Drinking on the Gold Coast of Australia
The Gold Coast, or Goldie as we Australians like to call it has since about the 1960's been a tourist hotspot, it's just south of Brisbane, on the coast, it is a thin strip of houses between 'the hjinterland (read hill) and the east coast surf beaches.
It's generally warm, in the 1980's it got all of the warm tourist area cliches, Old retirees, bowling clubs, theme parks, cheap motels, caravan parks and family holidays, and cheap yellow mid strength beer.
This has of course changed over 30 years, the 80's retro is now cool, they have pushed it in a Palm Springs direction (Maybe America's 1950's was Australia's 1980's) They have a (almost) world class modern art mueseum, a thousand cafes, and one of the better craft beer scenes in Australia.
So come with me as I spend 4 days on the Goldie, doing lots of things, but including visiting some breweries...
Let's start as we did at Lost Palm's Brewery - this is probably by favourite brewing, and the one pushing the boundaries the most. it is a pretty standard factory, but painted as if we are in Miami, which we are by the way, there is a Miami on the Gold Coast, and that Truck looks like it could be out of the US as well.
This is a great little brewery, stainless steel tanks in the back, behind a huge roller-door seats inside at the Front, that I'm sure used to be the office, bar in the middle, but the real back to sit and drink is in the driveway, under an umbrella, particularly good on a warm night.
And this beer was the highlight, the Triple IPA (all the goodness of an IPA but tripled) and with my favourite hop - Citra, and because we are at the brewery it's so fresh and juicy and amazing.
Brewery Two is a little bit different, we are inland, as inland as the Gold Coast gets, which means about 4km from the beach, we are in a fancy, quite large open room, it was likely meant to be a shop or showroom for something like a carpet retailer or maybe an Autobahn or something, it's next to a petrol station. But inside it's all brewery, tanks down on side, tables everywhere, function room to the side, this place is huge - it could seat 300 hundred people maybe and the beer line-up is almost a big.
The Brewery is called Burleigh Barrels, which is a little confusing as there is already and better known brewery called Burleigh brewing so when I talked about this with people they assumed it was a barrel aged program for them. But No this is a completely sperate brewery in the suburb of Burleigh and the barrels refer to waves not the wooden variety
With a beer list that long it was obviously paddle time - this is how to drink 8 of their beers and get a real sense of what they were doing. And what they are doing is producing some pretty darn good beer. The highlight and Raspberry and Mandarian sour, which suited the weather and the time of day - lunchtime and I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt - does it get any better than that.
And then our final brewery on our final day, and in fact in our final hours on the Gold Cast, we had had lunch it was a Monday afternoon and two hours until we needed to be at the airport so why not spend some time having a quick beer at the local brewing.
This is another brewery which is in and old mechanics workshop, again it's pretty large, although being a Monday Afternoon there are only about 5 people in here, We only have time for one round - plus I have to drive the car back to the airport so, you know being responsible and all we order up a Sour Hazy Pale Ale and a Smashed Berry Sour. Now the first of these could just be called 'all the hot right now styles in one beer' but weirdly it actually works, it's unusual but it's also enjoyable and weirdly suited to drinking on in the mid afternoon when you would otherwise be at work.
So people, if you find yourself on the Gold Coast, and you probably should because it's a good place for a relaxed easy getaway then those are three breweries to try, probs also give Black Hops a run as well, we didn't make it on this trip, but it is a bit of a favourite from early sojourns.