Last week I told you about a beer festival in Wellington NZ call Hopstock which involved twenty or so venues and fresh hop beers, well this week I'm back home in Melbourne Australia and it's time for another beer Festival. This one involves twenty or so venues and something like 500 beers. It is called Pint of Origin, organised by beer website The Craft Pint.
The concept is simple enough, each venue showcases beers from a particular region. It started off about 15 years ago as one venue from each of 6 states of Australia, but it expanded a fair bit, they started adding countries and overseas regions, New Zealand obviously as it's so close. The US because, well craft beer, and Europe, then Europe broke into Scandivia, the UK and Europe as three separate venues,we added Asia as a whole, then that broke into Japan and 'Other Asia', then we added the territories of Australia - Northern and Capital, then each state broke into the City and Regional areas, and then Melbourne broke into North of the River, South of the River, then we added Gypsy breweries (pint of No origin) - So basically now there is something for everyone.
It runs for 10 days, there are 28 venues, there is a passport to scan in each venue, collect them all go into a draw to win stuff, also I assume get some help, that's too many venues. There are mini-crawls of 5-6 venues, collect them all and you go into a different prize draw.
We started the week at Benchwarmer who are doing Japan, but that's not our tale, we will have more of them in another post. No today we ventured about 5km north of our house to do 3/5ths of the 'Brunswick Crawl'
In true Melbourne style we caught the tram (the weird route 58 which spends a good deal of it's time going through a massive park with a zoo, through the middle of gold course, seriously there a 9 holes either side of the tram line, it's very odd. But departing the tram and after a walk through another park we get to our first venue - Co-Conspirators which is a Brewery as well and a bar, and they will be presenting beers from Brisbane, which is the capital city of the state of Queensland, and home to the upcoming 2032 Olympics (fun fact)
Importantly they are doing a 'Range Brewing' tap takeover, Range are the best brewery out of Brisbane in my book, they had a taproom in Melbourne but unfortunately it recently closed down, so we needed to get our Range Fix, and it was amazing. They are reknown for NEIPAs and they had sent down some of their freshest and best.
The standout was 'Repeat After Me' which is on the right in the above shot, it was everything a Hazy NEIPA should be, fresh, juicy, easy drinking and wonderfully balanced.
Shout-out to the Co-Conspirators Beer called The Don which was a 12% barrel aged imeprial stout which I couldn't resist a small serve of - it was amazing.
Then it was time for a 5 minute walk further North to a bar called Miss Moses for the Sydney showcase.
Sydney meant another of my favourite Australian breweries - One Drop, and there crazy out there beers. The Pink beer above is one of theirs, Called Mr Big Stuff, a Ice-cream sour made with Strawberry, Blueberry, lactose and French Vanilla, it was like drinking a smoothie, not sure it's a beer experience, but it was a fun experience.
They do make more normal beers, we also had a Imperial Stour (seeing a theme yet) called Mongrel which was 11.1% warming, smooth and frankly just brilliant. but as is always the case in Pint of Origin week you need to keep moving, it was about a 10 minutes walk south to the next venue, and it seemed intelligent to have a dinner break, so after a pit-stop for Pizza it was time to walk into an old school pub. The Sporting Club for beers from Canberra - National capital, and a made up town, think Washington DC, or Brazilla, it's only reason for exisiting to to host the federal government, but they have some good breweries.
This Pub was a complete shambles, we were four deep at the badly designed bar, and I'm not sure if the staff had ever seen this many people before, the place was very very busy, particularly for 7.30pm at night. But we managed to get some beers, find a spot to sit and I must admit over the next hour and a half it did settle down which was good, because it was unpleasant early. And I could also see how this could be a good local if you were into that old school more english style of pub thing.
Anyway the best beer here. It was a beer called 'Madness' which was, you guessed it a 7% New England IPA, and was fruity and juicy, it had a backbone of Citra hops combined with some newer blends which were interesting. And here is a picture of it just before I drunk it (and yes there is another Stout waiting for us as well)
The important thing here though is that it was from a brewery called Cypher, which I'd never heard of, and that is the whole point of Pint of Origin, it's breweries from far off states and countries that you wouldn't have otherwise got to experience, and who isn't happy with that, discovery.