2019: The Year of Local
I’m very lucky to live in Melbourne, the craft beer capital of Australia. Melbourne has a huge array of craft brewers from tiny operations out of peoples garages right through to breweries with the capabilities to export their beer around the globe.
Victoria is without a doubt the leading craft beer state in Australia. Melbourne may be the epicentre but it would be a disservice to not mention the many wonderful regional brewers that our state has to offer.
The other day I was thinking about how many commercial brewers there are in Victoria. Naturally, this then lead to me thinking about how many Victorian brewers I have had beers from. I thought about how to go about sourcing this information, before deciding I’d need to create my own list.
Firstly I had to define what I meant by commercial brewer. I settled on a company that produces beer for sale. This allows for the growing number of contract/gypsy brewers to be included in this list; alongside their brethren that own their own stainless.
I’ve utilized a number of different resources to curate my list. I started with the best Australian resource for this type of thing; the Craft Beer Reviewer list. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the list, I think that it holds onto extinct breweries for far longer than necessary. With this knowledge I began contacting all of the breweries on the list to see if they were in fact still producing beer. The vast majority got back to me. As I anticipated, a number of brewers had stopped producing beer.
The brewers who I didn’t hear back from needed further investigation. For this I used social media, Untappd; to see if their beer was still being consumed, Twitter/Facebook/Instagram; to see if they were still active. In most cases they weren’t and I concluded that these brewers were no longer producing beer and could be excluded from the list. Three breweries got back to me and said they’re on a break & weren’t sure of their intentions in 2019. These breweries have been included in the list & I will re-evaluate them towards the end of 2019.
With all of that said I believe that as of today, January 10th, that this is the most up to date list of active craft brewers in Victoria (see bottom of page). I’m also aware of 4 or 5 brewers, and there are probably at least that many again, that are in the process of getting up and running in 2019. They will be added to the list as they release their first beers. All said and done; I had had beers from barely 60% of them, hell I hadn’t even heard of 15% of Victorian brewers! This is something that needed to change!
The idea behind The Year of Local, apart from sampling beer from every brewery in my great state, is to create a directory of all Victorian brewers. A one stop shop if you will, where you can not only find a list, but also get some information about the brewery. These may change in format as I go along, I’ll be sure to update the original listings, so let me know what you want to see in these posts.
Queenscliff Brewhouse
Zonzo Estate
I need your help guys! I need you to let me know if I’ve missed any breweries off the list or if a new brewery opens near you I need to know. I’m biting off a lot here; there will be at least 150 posts for this to be completed this year. I think I can do it, I’m pretty determined to make it happen.
Remember it’s always Beer O’Clock somewhere in the world!
