Thanks to Gavin Bannerman, Oral History and Digital Storytelling Coordinator at the State Library of Queensland, for sending this link to this through.
Surprisingly, beer and brewery history isn’t bigger in this country. Great small breweries come and go with their histories and passing barely documented. Even the big breweries seem to refuse to develop any form of true corporate histories, other than the PR and marketing created ones than are largely creative back stories rather than true accounts of periods of time.
One of the few serious beer historians in the country is Dr Brett Stubbs who maintains the Australian Good Beer Directory, though being a serious historian rather than a populist PR hack historian, his efforts are largely confined to his passion and own time rather than funded in any way.
It is great to see an interest microbrewery featuring in this project. The project is called “Storylines” and was run by State Library Queensland, funded by the Queensland Government for Q150 – Queensland’s 150th birthday celebrations. It’s one of those little projects that gets funded by Governments for which they receive little, if any, credit – but often provide important historical markers. This was a project to capture stories from all around the state – local people, places and events. The stories made for Q150 have been added to the library’s parent site, “Queensland Stories” which Gavin coordinates.
Sunshine Coast Brewery is one of those little breweries kicking around, doing some really enjoyable beers largely unheralded. This year they won the Trophy for Best Reduced Alcohol Beer at the AIBA (yes, a beer that’s even better than XXXX Gold coming from Queensland) and came within a point or two of winning the wheat beer trophy for their Dunkelweisse – beaten by Weihenstephaner Dunkel.
It’s great to see it recorded in Queensland’s official history.