About a week ago, Bridge Road bottled their 100oth batch of beer!

Now, that’s not 1000 different kinds of beer (give them time…), it’s 1000 brews done by Bridge Road. For a brewery that started in 2005, that’s over 100 brews per year; about two per week!

Master Brewer Ben Kraus said in an article here that it took awhile to get to 500 batches, but to get from 500 to 1000, it only took a couple of years. This is, presumably, due to increased production as the popularity of Bridge Road beers increased. So it stands to reason that the next 1000 batches should be even quicker.

Think about this. Assuming each batch spends 10 days in the fermenter, that’s 10000 fermenting days in total: 27 years!

Bridge Road Brewers is one of the best craft breweries in Australia (in this writer’s opinion at least). They’ve managed to balance their size and growth while still remaining true to being a small and local craft brewery. There’s nothing wrong with growing and succeeding, but it seems they haven’t forgotten where they came from.

Bridge Road Brewers has about 12 core beers that are great, but standard. However, they’re not afraid to experiment and their special releases is where they get fun.

Obviously Bridge Road’s 1000th batch is a special release, and it’s an Imperial Stout.

According to Bridge Road Brewers, they chose to do an Imperial Stout because they’ve never done one before. While that’s all well and good, we’re coming right into the Australian summer! Their 1000th beer will surely be tasty, regardless of style, but an Imperial Stout in the summer? Needless to say, Brew in Review will definitely be trying this beer, even if it is 40 degrees out and we’re sweating through the whole thing while watching cricket, but it’s a pity this brew didn’t fall in the middle of winter.

Yes, and 1000th brew does require something big and ballsy, but it would have been nice if they had taken a risk and gone with a nice crisp lager, something a bit unassuming and understated…  at least something to go better with the weather in which the beer is going to be released. But admittedly, that’s not as fun as a nice big stout!

1000 beers is a big celebration, so you need a big beer, and an Imperial Stout will do that.

Congratulations to Bridge Road Brewers and their continued success. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, they’ve balanced being a decent sized  brewery with keeping their craft/microbrewery routes very well and, assuming they maintain this ethos, we hope to see them keep increasing production so that 1000 brews becomes a yearly occurrence.

We’re sure they had a few to celebrate.