The BrewHouse

This place has become my "local" of late, mainly due to the handy 183 bus that goes pretty much from my doorstep to theirs, and the lack of any sort of decent beer bar around home. This review is a general consensus of my many visits over the last couple months. The vibe is usually decent when I'm there which is usually afternoons. Its quiet with the lunch business lunch crowd filtering through. Its a bit busier on Friday afternoons with many if not most of the tables reserved for group parties, and getting a beer can be a challenge at times. Timing is everything, and I find going left at the bar and looking longingly at the taps will get someone there to take your order for a beer. If you want to order food, or wish to use eftpos, then this approach doesn't work and you have to get into the cue for the main till.

Yes, the beer is quite chilled, but I don't find this as necessarily a terrible thing. I find that by ordering two pints, the second will be at about the right temperature when you finish the first one. They would do well to install a separate temperature control for their brews so they could up it some for the ales while keeping the macro-lagers near freezing. The macros on tap are Tooheys New, Tooheys Extra Dry, XXXX, & Hahn's low-carb, which I think should be over in the same macro tap bank as the other three, putting the Little Creatures Pale Ale over with the James Squire Golden, Pipsqueak Cider, and the rotating guest-tap. This guest-tap over the last few months has had Sunshine Coast Rauch, Red Oak Wild Wheat, Northern Rivers Migration Dark, & Mt Tamborine Bitter. Their house brews are, Bollocks English Bitter (mid-strength), Engine Pale, Up Your Kilt Scottish, Midnight Stout, 4th Reich Schwarzbeir, Starlager, Hefeweizen, & Honey Wheat. They all are good brews if not standouts, and are worthy of a taste and I think you can buy a sampler paddle. I would note that only one of their current brews appear on beer-fly, as that listing appears to be quite out-dated. I usually order the Scottish, Engine, or 4th Reich, but have been leaning toward the guest tap while the MT Bitter is there. Beer prices are average, with their happy hour (3PM-7PM weekdays & all day Sunday) knocking a buck off the $7.50 pint price.

Service has been hit & miss, with great customer service/salesmanship on one extreme, to absolute and total cluelessness and lack of concern on the other. On any given day, the service may be at either extreme or anywhere in between. Some seem to take interest in what the customers are asking while others seem not to care and have no desire to talk, or they have no idea as to what their products are, blowing opportunities to sell their product over the macros. Inconsistent at best, however, I will say they seem to have gotten better of late.

The food I've had has been reasonably good, with their chips & steak sandwiches being quite good. Like their pizzas too IF they remember to turn them in the oven halfway through their cooking. A couple times I've gotten one that was quite well done on one side, while barely cooked on the other. The food is a bit pricey but with happy hour for the beer, the bill becomes reasonable.

The last time I was there was WAY better than the first time I was there last November, and its my hope they keep upping their game!

This review is a combination of visits on a fairly busy Saturday night and a fairly quiet Sunday afternoon/evening,
All in all a pretty relaxed vibe with some people clearly getting pissed up before heading out for a night on the tiles but a lot of others just chilling out having a few brews.
It's a very big open plan venue with a few different areas depending on whether you want a quieter area to eat and talk, some big solid communual tables for bigger group socialising, some booths along the long back wall as well as lots of space to just stand around and mingle.
Yes, all the beers are served pretty damn cold but that's come to be expected I think. All beers I had there on the two visits, apart from one, were decent with a couple being pretty good.
The service was mainly good apart from one guy on the Sunday afternoon who didn't know anything. Didn't know what was on what taps and when I asked to order the "Pretzel & Kransky" he asked "What's that?" Well it certainly ain't the name of a beer.
I counted 16 taps - 8 of which were for BrewHouse beers, 1 guest micro tap (Mountain Bitter) & Little Creatures Pale Ale. The rest were occupied by shit such as Tooheys New, XXXX Gold, Hahn Premium etc. They have a varied selection of in house beers. Lager, Hefe, APA, English Bitter, Scottish Ale, Stout.
The food menu is pretty comprehensive, platters for large groups, pizzas, burgers, steak, pasta and a few other things. As mentioned above I ordered the Pretzel and Kransky. It wasn't anything exciting but went well with the beer and filled my stomach.
This is a place that I would visit again & from what I've heard/read they seem to be getting better in the beer department which is the main thing.

I concur with the review directly previous to this - the beer was relatively tasteless as they want to stick to the "great Aussie" tradition of chilling the shit out of it.

I rated this establishment as "a bit pricey" because even though the prices were not extravagent, they were a tad high for the quality of what you got, both in terms of food and beer.

The one plus I will give this place is that they seem to continually experiment with the beers that they make and every time that I went there, they seemed to have a new beer variety on tap. I remember sampling am Irish Red last time I was there, that actually had potential...

The BrewHouse is one of Brisbane's only brewpubs (formerly called Aurora's I think) and it's located in the heart of the city one block down from the Queen Street Mall.

Inside, it's like one giant, dark room sort of like a large warehouse with a stage at the front and booths/tables for eating around the edges and back. The microbrew equipment is visible from the main eating/drinking areas, which makes for slightly nicer ambience. The service is fairly typical Aussie service - good but not great, and paying for the meal is bit of a hassle here.

Unfortunately, when it came to the beer, my excitement of finding a microbrewery in Brisbane (oh happy day) quickly subsided...

The beers are served way too cold to the point that for the first 5 minutes that they're in front of you, I'd defy a blindfolded person to distinguish betweent the porter and the amber ale, for example. The biggest problem is that none of the beers have any "guts" - while their range seems great at first (stout, porter, "real" English ale, cloudy ale, amber ale, wheat, lager and midstrength lager) none of their beers have enough flavor or character to inspire. The wheat barely has any wheat beer character (just an afterthought it seems). The "real" ale is certainly not like any English "real" ales I've had in England. The stout is boring and not fun to drink and the porter is even more boring... and I love stouts and porters usually. Etc.

It's as if the brewer was out to draw in people with the range, yet fearful of offending the typical aussie pallate which prefers ice cold lagers that go down easy with as little fight as possible - so this awkward balance between creativity and blandness has been struck, much to their chagrin. I've been there twice and was disappointed both times, but I'll give it another shot sometime to see if things have changed... I'll keep you updated.