Good Beer Week 2015: Brews storm to new status

Move over wine, beer is here. It's wild, hoppy, malty, and barrel-aged, and it's often made by brewers with a winemaking background. Good Beer Week toasts the triumphant amber.

It's enough to make you spit out your shiraz. A quick flick through the program for Good Beer Week reveals an event of remarkable sophistication: there are dinners, tastings and talks, there are events devoted to barrel-aging, to high-quality local ingredients and to the best-quality products from around the world. If it wasn't for that word "beer" you might think this was a wine festival. But then again, some would argue the world of wine hasn't demonstrated this much energy in many, many years.

The truth is that beer is stealing wine's clothes. A drink once regarded as good only for refreshment is now the darling of the flavour-focused gourmet set, increasingly at home in the world's best restaurants and treated with the sort of reverence normally afforded to dusty bottles of French red. Even Michelin, gatekeepers of culinary high culture, know what's going on: a beer-only restaurant in Brooklyn called Luksus has been handed a coveted star. It's the first to receive such an honour; it's unlikely to be the last.

Indeed, were it not for Michelin's northern hemisphere focus, the next might be in Melbourne. A remarkable cast of restaurants has lined up to take part in Good Beer Week (May 16-24) including Vue de Monde, Green Park, Saint Crispin and Woodland House. Barely a world cuisine has been left out, either, with Vietnamese, Indian, German, Belgian and French food - among many others - on the menu. This range demonstrates an increasingly widely accepted reality: beer's diversity and complexity makes it a perfect partner for grub of all kinds.

Perhaps in that respect it's even better than wine. Few understand both drinks better than James Booth, winemaker at Taminick Cellars and brewer at Black Dog in north-east Victoria. He's been running Hop vs Grape as part of Good Beer Week for four years, during which five beers and wines - all made by him - are paired with food produced by chef Adam Pizzini of Rinaldo's Casa Cucina. It has taught him something about the two drinks' suitability for the table.

"Beer probably matches to food with a lot more versatility," Booth says. "Spicy food is very hard for wine, for example - there's so many options for beer." It's not just Booth who believes beer does the better job. His punters, many of them wine lovers, do too. "As part of the dinner, we get people to vote for whatever they think is better," he says. "The first three years wine triumphed, perhaps because we get quite a few wine drinkers coming along, but last year beer came out on top."

Not only does beer go with food, but it often goes in it, too. One of the central events of Good Beer Week is Mega Dega 3, which brings together a collection of Australia's brightest chefs and some of the craft-beer world's most exciting breweries. This year the (long sold-out) six-course event takes place at Green Park in Brunswick, where chef Jesse Gerner (also of Bomba and Anada) is co-owner. He's enjoyed experimenting with beer in food, he says. "It's been great playing around and seeing what works. The big hoppy beers don't work as well, you just end up with too much bitterness."

Gerner will be using a farmhouse ale from Texan brewery Jester King for his course, the canapes. Farmhouse ales (saisons and bieres de garde) hail from French-speaking Belgium and northern France, but their popularity has spread across the beer-drinking world due to their complexity and versatility. One of Australian brewing's rising stars, La Sirene of Alphington, focuses on this style of beer specifically because it works so well with food.

While acknowledging wine's "fantastic mouthfeel, warming alcohol, tannins, fruit esters, earthiness and savouriness", Costa Nikias of La Sirene says beer offers more, and saison most of all. "We are always looking for opportunities to extract food-pairing components," he says. "We aim to have this play-off in our flavour profile between warming alcohol, defined bitterness, funky yeast characters, high fruit tones and a dry, austere finish."

But it's not just about food. In terms of technique, beer is learning from the world of wine - it's no surprise, as Booth says, that so many of today's top brewers (such as Jayne Lewis of Two Birds, Brad Rogers of Stone and Wood and Ben Kraus of Bridge Road) have a background in winemaking. Booth says his brewing has been influenced by how he makes wine. "In my earlier days [as a winemaker], I used to get most of the fermentation done and then transfer into a barrel. But after speaking to winemakers, I started to get it in there earlier; this means you get different reactions going on, more melded flavours. That's how I approach my beers."

The rise of barrel-ageing has gone hand in hand with the growing popularity of beers to be laid down. Some the world's most coveted beers comes from the Senne Valley in and around Brussels in Belgium, where Lambic​ brewers use wild yeast to ferment ales that can develop for many years. In London, the venerable Fuller's Brewery have been producing Vintage Ales since the late 1990s, and these beers can stand up to 10 years and more of careful storage. It's a new way to look at beer.

But what about terroir, so often the crucial selling point for wine? How can beer - which might be made with European malt, American hops and Australian water - express a place? It's a fair point, but even here brewers have been learning from wine. The example of those Lambic​ brewers - such as Cantillon, based in Brussels - has inspired brewers around the world to play with wild yeast, which floats on the air. What could be more "local" than that?

And then there's hops, the new grapes. Australia's hop industry is going gangbusters, so much so that Hop Products Australia has recently invested $15 million to increase production by 50 per cent. America, in particular, wants Australian beers made with Aussie hops. "It's really exciting," says Ben Kraus​ of Bridge Road Brewers. "We've spoken to guys in the US a number of times and they've wanted to get some craft beer, but the story was often weak. Who wants an Australian craft beer that's like an American craft beer? We've got these [new hop] varieties now, and it's a new story. Australian beer made with Australian hops."

Does beer really need to be like wine, though? Plenty of people think all this is pretentious. Isn't there something to be said for the good, old-fashioned, cold glass of beer? Well, you can have both, as Mark Dredge, author of Beer And Food, says. "If you want to go to the pub and have four pints of good, clean lager you can do that, but you can then come home and have a piece of cheese with a 10 per cent barrel-aged stout. That's going to work really well too," he says.

It's a good point. Beer can do what wine does (and it still has plenty to learn; the industry is overly male-heavy, for example), but that doesn't mean it has to stop doing what it's done so well for so many years. "Beer can be a great palate cleanser as well as really complex," says Gerner. "It's not the same as wine; it's more casual." We can all raise a glass to that, be it shiraz or saison.

Celebrity brewers

It used to be simple: you'd order a beer, it would taste the same as the one you had last week/year/decade, and who cared who made it? Things have changed. Beer is now hugely diverse, and punters are increasingly interested in who makes their beer. Welcome to the era of the celebrity brewer! Here are three global names to look out for at Good Beer Week:

Logan Plant

The man behind London's Beavertown Brewery, Plant has the infuriating ability to be both the best-looking (he's a former model) and the friendliest (he grew up in the down-to-earth English West Midlands) bloke in the room. His beers are American-influenced: Gamma Ray, Beavertown's flagship beer, is a hugely tropical US-style pale ale. (It's obligatory to mention here that his dad is Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame).

Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso

Co-owner of Torst and Luksus in Brooklyn, Dane Bjergso is one of the beer world's most interesting characters. He's said to have a bitter rivalry with his brother Mikkel Borg Bjergso, the man behind Danish brewery Mikkeller, although not everyone is convinced (it makes for good copy, though). His brewery, Evil Twin, does not actually own a brewing site. It doesn't seem to matter: the beer is generally excellent.

Leonardo Di Vicenzo​

One of the flag-bearers for the Italian beer revolution, Di Vicenzo is the man behind Birra Del Borgo, to the north-east of Rome. He has a long relationship with Australia, which has culminated in Nomad, a brewery north of Sydney, that makes beers that are intrinsically Australian as those of Birra del Borgo are Italian. Like all the the best Italian breweries, BdB's beers are designed to go with food.

Five events not to miss

1. Evil Twin Tap Takeover (Free, Sat, 16-Sun, 24, Cookie, Level 1 Curtin House 252 Swanston Street, cookie.net.au) Find out if Evil Twin's beer lives up to its billing. Eight taps all week.

2. Tonka and Mornington Peninsula Brewery Dinner ($120, Mon, 18, 20 Duckboard Place, tonkarestaurant.com.au) Find out just how well Indian food goes with beer.

3. Brewers & Chewers ($95, Wed 20, Local Taphouse, 184 Carlisle Street, St. Kilda East, thelocal.com.au) A mix of meet the brewer, speed dating and of course, beer drinking. Featuring (among others) Modus Operandi, one of Australia's most highly-rated new breweries.

4. To Drink a Mockingbird ($150, Wed 20, Saint Crispin, 300 Smith Street Collingwood, saintcrispin.com.au) Quality contemporary cooking matched to excellent beer from 3 Ravens and Mash Brewing.

5. Great Australian Beer SpecTAPular ($35, Fri, 22-Sun, 24, Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton, gabsfestival.com.au). More than 300 beers, including some interesting offerings from overseas, such as Baird from Japan, Deschutes from the US and Beavertown from Britain.