Congratulations Lauren Riga, you are coming to Byron next year to brew your ‘Leatherwood Chai Cream Ale’ for the 2019 GABS!

This year at the festival we invited our drinkers to come and touch, taste, smell and explore what goes into our beers, then come up with their dream beer.

We loved Lauren’s entry that balanced earthy flavours with the additions of chai and turmeric spices and leatherwood with a clean refreshing finish. She also added in that proceeds from the beer are to go to marine protection, so we will donate all money from the sale of her beer in the tasting room to a marine focused Aussie not for profit.

We’ll be flying Lauren up to sunny Byron Bay to hang out with the crew, spend a couple of days enjoying the Northern Rivers lifestyle and of course, brew her beer which will be tapped at next year’s GABS!

Congrats, we can’t wait to hang out and make some spiced chai magic!

A massive cheers to everyone that came to our stall at GABS Melbourne and Sydney and got involved in our Brewstorm competition – your enthusiasm for good beer is incredible!

If you were to graph a drinker’s growing love of good beer, their interest in the quality of that beer would be directly proportional. That’s because quality matters!

With you in mind, we’ve started stamping the ‘Packed Date’ (PKD), in addition to the ‘Best Before Date’ (BBD) on our bottles. With different breweries using different time frames for BBD and the rising interest in seeking out fresh beer, we’re keen to provide transparency.

The PKD stamp is one small step of many that we take to ensure our drinkers and customers are receiving our beer in the best condition and the information is accessible. From raw materials to final finished goods, we do rigorous testing with over 300 touch-points to monitory quality inside the brewery. We also do ongoing sensory testing. By regularly tasting the beers in sensory sessions (and Friday knock-offs!) we are able to monitor how the beer is handling the ageing process from PKD to BBD.

Beyond our brewery walls, our focus on quality continues by actively managing stock in trade by partnering with logistics partners, wholesalers and customers. We also have a sales team and national trade technician who regularly hold quality training sessions and are educated on how to trouble shoot in venues.

Through our testing and monitoring processes, we are confident and proud to stand behind our beers, knowing that those within that date range are fresh and tasting good.

For us, quality is key and we’re hopeful that more breweries in the industry will adopt this measure to ensure drinkers can be informed, confident, and stoked with their beer purchase.

Cheers