As far as beer landscapes go, no other country on the planet has the variety of the US. After industrializing the industry and virtually exterminating every style of beer, except for light golden lagers, the American craft beer scene has made up for this atrocity in recent years by leading a revival in handcrafted brewing that has spread around the globe.
It’s been a while since we’ve been able to get away from the brewery, let alone make it overseas, but the 2012 World Beer Cup (held in San Diego, California) seemed like a good enough excuse for Brad and Ross to pull out the passport and go visit our Yankee brothers and sisters.
Brad reckons the scene over there is still as crazy as ever. It’s still full of crazy beers that sit somewhere between absurd and ridiculous levels of bitterness, but the beers are also becoming more balanced and drinkable. Australia makes more approachable beers though.
The biggest change he noted since his last visit, which was a few years ago now, was the amount of sour beers and barrel-aged brews around the place. Every brewery that they walked into had barrels of some description. The Australian scene is catching up very quickly though, and the gap between both countries is certainly narrowing.
As we know the US is in such financial trouble, but incredibly, it doesn’t look like the craft beer scene has been affected at all.
As well as bringing home a bag full of brews for us to sample (we hope), the guys had to make room for a silver medal that our Pacific Ale won at the awards.
That’s a little humbling for us as we put our toe into the water of the awards world with Pacific Ale, based on there being a class that it sort of fitted into, being English Summer Ales. It wasn’t a neat fit, but we gave it a go to see how the judges would view it. Winning a silver medal was just amazing.
Since the win on the weekend we’ve had lots of comments from Pacific Ale fans that are happy that their love of our beer has been validated.
That’s a great thing in itself.














