2017 BA Australia wish list

they're good wishes Bront.

 

my thoughts exactly

 

For consumers to abandon "drink local" and move to "drink what is good". I see that as the only way quality will improve. If you benchmark against only what is local you don't improve anywhere near as quickly as if you benchmark against what is the best around. Where do you think Australia's ranking is relative to other brewing nations (forget the Beer Cartel poll) and where do you think it was 5, 10 or 15 years ago?

Breweries to seek out more collaborations with breweries from overseas. Seeing breweries like Nomad and Akasha have their best beers come from collaborations. Obviously a good learning experience.

Bars & pubs to think a little outside the square. It's great for you having all these beers with high gross profit margins. But maybe consider stocking something that was a better beer with a lower gross profit margin and brought more drinkers to your venue and sold more beer at a slightly lower profit margin. There's plenty of times i choose to stay at home as the tap selection seems full of cheap kegs or a taplist bereft of any thought.

Rotation. If you have a really good beer, do you need to rotate it off the menu? Some people actually do go to places because they have a really good beer on there all the time.

 

would like to see people call out breweries who continually make poor products,
I want to be able to confidently buy a beer and know that it wont have huge fermentation or packaging faults, which seems reasonable if its a $10-15 purchase
it amazes me the shite that gets 4 and 5 star untapped reviews.
nothing will improve if people continue to pretend its all "fine"

 

I would love to see more Australian breweries taking risks. Understanding that releasing a generic line of beers enables a brewery to fund plant and continue as a going concern, there are more and more Australian breweries that are well established who should be pushing the envelope.

While not all of 3 Ravens beers are amazing (or even any good), I like how he is pushing the boundaries of Australian palates. What must not be lost on all this is that, as a nation, Australian palates are still quite young (for want of a better term) but we are getting to the point now where there is enough of us willing to try something new.

Agree that international collabs would be great for the industry over here. We need to start forming relationships with the innovative breweries overseas which will help to push the quality locally.

 

More beers like Stockade Old Money. Could give Bourbon County a run for its money.

I'd also like more barrel-aged (maybe Chardonnay) hoppy sours/saisons. But I can't see any breweries other than Bridge Rd or 8 Wired doing that.

More hoppy pale ales are always appreciated also.

 

I rarely post now. For a myriad of reasons.
I suppose my wishes are pretty simple. Might be a bit extreme however.
I would love to the see the dependency of using Untapped go away. I would love for that site to just go away. Untapped is not the bible. it is good a a record of keeping one's beers but not as a rating tool. " This pale is too hoppy for me", "2 stars". Oh dear.
I will go against the grain with what a lot of people have said. I don't want experimentation. I would rather have good, clean, quality beer over experimentation. Make a good range and then go do do different things. Making one good BA RIS does not excuse a piss poor core range.
lastly, bottleshops to order less beer. Love walking into a shop and getting told how great the range and all the beer we have in stock, Only to find 4-6 month old Pales, IPA's, and session beers melting in a floor stand that gets nuked by the sun. Then you see the back storage area. Order what you need, give the punter a chance to have beer in packaged form as good as possible.

 

I absolute agree with this which is why I was angling at well established breweries going down the experimentation path.

There are quite a few Australian breweries out there with a complete scatter gun approach; rattle off as many beers as you can and maybe hit 1 out of 10. Actually alienates drinkers rather than sell beers. I avoid buying beers from such breweries.

Good post!

 

Experimentation where thought is put into the experiment and the result is released after a few iterations: good.
When it's bung some bland beer into a random barrel or imitate some icecream or 2c lolly: not.

I think there's room for your Red Duck and HopDog where maybe there's more of a gamble involved but the promise is not of some novelty for the sake of it. But for the medium term I want beers I'm more than happy to revisit and perhaps find a little improved. And surely that's what brewers have to have too - surely businesses can't prosper if many people like a beer but only once.

 

Some good posts so far. It's interesting that a lot of us have landed in a similar place.

I'll focus on how I want our breweries to improve, because there's too much to cover otherwise. To my mind the current composition of Aussie breweries is something like:

• 90% follow a safe, don't-frighten-the-horses-model, and have a very similar portfolio (Pale Ale, NZ Pale Ale, APA, XPA, Summer Ale, Golden Ale, Porter, Stout, IPA). There may be plenty of core beers beyond this, but this is the basic template.
• 5% run a year-round GABS model and spit out a steady stream of addled nonsense.
• 5% are specialising and/or doing something genuinely different and unique.

Re: the 90%, I'd like to see these breweries refine their base range and kick the lazy assumption that Aussies will always want Golden Ales and Summer Ales. More importantly though, I want these guys to nail hoppy styles properly and consistently. Whether it's too much crystal malt, poor attenuation, or whatever, the fact is most of our hop forward beers aren't sufficiently focused, clean or structurally sound. A lot of our attempts at IPAs/IIPAs remind me of the experience you get when you shove an entire packet of 5 Flavour Life-Savers in your mouth. An undifferentiated mess.

Re: the GABS 5%, these guys are beyond help. The rare number of decent beers they produce doesn't excuse the avalanche of train-wrecks. It's telling that this model seems to be an Australian phenomenon. There are no breweries that I'm aware of around the world that have embraced gimmickry to the extent we have.

Re: the other 5%, I want this segment to expand and I want existing breweries to refine their craft and specialise further. Breweries like Boatrocker, La Sirene and Blackfont are doing super interesting and impressive stuff, but these guys still have QC and consistency issues and aren't remotely close to the realm of say Hill Farmstead, Jester King, or even 8 Wired. More winemakers getting into beer is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

 

I am one of those readers who never posts.

For me I would love to see a larger focus on lager styles and just sessionable styles that fit our warm climate. For me Black Hops is nailing it with their Miss Pinky quenching my palate all day long.
Of course these have to be really dialed in as we are drinking beer with lighter characters which results in flaws standing out easily.

As a lot have said I would love to see proper barrel aged programs either beginning or continuing to improve.

Cheers