Inaugural

As you may or may not know – and hopefully you may – Australia is about to break the champagne bottle – irony! – on its inaugural Good Beer Week, a week-long celebration of mostly Australian but also international craft beer. At the epicentre is the city of Melbourne, which we personally are fortunate to call our home. For Good Beer Week, its craft-beer-friendly venues and stores are hosting a great variety of dinners, tastings, beer launches, and even a debate, each day from Monday May the 16th to Sunday the 22nd.

Were you to know our faces, you may vaguely recall seeing us floating around some of Melbourne's craft beer events over the past year or so, and we have to say how proud we are to see a real surge towards craft beer in Australia, and Melbourne especially, and away from, well, you know... We could rant about the quality of the mass-produced and consumed lagers in this country and about the brand loyalty, but chances are you know what we're talking about and spouting negativity is something we'd like to stay away from. (At least until we can stand it, and even in the case of the beer excise, a reduction and/or remodelling of which we fully support.) Anyway, it's an exciting time to be a beer lover in Melbourne, and we'd like to talk about it a little please.

And so, with Good Beer Week fast approaching, tickets purchased and otherwise organised, what better time to get started? We're also hoping to pull some Sydney-siders into our orbit to talk about the 'Meet the Yeastie Boys' event at the Darlo Taphouse. (Which they better go to, dammit!)

To start with, we'd like to introduce ourselves, which we'll do over the next week; Nathan will be playing with the layout and design to make it more pleasant for our and your eye-holes; and then we'll blog our experiences and thoughts of Good Beer Week and see if anyone finds it interesting.

So, hello. Nice to meet you.