The Great SpecTAPular 2011 Aftermath

Well well well.

So concludes another installment of The Local Taphouse's Great SpecTAPular, and what a wonderful day it was.

For the folks upstairs Mother Nature provided some very pleasant weather for enjoying the craftiest of the craft beers, and the most micro of the microbrewed beers on a sunny rooftop garden that Australia has to offer.

For the folks downstairs, well it was still good but it doesn't include the features of the aforementioned beer garden. Mainly because the downstairs bar hasn't got a beer garden. Forget it.

It was a great way to enjoy some classy brews.

The downstairs bar had more Aussie than... something like...  never mind, but it had a great deal of Aussie.

Most of the hundreds that attended had the interest and level of appreciation to grab a paddle and sample at least the majority of the beers that was on offer.

After I had finished the 19 samples on offer I did have a certain level of satisfaction, but also I was amazed by the overall quality of every entry.

There were some styles that were entered by the breweries that I don't particularly show an interest in (namely the wits and lagers) that I thought were very good. The Otway Organic Blueberry Hefeweizen was a particular joy that I wasn't expecting due to my staunch prejudices.

The Kooinda Raspberry Wit was another pleasant experience for a style I wasn't overly excited by.

Enough opinion for now, there will be a little bit more of that later on.

In attendance were a lot of the head brewers (as expected) from the breweries that submitted entries to this wonderful event and due to the educated crowd these figures were recognized and had praise heaped upon them for their wonderful work.

This created something of a "rock star" element to the event that was unexpectedly exciting, but it was nice to see that interaction with the punters.

Also noticeably present was The Crafty Pint who was travelling with a camera man and conducting filmed interviews with some of the brewers when he could find the requisite space in the excessively busy top floor of the Taphouse. This suggests a new feature that might be added to The Crafty Pint website, and what a wonderful new addition this would be.

Winners of the night, in the humblest of my opinion, were the 4 Pines Wee Heavy strong scotch ale and Murray's Imperious Belgian blonde ale which were both just fantastic. Oh, so good.

I've just lost my train of thought when I think back to how good those two beers were.

It will be interesting to see which if these get picked up as seasonal releases for the breweries so we can enjoy them continuously. One that I wouldn't mind being turned into a seasonal is Fanny Gertrude's Anzac Bickie Beer from the Burleigh Brewing Co. Initially, when I found out that this was on the list for the event I thought it might be a little bit of a novelty, but upon tasting it I realized that it was a genuinely lovely tasting beer. The Anzac biscuit flavour was clearly there but it's a smooth, clean ale that is strangely sessionable.

Okay, you people aren't interested in hearing more of my boring opinions and beer evaluations, so this me signing off.

I believe we'll hear more about The Great SpecTAPular from Rian shortly.

*waits expectantly*