MEET THE BEER BLOKES

“ You can’t always be young, but you can always be immature.”

John ( Dr. Lager )

If one were to sit down and list every male cliche you could think of the list would probably consist of:

* likes sport

* likes beer

* likes nudity (preferably female)

The danger of this type of labelling is that it doesn't allow for the myriad of small differences and personality traits that combine to make us the unique characters we are. Stereotypifying males is a dangerous, inaccurate and belittling practise that serves no purpose other than to portray the male sex as a drunken bunch of breast ogling yobbos who enjoy parking their butts in front of the TV for hours at a time watching re-runs of the 1981 Australia v India One Day International. It just makes me angry...

Oh! By the way, I'm John. I like:

* sport;

* beer; and

* nudity.

Pete ( Professor Pilsner )

Born the day after John, Peter spent his early childhood years playing in parks, riding bikes and drawing cartoons. A love of backyard cricket was nurtured by childhood schoolmate, John who, as year 8 captain allowed the budding off spinner to bowl in an interschool match. Having waited patiently for three overs for a ball to land either on the pitch or in the batsmans’ half of the pitch, John wisely decided to continue the friendship but not the sporting partnership. Peter hopes that John will show similar patience in home brewing.

The Bible tells the story of Paul’s epiphany on the road to Damascus, when a bright light blinded the young man, causing him to fall from his horse after which he awoke with a new sense of purpose. As a teenager, Peter discovered beer in much the same way. In good Christian tradition he regularly re-enacted the Bible story by allowing himself to be blind-ed, but getting straight back on the horse.

As he matured he realised that moderation was not an altogether bad way to go about drinking, a philosophy which , in later years, led to a new appreciation for beer and the sudden realisation that many years had been wasted by skolling VB from the can. Except for the momentous and life-changing event in January 1986 when the space shuttle tragically exploded after lift-off. It was on the Australia Day long weekend preceding this tragedy that Peter and John led a team of intrepid beer drinkers on a mission to assemble one years worth of VB cans into a two metre high statue of Ned Kelly. The local daily newspaper, The Sun, took photos and assured us that, owing to a slow news week, the picture would most likely grace the front page of Australia’s highest selling daily. Over night the shuttle went down, we were bumped to page 4 and eight
young men learned a valuable lesson; journalists rarely tell the truth, but beer never lies.

After many years in the Pub and restaurant business, Peter began planning and hosting Beer Dinners in restaurants so as to share the love of beer and food matching to a wider, appreciative audience. This also led to a personal quest, beginning at the end of 1999, to buy, drink and document in tasting notes, every beer available in Australia. He is happy to concede that this may be an ongoing and possibly never ending adventure.

Married with three girls he looks forward to seeing them all grow up and marry nice boys who like beer. Not his wife, obviously, as she has already done so.

WHO ARE THE BEER BLOKES ?

Credentials ? What credentials ?

Let me begin by telling you who the Beer Blokes are NOT.
We are not world renowned beer experts, nor are we beer journalists or writers for foodie mags.
We are not master brewers ( you probably guessed that much ) and we don’t work in the
marketing department of a large multinational brewery.
We don’t spend a lot of time in trendy bars drinking expensive drops from the bottle.
We haven’t got on the juice til’ we pass out.
For a while.

We are a couple of average blokes - hence the Beer Bloke moniker - so clever you’d think we had our own marketing department, huh? and we enjoy a beer.
Or two.

We enjoy the whole culture surrounding beer. The brewing history, the Australian colonial roots and the way in which it has crossed borders and civilisations, the fact that it’s been around longer than wine, the fact that it’s disciples are not tossers like some wine trainspotters are and the way that it unites and defines it’s drinkers at the same time while maintaining it‘s egalitarian philosophy - O.K., that’s the stuff I like about it, Dr Lager just likes drinking it. At this stage. He’ll learn to love it too, like I do, on a deeper level. I think he’s getting there.

P.S. In a future post I will elaborate on my thoughts above about beer writers, brewers and beer marketing types as well as opinions about the beer scene in Australia

BEER BLOKES - A USER’S GUIDE

It’s funny how things start out simply enough and before you can say “ Gee, that’s a nice beer. “, the whole thing has taken on a life of it’s own. So it seems to be the way with this site. “ We’ll just sort of track the progress of the whole homebrew thing and kinda let people know about the ins and outs. Sort of. “ is pretty much how we thought the thing would work.

Til’ one day Professor Pilsner says to Dr Lager, “ You know, we probably should show the gear we bought and where we decided to set it up, and why, and then the punters can see how easy it is to do and then we could have a bit that tells you what we did wrong and how we could fix it which would mean we’d have to have a bit where we post advice from the bloke at the homebrew joint ..” “ … and then I could put a link to the brewing log to set out all the technical stuff … “ says Dr Lager and suddenly we’re creating a website that Google will be paying a kerbillion dollars for.

So, to make navigating the Beer Bloke Interactive Experience easier for you, it has been decided that we will try to classify each post according to it’s subject. Therefore every post will end with the suffix “ BEER”

Wait, that might be confusing. I know, we will use the following code;

For the stuff that’s of interest to first time or “training wheel brewers “ - 101
For those who are already brewing at an intermediate level - INT
For those with a general interest in beer - GEN
For a bit about the history of beer - HIS
For tasting notes and comments - COMM
For those still looking for boobies - NICK OFF

All comments are welcome. At Beer Blokes we think these pages should be a reflection of beer at it’s very essence - egalitarian, non-judgemental, all encompassing, enjoyable and free for all.

Our role will be like that of the malted barley - to provide the platform, the building block, if you will, of the site. Your contributions will be like the hops - the flavouring that makes it different from the next; or the last; the flavour enhancer that lifts the content beyond the ordinary and even helps to preserve the content (so that I don’t have to sit here and type the lot). And the web itself will play the role of the yeast - that strange, omnipresent organism, multiplying, feeding off itself, digesting the sweet word(t) and transforming it to create a magical hyper-brew to be shared and savoured. No, dear reader, I have not been drinking the raw homebrew, I am merely illustrating the depths of fascination that beer holds for me and the passion that its’ study can evoke.

It is also an example of the rich and varied tastes that will be encountered in the wonderful world of Beer Blokes.

A bit like the wonderful world of beer, really.

Cheers