bit iffy about a beer we’re not hugely into, but the similarities to vintage port and Christmas fruitcake are amazing. This harsh weedy alcohol flavour has turned into musty leather and raisins. B&S ball rum and cheap white bread toasted until it’s just that little bit too burned. The edges are black but you hide it with Vegemite; that kind of bitterness. This beer has changed dramatically and is still definitely worth checking out. We’re not sure where this beer is going, but we’ve stashed the last few in different wine storage, sock drawers and fridges so see how this vintage ale story pans out. We haven’t been this riveted by a storyline since Sawyer started doing Kate on the island with the freaky polar bear.

The Tap King

Beer Radar for WBM

My Kingdom for a Beer (Previously published in Wine Business Magazine in 2013)

By John Krüger

If you haven’t seen the humorous ads for the new Tap King beer dispensing system, have a Google. I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I see Lionel Richie drinking a large glass of beer. I’m not really sure why.

Tap King is the latest offering for us sad 30+ year old men who don’t get out much any more. We still like beer but keep getting texts asking us when we’re coming home whenever we go to the pub, so we drink at home. I actually have a number of beers on tap at home anyway, but I’m probably 1 in 3000 who can be bothered renting beer gas bottles, cleaning kegs and rinsing out drip trays. A commercial beer system isn’t cheap but the allure of draught beer at home is somewhat of a luxury for most people. For a while, everyone got excited about the little 5L metal kegs that were popular for a while. The only problem was, the tiny little tap wasn’t really up to the job. It’d squirt out a high pressure jet of beer at the start of the keg and take a month to fill a glass at the end of the keg.

Tap King is very different. It’s high tech and if I were to sum it all up in one word, I’d say “fancy”. It’s very easy to put together, and only takes a minute to tap the 3.2L keg and get some beer pouring. There’s even a dinky little drip tray with looks so small it’d be useless, but it actually pushes out of the way by the glass and is spring loaded so it pops back out just to catch the last drip from the tap.

Although some beer fans will feel a little limited by the beers available for the Tap King, which is a Lion initiative so don’t expect Feral or Coopers beers for it anytime soon, the bottle system is very good. Instead of buying light struck beers by the bottle, the thick black plastic bottle delivers very fresh beer. My test model was supplied with James Boags Premium Lager and it’s probably the freshest Boags I’ve ever had. If you’re used to pouring from a normal beer tap, the Tap King is still a bit dinky. The stream of beer is still thin and easy to create a bit too much head but it only takes a bit more attention to the pour to remedy that.

Currently Tooheys New, XXXX Gold, Tooheys Extra Dry, Hahn SuperDry, James Boags Premium Lager and James Squire’s The Chancer Golden Ale are the only beers on offer. You’d hazard a guess that if it takes off, the range would be expanded. I’d love to see the range of beers available increase, especially if hopefully nitrogen dispensing is possible. Having 3.2L of (locally made, under license) Kilkenny Irish Red Ale ready to pour at any moment would make me a very happy drinker. At the least, a stout would make a good addition to the range.

Price wise, the dispenser sells for $32.99 and the 3.2L refills cost between $33 to $48, depending on the beer. That works out to around $2 a stubby, which isn’t too bad, especially considering the freshness of the beer delivered.

One of the first questions I get from beer nerds about the unit is “Can you refill them with homebrew?” Looking at the coupler for the bottle, I’m guessing it’d be pretty bloody tricky to do so. It’s quite a convoluted piece of equipment, even though tapping it is basically popping the dispenser correctly onto the refill bottle and pulling a lever to lock it into place.

So the verdict is; I still love a stainless steel swan neck beer tap with a steady even flow of beer, but if you don’t want the hassles of lugging 18-50L kegs around the place, renting gas bottles and cleaning beer lines, the Tap King is a compact, easy, fun way to pour a few cold ones at home without any dramas. It’s not quite royalty, but even the hoi polloi deserve fresh beer.

*Tap King and a refill of Boags Premium supplied by Lion’s PR company

News Flash (2010)

Beer Radar for TWTW (Previously published online in The Week That Was for Wine Business Magazine in 2010)

By John Krüger

News just in: Warm weather brings on the festival of the brew. Finish those flagons of port, may the beer begin!

The beer marketing machines are up and sailing along nicely. We’ve been undercover (via twitter) and we’re following some cracker arguments between the purist brewers and companies that sell contract brewed beer. We’d love to publish a few emails in the near future, if we can get a uni student studying law drunk enough to look over them for free.

We’ve already had two new beers from one company that tasted pretty bloody good, but when we first opened the box, we thought someone had posted us 2 blind mullets for that crack about pelletised hops we made a while back. Upon closer but hesitant inspection, we realised they’d made the dinky 330ml beer bottle labels poo brown coloured. Weirdest beverage packaging concept we’ve seen for a while. We reckon people will be asking for paper bags at every bottlo so they’re not seen walking about in public holding them. We spotted a cock-up in one of the blurbs on one as well which really adds to the charm.

There’s also news of two new beers from Gage Roads. We got a little excited but didn’t get too carried away until we saw the names: “Sleeping Giant IPA” a 5.4%abv India Pale Ale, and “Atomic Pale Ale” a 4.7%abv American Pale Ale. Are “Sleeping Giant” and “Atomic” not the best new beer names in the last 15 years?! Better than “Eagle Blue” by a long shot. Get out of our dreams and into our fridge! With awesome names like that and two of our favourite beer styles, we’re damn excited. Our expectations are high and we’re hoping they didn’t back off the hop oomph. Read what we think about these two new beers in the next WBM magazine.

In our opinion, there’s never been a better time to release hoppy beers. A huge collection of hop freaks are out there and they’re spreading like zombies. One Barossa winery has been hit hard with hop zombies and they’re brewing up batches of all grain golden ale like crazy just to fuel their hop and malt addictions. Our undercover work has taken us to backstreet bars where hop addicts are spending big on specialty, imported beers that have 1000IBU (International Bitterness Units) levels, even though the tastebuds pretty well pass out after 100IBU’s. One beer we tried recently was pretty pricey and tasted like it’d been bittered with broken glass, razor blades and snail pellets. It was about as smooth and balanced as a Kangaroo Island dirt road. We’re always keen to try a new beer though.

Fizzy beer in my day.

Beer Radar

By John Krüger

Fizzy beer in my day. (previously unpublished)

We only had two beers when I was young growing up in country South Australia. The one the oldies drank which was West End Draught, which to me has always had a bit of a dirty earthy taste, and West End Export, which has slightly less dirt taste but did have a dash of lawn clippings. They were both cold, fizzy, the right colour for a beer and got you pissed after a while. We didn’t drink them whilst gazing at plasma screens or flipping listlessly through video jukeboxes. We nodded in the dark politely to old people at the bar and made polite conversation when pressed. The un-air-conditioned car outside was now hitting 65C+, the un-air-conditioned bar was hovering above 35C and we drank cold, fizzy, piss coloured beer and we loved it.

Then we got soft. The window rattler air-conditioner crept in and and the old arm-pitty guy would sit in front of it all afternoon. He’d be the guy chain smoking with the publican. Both of them sitting on ponies; little 140ml glasses of freshly poured beer. A couple of mouthfuls to empty while they’re still cold. No fresh glasses in those days. You’d give a half a dozen used glasses to the barmaid and she’d fill them all up and give them all back in random order. Before long someone had decided that a TV was a good idea and for a while, listening to the farmers make crude jokes about anyone on the news was a unique experience. But then came the bingo machine, the Frogger machine, the smokes machine, the Keno screens, the six TAB TV’s, the video jukebox and the extra plasma TV’s. People got too tight to pay $2 for a 3 minute song by Bananarama on the video jukebox, so they put in a concert ready sound system hooked up to an iPod under the bar. As soon as someone can be heard talking, it’s turned up. The air conditioning is so cold, I head back out into the blinding heat just to balance out the core temperature a bit. People scurry from their icy cold cars past the verandah and inside to the screens and the cold where they sit and stare. West End Export isn’t there anymore, the kids ask for Super Dry or Extra Dry. Neither of them taste dry to me but they’ve never been dry before. Parched in a stinking hot car on a 45C day, tonguing for a beer…any beer. They’ve never been thirsty.