ausculture.com

So I stumbled across an opinion piece in The Australian claiming (more or less) that there are no good Australian Beers.

Full of wonderful hyperbole. Rather misleading on that one important point.

Sure, much of the local beer that gets promoted to us is awful, adjunct lager crap. The same goes for imported beers though - personally I’m sick of having average euro lagers marketed in Australia as premium beers at premium prices. Some of them are almost enough to make me want to drink Crown Lager. Almost.

Still, saying that Australia doesn’t have good beers because of the poor quality of some popular local beers is akin to saying that we don’t have good wine because people drink Passion Pop.

As for the tendency to serve the beer extremely cold. I think that’s sometimes forgivable. When it’s 35 degrees celcius you don’t have much choice but to serve the beer a little bit cooler. Granted, it’s a bit of a double edged sword in that it can mask good and bad beers. However, if the beer is really, really skunking ordinary then the usual trick around these parts is to turn the beer into something else by adding lime. Not beer, just a nice cool drink on a hot day.

For anyway looking for a starting place to find some good Australian beer, Murray’s have just released their limited edition Best Extra Porter so if you’re a porter lover, get in quick.