Australia Day Wrap

So, how was your Australia Day?



Mine was lovely.



Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

Australia’s Favourite Beer

It’s Australia Day and the papers are full of the usual blab about “change the flag”, “the national Anthem stinks”, and “has anybody heard of the bloke they named Australian of the year?”

Here at Beer Blokes I want to talk about much more pressing issues. I’m all very excited to see which Aussie beers score a mention in The Local Taphouse Top 100 craft beer poll this year (announced later today) and even more excited to see if any of my nominations rate in the top 10 and even, even more excited to see if my entry is the one randomly chosen to score a slab of each of the top 5.
But let’s talk about Australia’s favourite beer, VB, for a minute, shall we? What’s that, Prof, I hear you say, ‘have you gone mad or something and forsaken your craft beer roots?’ Well, no, thanks for asking, I’ll explain in a minute.

Up until the last few years (and for about twenty years before that) VB – the artist formerly known as Victoria Bitter – has made up around a quarter of all beer drunk in this wide, brown land. 1 in 4. That’s a fair chunk of a pretty large market and has seen VB become an iconic brand intrinsically linked to the culture through sporting sponsorships and plenty of advertising. When CUB was trying to drive Foster’s Lager back in the early 80’s it made it an international beer while VB became, arguably, Australia’s first truly ‘national brand’.

So, as I wrote late last year, it was amusing to see the furore created by some seemingly minor changes to this much loved brew among its biggest and most loyal fans. ‘Career VB Drinkers’ as they called themselves were falling over each other to have a crack at the Big House for daring to tinker with their cherished amber nectar. Letters to the editor pages were packed with Johnnos, Blueys, Knackers’s and Shags’s willing to renounce their ‘religion’ and threaten to switch brands because CUB had ‘changed the recipe’, ‘watered it down’ and even ‘switched the beer to XXXX’ as one melon-head claimed.

So, with a little research (very, very little) and a quick e-mail to (SOURCE PROTECTED) who was once a major powerbroker for CUB, then its Craft Brewing arm and now a partner in a very nice craft brewing set-up just south of the Queensland border where lots of backpackers and hippies hang out and whose initials are JC and whose name I won’t mention – I got about three full pages of facts and figures and links to the ATO website and tables and graphs and all sorts of shit. So I’m fairly confident that what I write here is accurate and factual and can’t be argued with in any way at all whatsoever so there.

I’ll save some space here and ‘dot-point’ the facts (which (SOURCE PROTECTED) assures me are all in the public domain if you know where to look) relating to VB.
As a quick refresher, ‘Career VB Drinkers’ claimed that VB had changed noticeably due to (a) CUB trying to save money in tax by lowering the ABV of the beer, (b) By brewing it in Queensland and (c) by altering the recipe.

The VB facts.
• VB, along with many national brands are brewed in breweries all around the country and have been since the walls came down on state based brewing in the mid 80’s.

• The law regarding beer brewing states that a beer has a ‘margin’ of +/- .02% so that a VB whose label states an ABV of 4.9% might be as high as 5.1% or as low as 4.7% - allowable by law. When VB changed first to 4.8% and then to 4.6% more recently, the Career VB Drinker could have been drinking anything from 5.0% to 4.4% - and NOT NOTICED. Until he read a paper past the sports section.

• When CUB drops the ABV by just .01%, it saves tens of millions of dollars in tax allowing it to compete in the beery duopoly that is Australian mainstream brewing.

So, in conclusion, a ‘Career VB Drinker could, for the last twenty years have been drinking VB that was;
• Brewed in Abbotsford, Kent (Sydney), Fortitude Valley (Brisbane), Yatala, Matilda Bay or even Cascade. Although today it is only brewed at Abbotsford and Yatala.

• Could have been anything from 5.1% to 4.4% ABV

• May have had any of about ten slightly different labels


I’ll leave it here for now so that you can digest all these facts and figures. I’m off to have a beer (not a VB) and you might want to do the same.
I will post a follow up with the various reasons for the changes that CUB has introduced and also to look at the various theories regarding why they have done it and what the future might hold. Also, as promised, I have some VBs in the fridge waiting for the lab experiment to see if I can detect any difference in taste.

Cheers and happy Australia Day,
Prof. Pilsner

Australia Day 2010

As we emerge unscathed from the festive season and the New Year it’s perhaps a good time to look at our place as a nation in the Beer World.
I’m particularly keen to do a bit of navel gazing at our national drink as it seems that, with one thing and another, I have spent most of January drinking American Pale Ales both imported and locally brewed. I don’t mean that to sound as though I’ve been sitting curled up in a dark room drinking for three and a half weeks, I just mean that most of what I have drunk has been APAs.
Tomorrow is Australia Day and it seems that recently many have developed the habit of using the day as a soapbox to tell anyone who’ll listen what is wrong with the joint rather than grasping the opportunity to celebrate all the good shit we have.
I’m going to stick true and use this opportunity to sing the praises of ‘The Amber Nectar’.
I am hosting another Beer Dinner at the end of February and so have been looking for the theme and the beers to match it. We were going to host the dinner just before Australia Day but with the ‘extended long weekend’ seeing plenty of folk taking the last chance to get away before the weather turns, we put it off. I was thrilled to realise just how many craft beers I can choose from to create a truly Australian theme.
In the last month I have had the pleasure of tasting beers from Sierra Nevada and Anchor Brewing and, while they have finally been crossed off the Prof’s wish list (crossed off – not ticked off) they have also made me focus on just how Australian beers differ from their more widely respected neighbours.
I’ve also recently had the pleasure of meeting with some of Australia’s finest craft brewers and have learned that although many of them were initially inspired by some of the iconic brews from the USA, they have a bold determination to break the mold and create something different without straying from the essence of the style. And, when you think about it, apart from the kangaroo, the emu, the platypus and a few other native species, most of what we call Australian has its origins in nearly every other far flung corner of the globe, so while we may not have our own ‘true-blue’ beer style, we can certainly lay claim to having some of the most dedicated and talented brewers.
So that’s how I’ll spend my Australia Day. Celebrating Australian beer.
Oh, and being thankful to my friend who came back from the new supermarket warehouse thingy with some Vegemite for me.
Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

Australia Day 2009

This blog is unashamedly Australian. It is also totally inclusive of others at the same time, but it is proud of its heritage. The only group I discriminate against are dickheads.

Australia is not only the land of my birth and the giver of all opportunities to all men, it has also copped some harsh press in recent times and I thought this a good opportunity to stick up for her.

This whole thing of political correctness has not only gone a bit too far in recent years, but I believe it is as much an imagined myth as Bigfoot, the Bunyip, global warming or Scientology. I don’t think that ‘they’ who get upset are as plentiful as people think. Too often too many assume that a certain group will be upset or hope that they will be upset but ‘they’ may not really be all that upset.

This blog has never really been too bothered about offending anyone, it’s just that we like to hold up to the light anyone who wants to be a dickhead, do dickhead things or promote the attainment of dickhead status. Plus we are always happy to have a crack at various other arse-clowns, fark-narkles, global-warming alarmists, PETA activists, tree-huggers, social engineers, beer marketing dickheads, knob-jockeys, twats and flogs of all political and religious leanings. PC? Not for me!

Australia Day is a celebration of many things. Of opportunity and equality, of aspiration rather than envy, of hard work and luck in equal measure and, best of all – freedom. Freedom to have an opinion and a say without fear of being locked up, freedom to write letters to the editor and show tens of thousands of people that you are a moron, freedom to drink lager or ale – or even wine if you don’t mind being thought just a little gay – and the freedom to support Manly, Collingwood or Queensland.

But mostly, it’s about beer. Good beer, great beer, craft beer, mainstream beer, light alcohol beer, low-carb beer, low cost beer and overpriced swill, tap beer, bottle beer, stubby beer and keg beer. Beers for blokes and beers for shielahs, beer that you import from exotic locations and beer that you brew yourself at home. And any other beer that I may have missed.

So let’s celebrate what’s great this January 26. Be thankful that we live in a place that has a bit of something for everyone. And let’s spare a thought for those who just don’t get it – the wife-beating advocates hiding behind extreme religion, the chair-throwing tennis retards wrapped in the flags of their warring grandfathers, the mental-midgets who want to hold racist beach parties, the social engineers who want to level the playing field by making everybody dumb-arsed and on welfare and any other slap-head who needs to take a good hard look at themselves.

*Insert your favourite dickhead; HERE*

Happy Australia Day. Have a beer. I know I will.

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

PS; Don't get ROO-ted