Plenty of "craft" beer available on this year's holiday Down Under but the hunt for new outlets serving cask conditioned ale continues. Apart from one day in Melbourne and a few days along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, all of our time was spent in the state of South Australia, mostly around Adelaide city where we know our way around pretty well now, this being the 8th year in a row that we've been there.
Our favourite pub in Adelaide remains the Wheatsheaf Hotel, where there's always an interesting variety of beers available, including one hand-pulled cask, which this year was from one of our favourite brewpubs from the Adelaide Hills - the Bierhaus at Lobethal:
It was the time of the Adelaide Fringe and there were some good gigs at the Wheaty - although, unfortunately, none of them fitted in with the tight travel schedule our daughter had arranged for us:
Let's do this in chronological order - first Melbourne, where a Google search had promised the possibility of cask ale at an outlet up a laneway (usually Aussies shorten their words, but this is one they lengthen for some reason) in the centre of the city - a small place named Penny Blue. It was a cute enough little pub and it had beers from a brewery I hadn't heard of before, but definitely nothing on cask:
We also paid a quick return visit to the Crafty Squire, one of the James Squire Brewery's brewhouses. The brewery in Sydney is named after (or for, as the Americans would say) a bit of a rogue who was a convict on the First Fleet and who is credited as being the first person to successfully grow hops in Australia. The names of their beers tell the tale - Hop Thief, Swindler, Chancer, One Fifty Lashes etc - you get the drift.
Our first stop on our road trip from Melbourne to Adelaide was Apollo Bay, where we stumbled across the Great Ocean Road Brewhouse (http://www.greatoceanroadbrewhouse.com.au/). Really nice selection of beers - we managed to spend the best part of the afternoon here on their decking looking out at the Southern Ocean:
No such luck on our next stop at Port Fairy, but we knew that, having been there before, there was a brewery at our 3rd overnight stop at Robe:
All their beers are bottle conditioned - this is my favourite:
We had only settled in Adelaide for a few days before we were off again on our travels - down the Fleurieu Peninsula to Carrickalinga. We go there every year and always pay a quick visit to the lovely Smiling Samoyed Brewery (http://www.smilingsamoyed.com.au/) in nearby Myponga. The even better news is that next year we'll be able to go to a microbrewery even closer to the house we stay at in Carrickalinga - Forktree Brewing are currently building a taproom there.
Another away day was on my birthday when we travelled up to the Adelaide Hills to Uraidla. We had lunch outside the hotel there, where we could watch the progress on the new brewery they were putting in next door:
Not far away from there is Prancing Pony Brewery and it would have been rude not to pay them a quick return visit - so we did:
Yet another weekend away was spent in the outback in the Flinders Ranges. On our return journey to Adelaide, we took a slight detour and stopped off at the old mining town of Burra where I happened upon the site of the long closed old Unicorn Brewery there:
Back in the city, a smart new (to us) place where they had an interesting and ever-changing selection of craft beers was Nola (http://www.nolaadelaide.com/):
That was about it for this year.
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