Beyond Fosters: 10 Australian Beers You Need To Try

Craft beer in Australia has really started to come alive in the past few years. “Technically, the first contemporary craft breweries launched three decades ago, but the first wave pretty much rose and then collapsed by the mid 1990s,” says James Smith, author of the Crafty Pint website and festival director of Good Beer Week in Melbourne, Australia. “It began growing slowly again around the turn of the Millennium and, while some have fallen away, many of the best breweries in operation now – Little Creatures (taken over by Lion / Kirin a couple of years ago), Feral, Nail, Mountain Goat to name a few – have been around a decade or more.”

However you judge it, the craft beer industry in this country of 23 million people has been growing at a tremendous rate. “We’ll reach the most brewing companies in operation at any one time in Australia this year; the previous high mark was 300 at the end of the 19th century before rationalization turned the country into a nation of lager drinkers being supplied by just a handful of big operations by the late 1970s,” says Smith.

There’s also been an explosion in brewers attempting different styles in recent years, mimicking craft beer scenes elsewhere. “Sours and barrel-ageing are very much the in thing for experimental brewers and beer geeks, while farmhouse ales are enjoying a welcome rise in popularity.” It makes sense as sour beers and saisons, for example, have the potential to be well-suited to the usually hot climate of Australia.

For all the growth, it remains a very young industry with variable quality to be found, especially in newer, smaller startups – although an increasing number are hitting the ground running. “Issues of capitalization, consistency, quality control and so on need addressing in many cases and there will be some who (maybe deservingly) fall away in the next few years.” But, for the first time ever, you can safely say that, in the major cities at least, craft beer has hit the mainstream and is only going to grow.

Here are a few great Australian beers to try if you ever make your way “down under”:

Young Henrys Real Ale

Located in Newtown, New South Wales, Australia, Young Henrys makes a handful of great beers including their take on the traditional Best Bitter. It’s their homage to their British ancestors. It’s even made up of 50% Australian malts and 50% British malts. It also contains Australian hops: Ella, Galaxy and Topaz, giving it more of a taste of Australia than Great Britain.