Ale Lang Syne

My New Year's Eve column from the Courier Mail. I am filling in while regular beer writer Rory Gibson is on leave.

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In tougher economic times the phrase ‘champagne living on a beer budget’ is frequently used to describe ways to continue living well while tightening the belt a little.

While there is an implied slap to beer in saying that, it is also very accurate. With beer you can always drink exceptionally well at a fraction of the cost of more expensive grape juice.

What’s more, New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to discover the joys of living the high life by enjoying the true champagne of beers.

Deus Brut des Flandres from the Brouwerij Bosteels in Belgium undergoes a production process as careful, lengthy and complex as vintage Champagnes costing many times the price.

This Biere de Champagne is brewed in Belgium where it undergoes primary fermentation for a month and then further tank conditioning before being sent to Epernay in the Champagne region of France. Here it is fermented a third time in champagne bottles and cellared for up to a year on the yeast.

From here the bottles follow the method champenoise processes of riddling, remuage and degorgement, through which the bottles are gradually turned and upended before the yeast is extracted and the bottle is corked and capped.

As for taste, we are worlds away from Crown Lager as a celebratory tipple. It is impossible to describe how this beer tastes without borrowing a little from the wine expert’s vocabulary. The aroma is flowery and herbal, with – dare I say it – hints of thyme and allspice. For its strength the alcohol is warming but not over powering.

If you don’t tell your guests that they are drinking beer, there are few clues when you serve it. The bottle and label are identical to an expensive Champagne. In the glass the beer is pale with a head – or in more elegant champagne speak, mousse – that lasts longer than for champers, but the bubbles are the same perfect little pearls in the glass.

If you are going to ring in the New Year with beer instead of bubbles the first thing you need to do is jettison the six-pack mentality that is often related to beer. This is the notion that a beer is only good if it can be consumed in quantity.

When people first try Deus their reaction is often, “wow, I really like that…but I couldn’t drink a lot of it”.

And nor should you want to, or need to. At an alcohol content of 11.5%, this is not a beer to quaff while watching the cricket. It is one to be sipped and savoured while enjoying great conversation and company, especially on a night of celebration and reflection such as the ringing in of the New Year.

You’ll find it in better bottleshops at around $50 per 750ml bottle. Sure, that’s about the cost of a carton of some beers but it is also exceptionally cheap for a bottle of quality imported bubbles, which it is more akin to.

Live large in 2001, even if you are confined to a beer budget.

Happy New Year!

Beer and Christmas

Here are my recommendations for those who didn't have a pen handy, as well as some leads on where to get them if your local doesn't carry a wide range of beers. Oysters

Porter or Stout. Darker beers – often associated the very dry and astringent roastiness of Guinness , most actually have chocolate, coffee and liquorice hints to them that work really well with the saltiness of good fresh oysters.

• Coopers Best Extra Stout
• Bridge Road Robust Porter
• Meantime London Porter

Prawns, bugs and crab.

Lighter style – but flavoursome – lagers with the emphasis on the sweetness of the malt rather than bitterness of hops. German hefeweizen (cloudy wheat beer) or Belgian witbier.

• Stone & Wood Lager
• Burleigh Hef

Baked ham.

Strong malty German lagers and Belgian-style strong golden ales. Rauchbier may be too smoky but the mild smokiness of a smoked hefeweizen may work very nicely.

• Bluesky Smoked Wheat.
• Holgate Big Reg

Turkey.

Belgian-style strong golden ale is number one pick, though a biere de garde or spicy saison would work nicely too and suit our warm climate.

• Duvel
• Bridge Road Chevalier Biere de Garde
• Otway Bier de Garde

Chocolate.

Porters and stouts, not to mention chocolate stouts work well, but a Belgian strong dark ale such as Chimay and – if you can lay your hands on some – Trois Pistoles.

Fruit cake.

Porters and stouts again, or a good spiced Christmas beer.

www.adelaidebiershop.com.au

www.internationalbeershop.com.au

Isn’t ‘proposition’ something that drunks do?

Even though most global breweries kill the essential elements that give historic beer provenance, I understand what they mean when they say a beer has it. I also understand that a beer can be said to have “an authentic Czech taste”. But what exactly is a beer’s genuine and distinctive proposition?

‘Health conscious beer’…WTF?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to BeerMatt and there are a lot of reasons for that, mainly I’ve been flat out. But I just received my “What’s Brewing” newsletter from my old friends DB Breweries (you can read about them here, here, here and here.) and, there’s nothing like low-carb beer to get me writing. What caught my eye was the headline, “Health conscious beer increases popularity.”

Why this struck me is that I remember earlier this year an Australian academic caused a kerfuffle when he suggested that low-carb beers are an “insidious health risk” because they are marketed as a healthy option and may actually encourage people to drink more.

“Nooooooo,” howled the brewing industry when this claim was made. “We don’t market these beers as being healthy, we’re not allowed to do that.”

“ ‘Low carb’ is just a statement of fact, there’s nothing on the bottle to suggest that the beers are healthy.”

But then in their newsletter, DB Breweries are calling it a ‘health conscious beer’.

Read the whole thing and tell me if you’re left with the impression that this is beer is healthier for you. It never actually says that and I am sure that DB Breweries have had a team of lawyers go over the wording of the and to make sure that it doesn’t actually cross the line – but its toes are right up on the line and its shadow extends three feet across it.

Look closely and it’s like one of the old Mad Magazine fold-ins, make “A” meet “B” and something else emerges.

The key elements are:

• It’s a health conscious beer
• It's aim is not to add to growing beer bellies
• It is brewed 33% longer than standard beer to remove unwanted sugars and reduce the beer’s level of carbohydrates
• The beer is meeting a growing consumer demand among New Zealanders who are increasingly conscious of the way they look and feel
• “More and more Kiwis love beer but naturally they’re not so fond of beer bellies!”  “Export 33 is full strength, full flavour and low carb so now you can enjoy beer that is less filling without a taste trade-off.”

The last is the clincher. Notice how cleverly the first and second sentences of the last point are non sequiturs. It looks like they logically follow, but they don’t. “Kiwis don’t want beer bellies”. “Our beer is low-carb and less filling.” The latter doesn’t actually relate to the former, and DB can’t be said to be saying their beer is healthy, although the objective is quite clearly to make the connection between low-carbs and avoiding a beer belly – or else, why put out the media release?

In fact, according to DB’s own website, the difference in kilojoules (the energy provided by the alcohol and carbs in the beer that, if unused by the body, causes weight gain) between this ‘health conscious beer’ (425 kilojoules) and DB Draught (462) is 37 kilojoules or roughly half of one percent of a daily intake of 8000 kilojoules. A mouthful of your second bottle and you’ve consumed the same calories as their regular draught beer. The difference is the same is two rice crackers – the plain, not flavoured version.

Incidentally, I would burn 215 kilojoules doing 10 minutes of light gardening.

As ever, if you enjoy Export 33 - or any other beer for its flavour – drink up and enjoy, that’s the whole purpose of beer after all. But if you drink Export 33 because you’re trying to avoid a beer gut or you consider it to be a ‘health conscious beer’, you are every bit as gullible as DB Breweries hope you are.

Oh, and send me your bank account details – I have US$5,000,000 that we can split….

A sign of things to come?

Roger Protz has posted about the supermarket-led sales of beer in the UK and the power their supermarkets wield over even the brewers. This could easily be a pointer for what's to happen in Australia with the supermarkets controlling a substantial portion of off-premises sales in Australia and quickly moving into homebrand beers to compete with even our biggest brewers. Brewers big and small should be very concerned at the prospect of less shelf space, less prominent displays and pressure for lower margins. It's worth revisiting a Four Corners report on the economic power of the big supermarkets from a couple of years back called The Price We Pay. We all like to save a few dollars, but it can end up being a false economy when this leads to higher prices or smaller range and selection.

Beer that's all froth

It's been a very busy week so I've only just been catching up on some reading of beer news from around the world, and a couple of things struck me as a I read a couple in succession. First I read this... Leaving aside that fact that this 600 word self-congratulatory article about their marketing genius barely even mentions that the product is beer (the only words that indicate that this could be an advertising campaign about beer are the words ''clean, crisp taste''. The rest could be about anything. It is just a fast-moving consumer good after all.) But the point is to note that Lion "increased its spending into television, print and radio advertising to ensure its target audience of young metropolitan men are aware of the extra content such as websites, video diaries and the like that builds up the ''back story'' essential to give a brand credibility." Note too that they credited their six advertising and media partners.

Then read this story in marketing magazine B&T about Fosters whittling down a list of 117 agencies and selecting its stable of 21 marketing, advertising and PR partners (all good people, I assure you, many are avid readers this blog for some reason...morning all - congratulations on being selected!)

These show the cost of advertising in the world of commodity beer. Recently, the SMH noted that in the 12 months to November 2008, Fosters' VB brand spent $5.3 million in advertising, up from $3 million in the same period in 2007. A recent article in the Financial Review, which has no weblink, said Lion Nathan's CEO Rob Murray increased the company's marketing spend by 30 per cent when he took the top job in 2006 to bring it to "between 8 to 10 percent of annual net revenue". That's revenue, not costs, this must make marketing the single most expensive ingredient of beer.

And then I saw this about Lion in NZ putting prices up, citing the cost of glass and aluminium.

It always seems that when beer prices go up, it's the cost of ingredients that get's the blame (though as I've noted, it's never the cost of sugar which makes up more than a quarter of some of these beers - even when the price of sugar doubles), never the cost of the expanding teams of marketers or the advertising.

I wonder why that is.

Epiphany in a shoe

Those who know me know that fashion is not my thing. I have no care for it. I'm the type that, when I find a shirt I like, I will buy three  (usually plain blue) so that I don't have to worry about buying any more for a while. Clothes are a utilitarian thing. Shoes are to be worn, should vaguely match your belt and the colours of the pants and shirt shouldn't clash.

So when my wife pointed to a picture of a shoe in one of those free 'lifestyle' (read advertising heavy) magazines that turn up in the mail weekly and pointed out how impractical, ugly and ridiculous it was, I was entirely in agreement. But then suddenly I had one of those moments. I realised that there would be people out there to whom fashion matters. People who would be able to lecture for hours about how, yes, the shoe isn't to be worn day-to-day but that it pushes boundaries and shows the designer is rethinking the point of 'shoe', crossing barriers and merging styles. That such discussions about such shoes are the point of the fashionista's life.

It was a short leap from there to think about the discussions I have had recently about BrewDog's Tactial Nuclear Penguin or Sink! Or discussions I have had about the characteristics of single hop IPAs, or the current debate about whether a dark IPA is a contradiction in terms or whether it should more appropriately be called a Cascadian Dark Ale.

For some people, who have the same view of beer that I have of shoes, beer is just something to be drunk. It can have flavour, it can have character, it can reflect their personality but at the end of the day these are just minor footnotes to the consumption rather than the reason d'etre for the beer.

Lately I have read more comments dismissing beers such as Stone & Wood's Pale Lager, Mountain Goat's Steam Ale and Matilda Bay's Big Helga than praising them, or even just accepting them. Which is fine, except the fashionable way seems to be to dismiss them with the statement 'meh', which offers no insight or discussion, merely indicates disinterest. To dismiss these beers in such a way is pretty much to say that every beer needs to be oak-aged, brett-infused, hop bomb that is a trial by ordeal to drink.

These less exciting beers may be tennis shoes, but they are comfortable, well-made tennis shoes with genuine leather uppers and we still wear those more than anything else. And sometimes that's the point.

If you find the shoe at right in anyway ridiculous or impractical as you schlep around in a pair of old Nikes, just bear in mind that it is the footwear equivalent of the extreme beer that we covet...and that somewhere, someone is quietly sipping on a well made Pilsener, from the bottle, and really enjoying it...all the while laughing at us.

Free-flowing beer?

I got excited to see the headline "SAB Pledges Free-Flowing Beer at World Cup". I hoped this meant that, despite sponsoring the World Cup, beer lovers would have a choice of beer. Of course, it doesn't. What it means is that football fans will be bombarded with advertising saying how great SAB's beers are, while being denied the opportunity to actually reach that conclusion.

Happy Birthday Jay Brooks

Long time readers (and I am often amazed that there are any readers) of this blog know that US beer writer Jay Brooks is one of my favourite beer writers. He is prolific, he is informed, he is passionate and you know exactly what he thinks, making him the perfect company for a pub discussion or a blog.

Jay makes a point of marking the birthday of pretty much every beer person he has ever come into contact with on his blog and in case modesty prevents him from marking his own, Happy Birthday Jay. Please join with me in wishing Jay cheers and good beers!

Beer drinkers don't shave, wear shoes

XXXX will be launching their new ad campaign on Sunday night (you can read the full details on Brews News so I won't repeat it here). But the casting of the new ad follows on from this morning's update to the "Over Beer?" campaign. It seems that beer marketers believe that beer drinkers identify with people who don't shave or wear shoes. The Canadian Club people agree, though don't reveal their attitude to footwear. In Canadian Clubland, however, bar workers are metrosexuals who shave more often, but still maintain a designer stubble.... [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b3S6tqiHHU&hl=en_GB&fs=1&] .

Over alcopops?

RTDs have been working the edges of the beer market for a while now, picking off those who like the thought of drinking beer without actually liking the flavour. The beer industry has hit back with an increasing number of beerish drinks so people who don't like beer can still hold one, now Canadian Club is actually saying it.... [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWQDuNFSLTQ&hl=en_GB&fs=1&] . More.... Greig posted a comment below and my reply was much longer than the initial post, so I have added it to the main post.

It fails on you because your not the market. The marketing for this isn't aimed at the sort of bloke who can drink a glass of white wine confident that it doesn't call his masculinity into question.

I think they see that there is a big market for blokes that like the idea of drinking of beer, but not the flavour (but drinks it so his mates don't call him a poof), and a big group of blokes who like sweet, tasteless alcohol but don't like the thought of being seen drinking it (and so don't drink it so their mates don't them a poof).

This is a dog whistle for that market saying it is alright to drink this sweet slop confident that you're still a good bloke. Note the casting of the "beer drinker" as being an everyday characterful yob...exactly the same sort of bloke that VB's 'The Regulars' was pitched at. Who, incidently, reminds me exactly of the decription from Roy Morgan Research of the "Heavy Drinker"

Heavy drinkers; those who drink on average more than 3 drinks per day are more likely to be males aged 18-35, single and over-represented among tradesmen and earning a good income. Their social habits are skewed towards going to sporting events, gambling either on track, at the TAB or online, they go to nightclubs, play the pokies and even go shopping more than the average Australian although it’s for music and hardware rather than groceries or clothing.

Their media habits are different to the average too being a little less likely to heavy TV viewers, magazine readers and cinema goers, and slightly more likely to be heavy newspaper readers, Internet users and commercial radio listeners.

This is the group that comprise the "17% of the alcohol drinking population consume over 21 glasses of alcohol a week or an average of more than three glasses a day, and they account for 53% of all the alcohol consumed."

But alcohol companies wouldn't target heavy drinkers...would they?

Alcohol belt needs beer braces

Not quite sure what to say about this other than, "Bloody Romans".

It's apparently a map of Europe's alcohol belt, showing the wine, beer and vodka belts. Can't vouch for its integrity, but it does roughly accord with my understanding of the lay of the land.

"An interesting co-explanation for the prevalence of beer in southern parts of this belt is the relatively weak cultural influence of the Roman Empire on these places. The Wine Belt indeed conforms to a large extent with the territory formerly occupied by Rome, with notable exceptions in areas with large Slavic or Germanic migration (the Balkans, southwestern Germany, northern France respectively), where beer predominates (although often overlapping with wine)."

The good news for beer is that:

There is a climatological imperative to the Vodka Belt: freezing temperatures make grape cultivation impossible (except in southernmost Russia and some areas of Ukraine). So there’s almost no overlap possible between the Vodka and Wine Belts. For cultural reasons, however, the Vodka Belt has been losing ground to the Beer Belt. Scandinavians tend to drink more beer than before (although possibly this doesn’t mean they drink less wodka). Maybe this is due to the perception of beer correlating more with ‘core European’ behaviour (as it is the preferred alcoholic beverage of Britain, Germany and other influential and centrally positioned countries). That might explain the emergence in Poland, some years ago, of a Beer-Lovers’ Party (which actually won seats in the Polish Parliament in the early 1990s). Beer has since surpassed wodka as the most consumed type of alcohol in Poland.

Let's just hope that in switching to beer the eastern Europeans don't just swap one odourless and flavourless type for another and avoid the Coronas of the world. Through the likes of Nogne O and Mikkeller, the Scandinavians are showing them great beer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso]

Drinking wine from the bottle?

I was interested in this article in The Oz in which Foster's Australasian wine boss was giving his thoughts on wine. It's always fascinating to talk beer with business people. The average reader of these rantings - who I would affectionately call the beer purist - thinks that the only concern of the brewery should be to let the brewer make great beer. It would be a wonderful world, a better world, where that happened AND great breweries could stay in business, generate the capital they need to expand to keep up with demand etc etc etc.

Of course, in the real world, beer is business. Unit cost, innovation, distribution, porfolios, packaging, brands and brand values are often more important than what actually goes in the bottle. None of us really like it with our utopian ideas of beery nirvana, but that's the world we live in (butu please don't stop trying to change that world, one great beer at a time.)

So it was interesting to see David Dearie try to argue that wine wasn't a commodity these days. Wine still carries with it a cachet, a snob value, that beer will never and should never have. But, in my view, this is also one of the reasons that wine is so successful. I think there is a huge section of people who really like the idea of drinking wine, but don't really like the flavour - or know so little about it they just buy the label with the critter on it or the second cheapest on a wine list. The point is this class of wine drinker drinks it because they think that it makes them appear more sophisticated than drinking beer at a restaurant or elsewhere.

The theatre of wine, the need for the right glass (and Riedel has built an industry hyping that), the cork, the sniff and the pour all contribute to why people drink wine on certain occasions instead of beer. I'd love to see the pckaging innovations, and what it will do to the perception of wine, that will follow this comment...

"Dearie also wants to expand the number of occasions on which wine is drunk, with the traditional glass bottle excluding it from events where the hassle of carrying glasses and a corkscrew means drinkers tend to choose beer. The solution, he says is packaging innovation."

To keep its leading premium beer at events that don't permit glass, Foster's developed the aluminium Crown bottle. A really clever innovation that didn't change the experience in a major way (from taste tests we've done on the Beer Show, dedicated Crown drinkers say that they can taste a difference), but the shape of the bottle was the same and the experience - drinking from a Crown-shaped bottle - is largely the same. What can wine do? Plastic bottles will get the wine into events, but does "packaging innovation" and ridding the wine drinker of the "hassle of carrying glasses and a corkscrew" mean encouraging drinking wine from the bottle? Or will they develop plastic cups akin to the Berocca Twist 'n Go? Or maybe a wine cask/hat combo like beer yobs have used for years.

With 'innovation' in the beer leading to the brave new worlds of chill-filtered beer, low-carb beer and chromazone labels (that change when your beer is cold enough that you can't taste it), I can't wait to see what is in store for wine...

The best news in brews

It’s been pretty quiet on the posting front here at BeerMatt…Christmas was more a time of enjoying beer (and family etc etc) rather than writing about it, but I’ve also been busy on another project that is now up and running, Australian Brews News.

Part blog, part online beer magazine, Brews News aims to keep Australian beer lovers up to date with the latest in beer news, reviews, destinations…pretty much anything to do with beer in Australia.

The site morphed out BeerMatt, in the sense that BeerMatt has always been a personal blog through which I have shouted into the night my thoughts on beer but have largely avoided the day to day beer news. But from the amount of traffic I have been receiving it seems as though there is a need for something that has a much greater focus on news and beer information, but also for comment and analysis on the news. We have some really good writers who are passionate about beer and, most importantly, know about beer and the business of making it – and there’s plenty happening in the world of beer. There’s nothing like it in Australia and hopefully it meets the need that exists.

I’ll still keep posting here, though probably not as regularly so keep coming…just also subscribe to Brew News which will have much more content.

Let me know what you think of Brews News and what you would like to see on it and read about.

For a hard-earned ad campaign

In the wake of a share market analyst's recommendation that shareholders sell Fosters on the back of falling market share, and today's  news that VB will enjoy increased advertising support this financial year, the advertising types who frequent mUmBRELLA are getting all worked up about terms like 'positioning' and 'brand value'. If you don't know it, that site is the marketing equivalent of a beer site such as this one where the inhabitants debate the minutiae of IBUs and hop types, but about ad campaigns. The interesting thing in reading the comments is that, judging by the stereotypes being bandied about there, advertising obviously works-even on advertising people.

I don't know too much about advertising strategy, but The Regulars is a funny, funny ad that I would have thought would appeal to everyone, especially the VB target market.

Looking at comments such as "I do not drink VB because it is full of additives and preservatives and gives me the hangover from hell. Even Tooheys New have brushed up their beer ingredients, which is now made additive free." makes me wonder whether CUB spend too much time selling the brand and not the beer. Lion Nathan's Natural Beer Promise (which quickly fell by the wayside with XXXX Gold) did a lot to make beer the focus. Interestingly, with Fosters beers, the comments are generally negative. One of the most common things I hear at all of the lunches and presentations that I do is, "Crown Lager is just VB in a better bottle, isn't it?" With such a widespread and deeply entrenched perception that VB and Crown are made from the same brew, I can't work out why either the perception of VB isnt raised by the misconception (if you believe it, then aren't you buying Crown cheaply?) or why Crown isn't less well-regarded for being "just VB". That said, the comment is generally made to disparage Crown, so the error  just might do that.

A bit of beer talk

I caught up with Walter Williams on Radio 4BC during the week. Walter is a great bloke who championed getting beer on radio in Brisbane as host of the Sunday night show. He moved to weeknights over Christmas but Beer Talk unfortunately didn't follow him, but he got me on this week to talk a bit about beer and taste a few. We did Redoak Christmas Cheer (late, I know), Brew Boys Schweinhund and Seeing Double and finished with Eisenbahn Bier Likor. Here it is if you've got 37 minutes (including ads) that you don't want back...

[audio http://beermatt.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/beer-talk-thurs-7-jan.mp3]

Fosters to lose Corona?

Interesting speculation in The Age that Fosters could lose the Corona and Stella licences. To me the most important part of this article is this, tucked away right at the very end:

When Foster's releases its interim results next month it will show that the margins and profits of its beer business have held up, while volume has fallen. The question for the company is, how long can it keep letting market share go before it has to start buying volume?

In beer economics, less production volume means less recovery of production fixed costs. It's all to do with losing or winning scale economies.

It pretty much sums up the big brewing industry - it's a unit cost game. I just hope that the quest for volume doesn't see the business pressuring Matilda Bay to tinker with beers like Dogbolter or Alpha Pale Ale as they have in the past with Redback. Big Helga, which I enjoyed when it was launched, was obviously a style selected to appeal to a wide audience but was still a pretty good, if undemanding, beer. Their competition in the 'big craft' market, Lion Nathan's James Squire, has seemingly toned down the flavour of its major brews - the Amber and Golden Ales - in the search for market share and the beers have suffered greatly - though their popularity has grown...the commodity paradox.

The other interesting element to this speculation is what will happen to XXXX's intended 'Corona killer' Summer Bright Lager if Lion does get the Corona licence in Australia? While the brewery officially denied that SBL was going after Corona when it launched, it looks, quacks and waddles like a duck. Many Lion Nathan affiliated pubs in Brisbane have SBL on the same hig value shelf, right next to Corona in their bar fridge facings and that wouldn't happen without the brewery's  blessing.  They are going head to head. With two beers looking exactly the same and tasting almost identical but one selling  as low as $4 a bottle compared to Corona's $7+, there is only so far exotic goes before the beer "from where you'd rather be" changes to "I'll holiday at home and save my money." Or in the case of these beers, drink the local and get more value for my money - which, means drink more for the same amount.

I've seen nothing official yet but the reports I'm hearing from pubs is that the Summer Bright Lager is kicking goals, and doing a straw poll myself at pubs that had both - the market share was close to 50-50, although the XXXX was still being heavily promoted. I wonder whether Grupo Modelo would give Lion Nathan the Corona licence while they were competing directly against it, or would Lion kill off what seems to be a successful launch in order to get the "jewel in the crown in the foreign premium beer category."

No matter what, interesting times ahead in the world of uninteresting beer.

A world first?

It may be one for the overhyping files but it still sounds interesting...

Prime Beer has just been released as the first beer in the world made from the start to complement Red Meat flavours. Prime Beer is the third food matching beer by Australia's multi-award winning Fusion Brewing.

Prime Beer is intended to be the perfect accompaniment to red meat. Prime is a deep amber ale with complex malty flavours and strong bitterness designed to enhance the flavours of red meat from the grill.

Prime Beer is the third beer created by Fusion Brewing with the express intention of matching specific food flavours.

Whether paired with beef, lamb or gamier red meats such as kangaroo or venison, Prime Beer has been carefully crafted using the expertise of gastronomer Matthew Evans and master brewer Brian Watson.

Prime has a long list of accolades to live up to among its peers at Fusion Brewing; Bluebottle Beer won ‘Best Lager’ at the 2008 Australian Beer Awards, Bronze Medal at the Australian International Beer Awards 2009 and recently was the only Australian Lager to be awarded 5 stars by Winestate Magazine.

Firefly Beer was awarded a Silver Medal at the Australian International Beer Awards in 2009.

Prime was created and released to coincide with the Australian summer and BBQs across the nation – particularly during the Christmas, New Year and Australia Day celebrations.

No other beer has been crafted from the start to be the perfect complement to red meat.

I think the key here is made from the START to complement. It certainly sounds like it will and I'm keen to try it, but let's not get carried away with the claim of first!

Even though it was engineered to go with meat I'm keen to see how it matches up against some of my favourite beers that, though not necessarily designed to go with red meat manage to do it through a wonderful serendipity....such as Coopers Vintage Ale with steak (especially with a blue cheese butter) and Redoak Bock with lamb shank, or their Rauchbier with lamb chops.

Great to see that the concept of beer and food matching is getting to the stage that beers like this are appearing - and more importantly - selling.

Bogus brews raise health concerns

First it was copy watches and fake designer clothes, not it seems that international beers have been faked as well.

The China Daily reports that fake "foreign" beers sold in some Beijing bars could cause sickness because of insanitary conditions in the brewing process.

Apparently in a recent raid on a rented house in Wuliqiao village, officers found four men making counterfeit beer that they hoped to pass off as Budweiser, Corona and Carlsberg.

Of course it only seems fair that these beers should be knocked off. Budweiser and Corona have been passing their products off as beer for years now.

Craft in cans in planes

I suspect it will be a long time before we see this in Australia, but in catching up with some reading I found this on Jay Brooks’ site about San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery announcing that their canned IPA is to be served on Virgin flights in the US.

It really shows how deeply craft beer is penetrating into the mainstream in the States when you see this, but that’s not the sole reason that we’re not likely to see it anytime soon in Australia. Canning lines are expensive and generally beyond the reach of reach of Australia’s small breweries. Coincidentally I had commissioned Jay to write an article on craft in cans for Beer & Brewer magazine a year or so ago which provides a background to craft in cans and why we are unlikely to see it here for some time. You can read it here.

Given the unlikelihood of microbreweries getting their beer in cans, let alone muscling their way onto a flight over the deep pockets of the Big Two. About two years ago Qantas introduced James Squires Golden Ale to their inflight range, which at least offers a choice from the usual range of generic lagers. Still, Qantas offers a 50-page wine guide to its Business Class Passengers.

Coopers does put its Pale Ale into cans for SA-based events and so that would be available…not sure why it hasn’t joined the mile beer high club.