G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 44. This letter comes to you from Fremantle, a part of Perth on the ocean that is very much intertwined with the sea, and also with Australian beer.
A special welcome to those of you for whom this is your first letter. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 43 letters here, being used as a beer coaster.
Thanks for reading!
Luke
Sandboarding and steer, scones and snakes, all good things must come to an end. Such was our time at the Willowbrook Farm outside Neergabby, WA. After four nights, we packed up late on a hot Wednesday morning and headed south for Perth.
We had been looking forward to Perth for a long time. Home to just over 2 million people, it would be easily the largest city we’d visited since Melbourne. With all due respect to places we had passed through like Geraldton, Broome or Alice Springs, they’re large country towns. We longed for a taste of the big city life we were used to back in Melbourne.
Two months on the road in the outback, and the skyscrapers of Perth, the long commercial streets filled with shops and cafes, and then more cafes and shops, these bits of common city life looked every bit as exotic to us as the 300,000 year old crater at Wolfe Creek or the ancient water holes of the MacDonnell Ranges.
We were also looking forward to some real accommodation. We’d booked an Airbnb, so beds with sheets and pillows were in our future. Beds, and maybe a beer.
4 December 2019 - Fremantle
Leaving the Willowbrook today.
Bullshit check in at the Airbnb - they gave Katie the wrong instructions for finding the keys, there was a clearance issue we dealt with in the parking garage, and then the internet didn’t work.
Katie and I responded by leaving the boys at home so we could make the long walk down to Little Creatures for dinner.
We left the little creatures for Little Creatures, you could say, the former being our boys Henry and Oscar, and the latter being the Australian brewery Little Creatures.
Reading through my journals from this period, it strikes me that I was mentioning beer regularly, so I think it is something that deserves more than a passing mention. Just like the incessant heat, the flies, and red dirt, beer was a constant companion on our road trip. Beer was where we’d been, and would be where we were going.
And when talking about beer in Australia, Little Creatures and its mischievous beer drinking cherub is a worthy muse.
To start with, just as there are dark stouts and golden lagers, there are different shades of beer drinking. There’s the drinking level of Gary, the man who said fuck more than anyone I’ve ever met and accompanied his fuck weaving with many bottles of Carlton Dry. Gary ‘got on the turps’ to the extent that if Carlton started a frequent drinkers program, Gary would be a Platinum member. If Western Australia implemented a refund scheme for returning empty glass bottles, he’d a fuckin’ wealthy man.
Beyond Gary and lying somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, there’s the time honoured Australian tradition of a session, or ‘sesh’, which involves friends spending several hours together getting pleasantly pissed.
Then at the opposite end of the spectrum from Gary is a quiet beer with dinner, something to cap off a day where you drove 500 kilometres of outback roads, or braved the 41C (106F) desert sun to go on a hike. That’s where we fit in, most of the time anyway.
And even though we didn’t drink a lot, no matter where we were, our little esky-sized refrigerator would no doubt have a few tinnies of local beer sitting in the bottom.
There was a wholesome feeling about it. Alcoholic altruism, you could call it. When traveling, we didn’t eat out much, and didn’t go shopping for the usual tourist wares like t-shirts and commemorative silverware. So for me, stopping for a pint and a couple of takeaway cans was my way of buying locally and supporting the towns we were passing through.
It was also a way of getting a feel for the local communities. As you can imagine, the Alice Springs Brewery, in the heart of the Northern Territory, has distinct beer and a different feel to Whalebone Brewing in Exmouth, WA, the gateway to the Ningaloo Reef on the west coast of Australia.
You might be thinking that this ‘buy local’ nonsense is simply a weak justification for me to stop at random breweries during our trip for a bit of beer drinking, and you’d be partially right. But I just as easily could have been heavy into snow globes. One man’s beer is another man’s cheap souvenir.
And there really is something between beer and Australia, they have a fondness for each other, and beer has been a part of Australia since its colonial beginning. When James Cook arrived in Australia in 1770 on the HMS Endeavour, beer was amongst the cargo.
Breweries started popping up around Australia as soon as it was practical to do so - you know, once the natives had been suppressed and the settlers weren’t starving and whatnot - and continued throughout the 1800’s. One of those is Cascade Brewery, which opened in Tasmania in 1824 and is still operating today, making it the oldest continuously operating brewery in Australia.
I won’t go too far in the weeds of the happenings of the beer industry in Australia in the 20th century, because a) you probably don’t want me to, and b) it’s pretty simple in summary. It’s a tale of consolidation, localisation, and growth.
In the early 1900s, changes to taxes and other laws around beer caused many breweries to shut down. Some had to relocate to find success, like Castlemaine Brewery, which relocated from the state of Victoria to Queensland, where it now produces the unmistakably named XXXX Bitter (pronounced four X), a brand which has been extended into XXXX Gold, XXXX Dry, and as many other varieties as they can think up with four x’s tacked on the name.
It would be remiss of me if I mentioned XXXX without including its mascot, Mister Fourex. This smiling gentleman in the boater hat has been their mascot since 1924. He looks like a guy you would want to have promoting your beer, someone who’d be fun to go with down to the track and bet on the horses.
He also looks like a guy who you’d want to avoid in the latter hours of your office party when you catch him winking at you from across the room.
Some breweries didn’t move, but consolidated where they were at. Five breweries in Melbourne combined to become Carlton United Breweries, or C.U.B. They produce Carlton Draught and Victoria Bitter - better known as VB - and Fosters. Of course you’ve heard of Fosters, Australian for beer?
I remember drinking Fosters when I was much younger, and foolish. When it could be found in Iowa, Fosters was sold in an oversized steel can called an oil can, which was cool, exotic and rugged. You must build up a powerful thirst living in the outback and fighting crocs all day long, I assumed. In reality, the large can only meant that a reasonable portion of the beer would be as warm as bathwater by the time you got to the end, which is unacceptable, even for a 20-something.
In reality, while Fosters is the most widely distributed Australian beer internationally, it has never been more than a bit player in its homeland. When I first moved to Australia, you couldn’t even find it in the local bottle shop.
What was left after the relocations and consolidations was a much smaller pool of beers that were focused on owning the local beer drinkers. In addition to XXXX in Queensland and Victoria’s CUB beers, Sydney has Tooheys, Adelaide has Coopers, and Perth has Emu and Swan.
This follows the social norms that govern much of Australian life, from sport to food to coffee. Australians are very proud and very protective of their local favourites.
Those handful of local brews formed beer landscape until the 70’s and 80’s, only people were drinking a lot more of the stuff: At the time, Australia was amongst the top 5 countries in the world in terms of beer consumption per capita, at over 8 litres per person per year. The U.S., by comparison, was down near 15th in the world at around 5 litres per person.
Which brings us to today, and that consolidation has only continued. All of those once local beers, with the exception of Coopers, which is still majority owned by the Coopers family, are now brewed by one of two behemoth global companies: Asahi, which owns Carlton United Breweries, and Kirin, which owns the rest.
So it should have come as no surprise that when we first moved to Australia in 2010, the beer scene was a sea of sameness. There was a pub called the Corkman next door to the university where I was studying, and on tap they had both Boags, a Tasmanian staple, and Carlton Draught. Since both tasted the same, you’d get a pint of Boags, because it was cheaper than Carlton.
A Boags also tasted like VB which tasted like XXXX, and they all tasted pretty average and not in a good way, bubbly beer flavoured beverages that are immediately recognisable, no matter where you are from. Carlton Draught once used the slogan ‘Made from beer’, which aptly sums up Australian beer at that time.
I found this disappointing. In the couple of years before moving to Australia from Colorado in the U.S., craft beer was booming. I earned my beer drinking stripes on midwestern slop like Busch and Blatz and Milwaukees Best, but the pull of craft beer was strong in Colorado. The first one I can remember getting my hands on was New Belgium’s Fat Tire.
Fat Tire was, I think, a gateway beer that helped introduce many Americans to beer with more depth, more body, more flavour, and to the general idea that all beers didn’t have to be the same, didn’t have to be golden frothy lagers.
After going through a tasting paddle of Australian beer ephemera that, based on the beers involved, may have given you a bit of a headache, we finally find ourselves back at Little Creatures. Like Fat Tire was for Americans, there’s a good chance Little Creatures Pale Ale was that gateway beer for many Australians.
Little Creatures is legendary in that respect, that it was one of the earliest craft beers in Australia, and of course we would want to go visit the home of a legend. If it meant that we could steal a couple of hours away from the boys, something they were more than happy to oblige, that was a bonus.
To get there, we had to walk through a part of Perth called Fremantle, commonly known as Freo.
The walk was interesting - North Freo leading down into Freo proper before you get to the CBD is a mixed bag of gentrification, hard working port (the cargo ships docked were enormous), riverfront, and pretty ordinary shopfronts, including the local mission. The scrabbly stuff looks like it is from the 70’s, and is tired out. Unpleasant to look at, surrounded by concrete and road. I guess I didn’t expect it to be so diverse.
The older part of Freo, however, is lovely. You could easily be in Melbourne based on the 100-ish year old character of the buildings, the narrow, cozy streets. Then you pop out of the densely packed civilisation and into a lovely park on the foreshore, with huge trees, some of which are those bottle brush pine trees that remind me of Sydney. Off to the right a bit further down the waterfront is a restaurant with an Italian name that was lit up like Las Vegas on a Saturday.
Crossing the close cut grass, which looks like it may have been resodded recently, Little Creatures looms in front of you.
The brewery is situated on Success Harbour, but it wasn’t always full of bright lights, tourists, and a bloody ferris wheel. The shed which now houses the Little Creatures Brewery was home to a crocodile farm in the late 90’s when Phil Sexton and two mates got together to start the business. I have no doubt that this was not the first Australian business started in a former crocodile farm, but I digress.
The idea was simple: Phil wanted to brew a hoppy pale ale in Australia that was similar to some he’d had during a trip to the U.S. Phil was an experienced brewer and really the only person of consequence to the story. The other founders were a marketer and a guy handling who knows what, and that’s the point - do you really want to hear about the marketing guy and the guy running the spreadsheets?
Phil had worked at Swan Brewing in the early 80’s, and then quit to kick around in craft brewing in the mid-80’s, starting the then ahead of its time Matilda Bay Brewing.
The timing was right at Little Creatures, though, when they opened the doors in 2000. Things did start slowly at first, and the team found itself having celebrations when they sold a single pallet of beer in a week. But by 2005 demand was so high that they had to expand the brewery, and they’ve only continued to grow from there.
The beer Phil created, the Little Creatures Pale Ale, is simple, and the hoppiness that must have seemed bold 20 years ago has long been eclipsed by the bigger-flavoured india pale ales that breweries are putting out today. But there is beauty in the simplicity, it is tasty and refreshing without punching you in the mouth. A beer you don’t have to think about, you can just enjoy.
The brewery, however, was as bland as a 70’s lager brewed in a giant factory owned by someone far far away. If Disney were to put a brewery at one of its theme parks, Little Creatures would not be far off what it would look like. ‘Look kids, giant stainless steel tanks! Barrels stacked to the roof! Chairs made out of brew kegs!’
‘Here we are, with the rest of the tourists,’ I said to Katie, and sure enough I was right. It wasn’t all strangers from strange lands, but lots of them were. And Little Creatures spared no expense at giving us all a right fine time, devoid of any interest or character that might be unappealing to the masses.
Nonetheless, getting out together, to a restaurant amongst throngs of people, was interesting enough, a wonderful change of pace for Katie and I, and unique because of its infrequency.
It’s something that hadn’t often happened during the two months we’d been on the road, and while we were a bit lost on all the niceties of being a couple out on the town, we figured it out and had a good time. I should say, we had a good time despite Little Creatures.
I remember leaving a Google review for the place after we left, and it went something along the lines of this: ‘The beer was good, the food was fine, the service was fine. But you could have been anywhere in Perth that served food and beer’.
I don’t know that I should have been surprised at the blandness of the place, however. Kirin bought out Little Creatures in 2012.
Kirin has since then also bought out New Belgium Brewing, the maker of my beloved Fat Tire. So now it owns not only the beers of our youth, but the beers we once thought were the future.
We took an Uber home, I drank another beer that I didn’t need, ate some snacks I didn’t need, and went to bed. Not sure how I feel about drinking a beer in bed - relaxing reward after a long day (and this had been one) or an unnecessary expense and sign that you drink a bit too much and deserve a gouty toe for the effort?
In my next letter, I’ll stave off gout and hopefully a bit of scurvy, as we hop a boat for the most rotten island in Australia.