Drink the Local Beer!

The most popular drink in the world, apparently, is water. This is hardly surprising. Next on the list is a bit harder to decide and depends a lot on which oracle you consult. It does seem though that the top five is made up of water, coffee, tea, juice and beer.



Beer being the only alcoholic drink among these (although I sometimes wonder about the water in Adelaide) it must be the most popular alcoholic drink. It’s also probably the oldest alcoholic drink, although mead is a worthy contender for that title.

Beer is also surprisingly easy to make (albeit fiendishly difficult to make well) and features in the culture  of every civilised nation in the world. The fact that the French don’t have much time for it probably says more about the French than about beer.

Beer forms a sort of rite of passage for many a young lad. I don’t remember the first time I had a beer in a pub. As a young chap it was not uncommon to be allowed a shandy from quite a young age, the ratio of beer to lemonade being in proportion to the age of the lad in question. I do remember the first beer I bought though, it was at The Derrimut Hotel in Sunshine and was a glass (7oz) of Carlton Draught.

Beer at that time – this would have been early to mid 1980s – came in two varieties by the bottle, red (Melbourne Bitter) or green (Victoria Bitter). On tap there was Carlton Draught and occasionally, Carlton Light. There were rumours of other beers the very occasional pub that served Courage, but by and large, CUB ruled Melbourne and by and large, those were the three beers on offer.

As the 1980s wore on a fellow called Alan Bond acquired a Perth brewery called Swan and promptly began ‘exporting’ it all over Australia. I tried it as soon as I had the chance and was slightly miffed to discover that it tasted rather like Carlton Draught. It also occurred to me that Carlton Draught tasted rather a lot like Victoria Bitter and that Victoria Bitter tasted rather a lot like Melbourne Bitter.

So I started drinking wine instead.

The taste of these beers is something I have now come to know as “Commercial Lager”. It’s a fairly watery, slightly metallic flavour and at the best of times has a faint creamy/buttery taste to it. It’s not as awful as your beer snob mates would suggest, but it’s hardly a taste sensation. I’ve since been slightly miffed again as I’ve discovered that there are commercial lagers sold all over the world and the variation in taste from one to the next is at best, marginal.

It’s hardly surprising that these beers all taste the same. They are made to a very specific recipe and with a very specific cost in mind. Further more, these days, they are probably all made by the same company. There are just 4 companies that control production of 50% of the world’s beer; AB InBev, SAB Miller, Heineken International and Carlsberg. It’s slightly disturbing, for example, to learn that  Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois, Beck's, Hoegaarden and Leffe are all made by the same company. That company (AB InBev) also makes Rolling Rock, Lowenbrau, Cass, Fosters and every one of my first four beers. Hardly a recipe for variety.

But, dear reader, relief is at hand.

As I mentioned above, beer has been made by humans for rather a long time. As long as 10,000 years or more and the production of beer is not especially difficult; even Belgians can do it. I also discovered, much to my astonishment, that beer can take on a wide variety of styles and flavours, from the heavy-handed and rich flavours produced by the most religious of Belgiums beer makers, to the light, almost fruity tastes of some pilsener beers.

I wasn’t the only one to discover this and some folks discovered it quite a ways back. Some of these folks, appalled at the bland sameness of the commercial lagers, got it into their head that maybe they could do a better job. And then they did.

Hence was the world of the ‘boutique’ or ‘craft’ beer born.

Craft beer is that beer brewed on a smallish scale by independent brewers unaffiliated with the global giants. At least that’s the theory. The fact is that the global giants got to be giants by knowing what the public want and when the public wanted small scale breweries, they bought some and then pretended they hadn’t. Here in Australia, three of the more prominent ‘craft’ breweries, Malt Shovel, Little Creatures and Matilda Bay are all actually owned by one or other of the conglomerates. Rather sneaky really.

So how can you be sure that what you’re drinking is truly a craft beer? You can’t. But you can stack the odds in your favour with one simple step. Drink the local beer.

You can stack the odds a little further in your favour by drinking at a pub with a good range of beers and some knowledgeable bar staff. If you ask “where is it made” and the person behind the bar doesn’t know or doesn’t care, you need to move on.

The first and most pressing reason to drink local is that it tastes good. After all, why else would you be drinking beer at all? There’s a reason why it tastes good too. Unlike wine and most spirits, beer is made to be drunk fresh. The less time between it leaving the brewer and arriving at your lips, the better. Small brewers make smaller batches and transport over shorter distances. Mmmm.

Another reason is that your supporting the little bit of diversity that we have left. If you really want to drink your Heineken or Stella or Fosters, then go right ahead, but also know that if too many people think like you, there won’t be any choice to make.

And this leads us to another great reason to drink local: variety. Big brewers make big batches of big brews that, they figure, anyone would like. Small brewers cater for a niche. It means, among other things, that you can actually match your beer to your food. (Yes Virginia, you can match beer and food in the same way that you match wine and food).

Next time you’re enjoying a roast duck or pork, consider matching with a brown ale, pair a pilsener with your seafood and for the very adventurous, try an imperial stout with your chocolate truffles. Mmmm.

So support your local brewer. Drink often and drink local.


Photo courtesy Paul Joseph from vancouver, bc, canada (08-mar-31) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons