The Brew in Review Crew hit the town last night to check out some of Melbourne’s pubs.  It’s Good Beer Week down here and there’s a few pubs featuring craft beers from different areas under their Pint of Origin series.  We managed to travel around the world by just hitting three pubs.

It was a bit of a long night, and we managed to try quite a few beers.

Village Melbourne – Europe

We started the night in Europe at the Village on St Kilda Road.

They had a great selection of beers from Italy, the UK, Norway, and others.  As tap space is limited, not all the beers listed on the Village’s Pint of Origin page were available, but that’s only to expected.  They had eight beers available on tap which amounts for a decent selection.

It was great to try some beers from Norway and Italy, they’re a bit of a novelty in Melbourne: you can find them of course, but they’re a little more rare than American or British beers.

The Village was a great place to start the night.  It was a good night to be out and we managed to get the last bit of daylight sitting in their great beer garden.

Two Row – “Rest of the World”

A quick cab ride across the city brought us to Two Row representing the “rest of the world”; namely anything not from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, or the U.S.A.

Two Row were mostly showcasing Japanese beers last night, but also had one Lebanese beer on tap.  As with the Village, they’ll also be rotating through a few beers throughout the week.

Japan is such an upcoming craft beer country and the stuff they’re putting out is great.  They’re still finding their style a little bit, but they’ll get there.  It will be very interesting to follow Japanese breweries in the future to see what they come up with!

The one Lebanese beer on tap was from a brewery called 961 that they were calling it a black IPA.  This beer didn’t rate very highly with us…  There wasn’t much there that could make it an IPA, so really it was more of a brown ale, but it wasn’t terribly malty either.  It was worth a try though just for fun!

The Great Northern Hotel – U.S.A.

Another cab took us to the U.S.A.  By this point we were quite a few beers in so thoughtful consideration of the beer went out the window!

Also, while the Village and Two Row had been relatively quiet (for a Saturday night), the Great Northern was buzzing.  The Village is designed as a lovely beer cafe, Two Row as a hip little craft beer bar, the Great Northern is a standard pub that happens to serve great beer.

The beers were great but of course a lot less novel than our previous ones from the night. American micro brews are great, but they’re fairly common in Australia and around the world, so there was a bit less adventure here.

And Home

It was a long night: we went all around the world and tried a lot of great beers.  It was great to see the different styles from different countries and cultures.