It’s time for Newcastle to celebrate, educate and enjoy everything good about good beer. And we’ll be there to help out. What used to be a stand-alone festival at Warners At The Bay over the last five years has evolved into Newcastle Craft Beer Week. Stretching between November 21-27, all the best beer venues around the Steel City will be busy hosting dinners, masterclasses, pub crawls and even a few lessons on cooking with beer with Paul Mercurio. Brad will be at the Craft Beer Dinner at the Albion Hotel on Thursday night and we’ll also be pouring beers at Warners At The Bay on Sunday from 12pm. For information on tickets, click here. We’re really looking forward to this one, see you there.

The teams at Harvest Café and Stone & Wood Brewery have come up with an exciting way to indulge in the amazing local food and beer from our region. The wood fired stove will be cranking out fresh bread and a suckling pig, which together with local cheeses and salami will be matched by three Stone & Wood brews, including the last of this year’s hard-to-find Stone Beer. There will also be tunes by Black Billy Goat, so book now for what will be a great way to spend Sunday afternoon at Harvest Café, Newrybar, starting at 2.30pm. Tickets $60 per person.

We’re stoked to be hosting the opening event for the inaugural Byron Bay Surf Festival.

Legendary surfer Bob McTavish will be kicking things off with some photos and stories from when he first discovered Byron in the ’60s. He’ll be doing some live shaping too. Then it’s bands The Haldanes Daughters (led by former pro-surfer Neil Purchase Jnr) and The Otchkies providing tunes for the rest of the night. Plus wood-fired pizzas and lashings of fresh beer for all!

Entry is free and everyone, including children, are more than welcome.

A bit more info from the Byron Bay Surf Festival press release…

“Bob McTavish, truly one of international surfing’s most influential thinkers and presenters, kicks off the festival on Friday night at the Stone and Wood Brewery where he will not only demonstrate some of the sport’s most forward thinking board shaping ideas (with a live demonstration) but he will shoot the breeze with the audience spinning hilarious yarns about the earliest days of modern surfing in Australia (the 1960s) and how he, along with other surfers, brought their beliefs and lifestyles to beautiful but quiet and conservative country towns like Byron Bay and Lennox Head. Bob’s story about his first trip to Hawaii (where he and his mate stowed away on a passenger vessel) and his ensuing run-in with the Hawaiian authorities paints an interesting picture of where many of our surfing legends started their careers in the public eye! Anyone who has seen one of Bob’s presentations will vouch for the fact that this is not an evening to be missed.”

Rolling out our Stone Beer every year is always cause for celebration. We have a lot of fun brewing it, but we also think it’s important to have some fun when the medieval brew is ready to drink. We’ve always celebrated tapping the first Stone Beer kegs with a party at the brewery, but this year we’ve decided to expand.

Festival Of The Stone is going down on July 23 from 3pm till 11pm. There’ll be music (four bands) food (wood-fired pizzas plus Stone Beer sausages from the local butcher) pop-up market stores and a preview of the beautiful surf film “El Mar Mi Alma”. Oh yeah and plenty of fresh beer. Entry is $10, which gets you a Stone Beer, and you can buy tickets here or at the gate on the day.

We’re planning on taking the Festival on the road this year too, so stand by for some news about a Melbourne event soon!

Yes, there is such a thing as Good Beer Week, and we’re heading to down to Melbourne to be part of the action. The whole week is chock a block full of events that all pay homage to good beer.

We’ll be involved in a number of events such as Brewers and Chewers at The Local Taphouse in St Kilda, Happy Hour at The Courthouse Hotel in Nth Melbourne with the crazy guys from Elbowskin, the Hair of the Dog breakfast at Beer Deluxe at Fed Square with the guys at beermentv, and the Great Beer Debate at Ormond Hall on St Kilda Road.

During the week a special release of our Kellerbier will also be on tap at the Terminus Hotel in Clifton Hill and the Royston in Richmond.

It’s certainly going to be a big week, so if you are going to be in Melbourne, get along to some of the events and enjoy some good beer.

We hope to see you there and share a brew with you.

Cheers