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.
