Turning heads

A beer-brewer’s life is a bit more complex than sitting around and tasting a few different drops.

Story + Photo Ken Eastwood

Mike Colman reckons one of the most important roles he has as a brewer is educating people about beer. “Beer is as diverse as you can imagine,” he says. “Yet, in Australia, we have been pushed by the industrial revolution to a variety that is the cheapest to make. Lager beer is the ‘square loaf white bread’ of beer – it uses the least amount of ingredients and has had a big role in people saying, ‘I don’t like beer’, because they’ve never seen anything different. They’ve probably never seen a hoppy beer or a German lager. Often people’s whole experience of beer is smashing schooners at a pub – it’s not about flavour.”

So, every Saturday, Mike will be found in his two-year-old Bulla Creek brewery, between Young and Grenfell in central NSW, chatting to the public about everything from the huge foreign beer duopoly (“90% of all draught beer sold in Australia is from either Asahi or Kirin”) through to specifics on individual recipes with “beer nerds”. “People just want to talk. Beer nerds want to talk about the process, the hops, what sort of temperatures.

“We’re trying to give people a whole experience and a whole learning, convincing people that craft beer isn’t weird, it’s just variety and choice,” he says, referencing how the wine industry has done a good job at similar education. “People don’t usually think of beer as an agricultural product – they think of it as an industrial product. But historically, it related to the end of harvest, when you had an excess of grain. What we push here is seasonality, so in the hop harvest we have lots of hoppy beers, in winter we have darker beers, in the summer we have lighter beers, and then around Oktoberfest, we’ll have German lagers.”