Hepburn Springs Brewing - Victoria, Australia

Hepburn Springs is a town about a hour and a half North west of Melbourne, Australia, it is traditionally known for it's mineral springs - hence the name. But that is not the sort of liquid I'm interested in, rather I sort out the local brewery.

This is not your normal craft brewery either, one of the things I find odd about breweries which are mean to be localised and individual is how alike they all are, most have the same asethic, sort of a industrial hipster cool, this brewery is absolutely not that.

It's in a house for starters, a pretty regular suburban house, you walk in through a front door which is house like and down a hallway to the bar area at the back which clearly used to be someone's kitchen and dining room. We were greeted by the lovely owners (husband and wife team of course) and had everything explained to us, we had 14 beers to choose from and yes they did tasting paddles, so obviously it was two tasting paddles for us (so eight different beers), we where then told we could sit anywhere, including these side rooms, that I imagine we the kid bedrooms at some point. Also If my parents had turned my bedroom into a bar and craft brewery after I'd left home, well I probably would have promptly moved back in.

The odd side room that we would no kings of, also everything in this room was for sale, it was a very good brewery/terrible gift shop

So we sat back, soaked up the free internet (we hadn't had internet where we were staying) and slowly spent the afternoon drinking, beer after beer.

Always nice to keep an eye on the car whilst drinking

But enough of the the oddity of the establishment, and how much I enjoy wasting an afternoon slowly drinking beer and talking crap. What were the beers like.

Well firstly these had 14 beers on, and this is weird for a Aussie craft brewer, not a single IPA, not even a pale ale I think. It was all traditional styles which is ambitious, but I like. In fact this brewery did win 'Champion Pilsener' and the Australian Beer awards. Now I'm not usually a pilsner fan, but when they are done right they are really good and this one was done right.

The second interesting thing - Have a look closely at the photos of the beers above, what if I told you there is both a red ale and a stout in there.

In fact this is the stout...

I can tell you it tasted like a stout, and the brown ale tasted like a brown ale, but they seem to have a amazing ability to make beers that don't look like how they should but taste like they do, and it's not like this is their gimmick it's not mentioned anywhere in the descriptions, it just is - weird.

THe highlight though was the Dubbel and the Tripel which where both excellent, I guess it's not suprising given this is a brewery that is clearly focused on tradtional styles so of course these was going to be the standouts.

So another lovely afternoon spent in the country.