Verdant Gardens

Another new Verdant beer sampled at the weekend, this time something called "There is a Garden Within Me", in what I reckon is one of the best looking cans I've seen for ages. This brew certainly has a lot going on, the hops are NZH-101, Krush and Galaxy giving limey, tropical and dank characters to the beer in that order and the Verdant house yeast has worked it's magic along with the customary haze, a near perfect hazy IPA, great work!

Oktoberfest Memories

It was about this time last year that we headed over to Germany to Berlin and Munich where we attended the official Oktoberfest beer festival. It was a hoot, very enjoyable, I think my favourite beer was the Augustiner but the picture above lists all six of the official Oktoberfest beers/producers, I can't get to Munich this year but perhaps I'll be lucky enough to try some of the these beers in London somewhere over the next few weeks, there seem to be plenty of Oktoberfest-like events going on in the capital to choose from!

The real thing (pictured above) in the Augustiner tent, just look how crowded it is, and we went on a Sunday!

Asian & Antipodean Adventures - VIII

 

Lots of wine and beer options in Perth, we found quite a few craft beer places and some nice restaurants, in fact literally across the road from our hotel in Elizabeth Quay was the taproom for Little Creatures Brewing (see below) LCB are quite well known, we even had their beer in Singapore, it was a nice taproom but absolutely rammed and very noisy, obviously very popular with the "after work" crowd since it was right in the heart of the CBD or Central Business District. 

Our favourite bar however was down the street a little, in fact it was a complex of bars, restaurants and coffee shops called "State Buildings", inside was a craft beer bar called "Beer Corner" which was great. There was also a nice restaurant called "Petition" where I managed to snag a bottle of Vasse Felix single plot Cabernet (see above) delicious wine, real balance for such a hot climate.

In the Beer Corner they had a very wide range of brews on offer, they even had a beer from Verdant (Cornwall) called "Lightbulb" one of my all time favourite pale ales, I was shocked (and excited) to find it so far from home! Anyway, there were some really good local options too, some real haze bombs (which I love) I snapped a picture of one (see below) called "Drift" by a Perth based brewery called "Venom Brewing", a really nice beer as good as any you'd find in the UK or USA.

They even had a UK bitter available from Harveys (Lewes) called "Sussex Best", quite amazing, I snapped a picture of their beer board for posterity (see below)

We found Perth to be a very "liveable" city, everything seemed handy, good public transport, great beaches (if you can avoid the sharks!) and some fantastic properties along the Swan River. On our last day there we took a long (10km) walk around "Perth Water" which is a wide section of the river right in front of the CBD, it was lovely, sunny and warm with a nice stop for lunch about half way around. We even saw dolphins frolicking in the river as we walked along the bank, very convivial. (I took a rather poor video of them, see below, you can just about make out one of the dolphins in the pod tossing a dead fish around)

Eventually all good things must come to an end and our time in Perth ran out, we jumped in an Uber and headed back to the airport our next destination Singapore for a rendezvous with our globe trotting offspring and a birthday celebration, more about that in my last installment!

Sunday Smile

 Well, Jimmy has fallen quite far from the Bronski Beat days..

World Beating

A new Verdant beer to try, always an exciting time round our way, I even hosted it in a new glass gifted to me by my Son and his Girlfriend from their recent trip to Vietnam, 7Bridges is a brewery based in Da Nang and have taprooms throughout the country. The beer was delicious a 4% pale ale with Citra and Nectaron hops, tropical, citrus and pine were my take-aways, presented with the characteristic murk from all the oats and flaked wheat that the Verdant guys use, having recently sampled some top ales in Asia and Australia this one is easily up there with them if not a nose or two in front, a world beater.

Friday Smirk

The boys this week talking about making use of religious spaces for other things. Sounds like a good idea to me, might as well use them for something useful before they are re-absorbed by nature and crumble away.

Hops of my dreams?

While out for my daily walk today I came across these fellas. I had to do a double-take, but yep, they're wild hops! I grabbed a couple of cones and sniffed them, the yellow lupulin glands were there but I don't think they were quite ripe just yet. Still, they smelt like hops, slightly citrus, earthy with some kind of spice edge I couldn't quite place. Fascinating, I wonder how they got there? Maybe I should harvest them and make a beer, perhaps they're some new hybrid that's going to take the beer world by storm and I'll make a fortune, or maybe not..

Asian & Antipodean Adventures - VII

 

Having used up our time in Melbourne we hopped on a flight to Perth WA, it's a longer flight than I thought, I snapped the picture of the seat-back screen I was watching (above), about half way across the Great Australian Bight, overall the flight  took around three and a half hours. I hadn't realised before we went there but Perth is one of the most isolated capital cities in the world, it's nearest large city is Adelaide over 1300 miles away, only Honolulu is more physically isolated but isn't as remote if you look at the sheer distance-to-population ratio.

We took a few trips from Perth, one of them was out to a place called "Caversham" (I guess named after the place near where we live in Berkshire) There we visited a wildlife park, my wife is very keen on Koala Bears, having held on at a park in Queensland back in 1998, so we had to see some Koalas. Fortunately the park had loads of them and uber-cute they were too! I snapped quite a few pictures while we were there but I think the one below captures the lazy-life of this popular marsupial, it's food is do energy poor that it has to sleep around 20 hours per day (a bit like Human teenagers then?)

We saw quite a few other Australian critters while at the park, the picture below shows a Kangaroo mum, you can just about see the joey (and its long legs!) in her pouch..

One of the rarer and more elusive of the mammals that we saw was a Red Tree Kangaroo, I hadn't even known such a thing existed but there it was, climbing up and down the trees. The light seemed to catch the fur at the edges and illuminate the hairs so that it looks like the animal was photoshopped onto the scene, but I can assure you it's real! (see below)

There were a ton of other interesting animals to be seen so I've assembled this little collage (below) to summarize them, it was a great day out at the park and at the end we hailed an Uber to take us back to our hotel for a quick shower before heading out to our adopted beer bar for a cold one and a bite to eat.

While in Perth we also took the ferry up the Swan River to Freemantle, originally a separate community it's now been absorbed into greater Perth but it still has a very "Victorian" colonial character, home to the major container port for the area it's also an education hub with a couple of universities located there. I also managed to find a little craft beer spot to sample a couple of brews while waiting for the return ferry.

In Freemantle there's a really good Maritime Museum, we spent a good hour wandering around that looking at the exhibits, everything from immigration to fishing to whaling as well as some cultural artifacts from the original inhabitants through to the Americas Cup winner as well as more recent waves of arrivals from Europe, Asia and Africa, it was an interesting place that covered a lot of ground. I snapped one of the buildings on the high street in Freemantle, I don't think I ever saw a more Victorian/Australian looking building (below).

There was quite a good craft beer scene in Perth as well as some stunning wines from the Margaret River area which is a couple of hundred miles to the south of the city, more about that in the next part.