Just returned from Christmas/New Year trip to visit our daughter in South Australia. Unlike previous trips when we went to Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, this time we stayed around the Adelaide area. Not one cask ale was found this time around - although we didn't go looking too hard.
There's still plenty of microbreweries/brewpubs around, with their own selections of craft beers, but we were restricted a little by it being the holiday period - a couple of places we planned to visit were shut between Christmas and New Year.
Their liquor stores ("bottle-o's") do have a wide range of Australian, British and international bottled beers, especially the Dan Murphy chain (http://danmurphys.com.au) which seems to dominate the off-sales business in SA.
Measures served in pubs are usually "pints" (not imperial - US measures!), schooners (2/3) and tasters of various sizes.
We paid a return visit to the little town of Lobethal in the Adelaide Hills, where there's a great brewpub called the Bierhaus (South Australia is full of German connections from the early settlers). It's run by a former international banker who worked in USA, saw what was happening there in the microbrewing sector, then gave it all up to move to Australia to start his own brewpub in 2007:
We were also delighted to see that he had learned another American trick of supplying "growlers" for home consumption:
The slight downside was that there didn't appear to be any other local microbreweries that were able to re-fill this for us - something to do with their licences - we could only go back to the Bierhaus for re-filling.
The Bierhaus also had an interesting and antiquated bottling machine - still in use:
Our best find of the holiday was the Barrosa Brewery & Brasserie (http://www.barossa.com/barossa-eatery/barossa-brewery-and-brasserie). Located in Tanunda, in the heart of wine country, it's a super little place - very informal and some nice beers. Here's Jo and I after a couple of sampler trays:
During our visit we noticed a couple of beers from small breweries/pubs in Perth, WA that we'd visited earlier in the year - quite a challenge for small businesses to distribute beers to locations almost 2,000 miles away - but nothing seems to faze these guys - not even the exceptional heat. It got to 45° C in the coastal city of Adelaide when we were there and it was even hotter further inland. No wonder they like their beer extra cold - the pipes on many of the bars were often visibly frosted on the outside.
We had a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur on the way home. Our man in Malaysia had tipped me off about TAPS beer bar - about the only place in KL that offers a variety of craft beers - 14 in all, of which 7 were from Denmark's Mikkeler and another 2 from Brewdog, who had their advertising posted all over the pub. There was a predominance of IPA's when we were there - and everything, as expected, had high abv's. Still, definitely worth a stop if you're passing through.
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