Australian and New Zealand Beer

The first thing worth saying about beer in Australia and New Zealand is that the climate, for most of the year, is actively hostile to the idea of warm beer. The second thing worth saying is that the regulators in both countries spent a great deal of the twentieth century trying to make sure people drank less of it, and the brewers spent the same century trying, with considerable ingenuity, to make sure people drank slightly more. The result is a brewing tradition that looks, from a distance, like a colonial offshoot of British practice but on closer inspection turns out to be its own thing entirely — shaped by heat, by isolation, by a peculiar set of licensing laws, and by the fact that two of the world's most important hop-growing regions happen to sit at the bottom of the map.

A short geography of thirst

Australia is large, mostly hot, and was settled by people from the British Isles who arrived with a strong preference for ale and almost no way to keep it cool. Lager, when refrigeration eventually made it possible, swept the continent with the sort of completeness that only an ecological vacuum can produce. By the late twentieth century the Australian beer market was dominated by pale lager served extremely cold, in glassware sized to be drunk before it warmed up. The vocabulary alone tells the story: a pot in Victoria is a middy in New South Wales is a handle in the Northern Territory, and the schooner means different volumes in different states. None of this is a joke. It is genuinely how the country talks about its beer.

New Zealand, smaller and cooler and somewhat damper, followed a similar trajectory but with the added complication of a temperance movement that came much closer to winning. The country imposed a six-o'clock closing time on pubs in 1917 and did not repeal it until 1967, producing the famous "six o'clock swill" — fifty years of working men trying to get through as many beers as possible in the hour between knock-off and last call. The lasting effect on glassware, on pour speed, and on the design of the New Zealand public bar was substantial.

The hops nobody expected

If there is one reason the rest of the brewing world has paid attention to the Antipodes in recent decades, it is the hops. The cultivar Nelson Sauvin, bred in New Zealand and released commercially in 2000, produces aroma compounds that brewers and drinkers consistently describe in terms borrowed from the wine vocabulary — gooseberry, white grape, the same thiol-driven character that makes Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc taste the way it does. Galaxy, an Australian cultivar released in 2009, brought a similarly distinctive passionfruit and citrus profile.

The chemistry is not magical, merely particular. Hop bitter acids and the volatile thiols and terpenes that drive aroma are, as the peer-reviewed literature collected on NCBI PubMed Central documents in some detail, sensitive to latitude, daylight hours, and growing-season temperature. The Tasman growing regions sit at latitudes and on soils that produce thiol precursors in unusual concentrations. American and European brewers noticed. By the late 2010s a New Zealand single-hop pale ale was a familiar sight on tap lists in Portland, Copenhagen, and London.

The USDA NASS hop statistics track the United States side of the trade — what comes in, what goes out — but the underlying point is straightforward enough. A small set of cultivars from a small set of farms in two small countries reshaped, in about fifteen years, what an India Pale Ale could taste like.

The law, in two countries

Neither Australia nor New Zealand has anything like a Reinheitsgebot. There is no ingredient list written into statute, no protected style designations of the sort the Deutsche Weininstitut administers for German wine, no equivalent of the protected lambic framework that HORAL maintains in Belgium. Beer in both countries is regulated primarily as an excise commodity and a food product, with labelling rules that focus on alcohol content, volume, and standard-drink declarations rather than on what may or may not be added to the wort.

The Australian excise system taxes beer in tiered bands by alcohol content and packaging, which has produced one of the more visible quirks of Australian drinking culture: mid-strength beer, typically around 3.5% alcohol by volume, exists as a distinct and widely sold category largely because the tax code rewards it. Full-strength lagers sit above, light beers below, and the brewing industry has spent decades optimising recipes to hit the band edges. A regulation written to discourage drunkenness has, in effect, created a category of beer.

New Zealand's framework is similar in spirit but administered separately, with its own excise schedule and its own labelling rules under food-safety legislation. Both countries require a standard-drink declaration on packaged beer — a small icon stating how many 10-gram units of pure alcohol the container holds — which is a more direct piece of consumer information than anything the US system requires. By comparison, the United States approach under 27 CFR Part 7 focuses on alcohol-by-volume statements and the brand-and-class labelling rules administered by the TTB, with the separate health warning required by 27 CFR Part 16. Different systems, different theories of what the drinker needs to know.

The two-company century, and what came after

For most of the twentieth century, Australian beer meant Carlton & United Breweries (Foster's, Victoria Bitter, Carlton Draught) and Lion Nathan (Tooheys, XXXX, Hahn). The two companies between them held the overwhelming majority of the national market. New Zealand was, if anything, more concentrated: Lion and DB Breweries effectively split the country.

What happened next will be familiar to anyone who has watched the American craft scene since the 1980s. A first generation of small breweries — Coopers in Adelaide had been there all along, family-owned and stubbornly independent since 1862 — was joined in the 2000s and 2010s by a wave of new operations. Little Creatures in Fremantle, Mountain Goat in Melbourne, Stone & Wood in Byron Bay. In New Zealand, Emerson's, Tuatara, Garage Project, 8 Wired. Many of the more successful ones were subsequently acquired by the large incumbents, which is also a familiar pattern. The Brewers Association in the United States maintains a Craft Brewer Definition that turns on independence, size, and ingredient practice; neither Australia nor New Zealand has adopted an equivalent formal definition, though the Independent Brewers Association in Australia operates a seal program with similar intent.

Comparative coverage of brewing organisations is worth flagging here. The Master Brewers Association of the Americas serves the technical and production side of the industry across North America. The Beer Judge Certification Program publishes the style guidelines most widely used in homebrew and small-commercial competition. The Institute of Brewing & Distilling, based in the UK, runs the qualifications most commonly held by professional brewers in the Commonwealth countries, including Australia and New Zealand. For sensory and service-side education the Cicerone Certification Program® operates internationally, with candidates studying for the Certified Cicerone® exam in both countries; coverage of Australasian beers in the official syllabus is, as with most international programs, weighted toward globally distributed examples. See cicerone.org for current details.

Styles that are actually styles

A few things brewed in Australia and New Zealand have enough of a distinct character to count as regional styles, as opposed to local versions of something else.

Australian Sparkling Ale. The Coopers house style — bottle-conditioned, cloudy when roused, fruity from a distinctive house yeast, hopped lightly. The BJCP guidelines list it as a recognised category. It is one of the few surviving examples of a top-fermented ale tradition that predates the lager takeover, and it tastes like nothing else.

New Zealand Pilsner. A pale lager, generally around 5% alcohol, hopped almost entirely with New Zealand cultivars — Motueka, Riwaka, Nelson Sauvin. The result is a beer with the clean malt and attenuation of a Continental pilsner but with a tropical-fruit and white-grape aroma that no German or Czech pilsner would ever exhibit. It is the clearest case in the Antipodean repertoire of a familiar template producing a genuinely new flavour because of the local raw materials.

XXXX and the Queensland lager tradition. Less a style than a regional preference: very pale, very dry, very cold, brewed for the subtropical climate of Queensland. The Reinheitsgebot purists at Deutscher Brauer-Bund would find the recipes startling. The drinkers find them refreshing, which in Brisbane in February is the relevant criterion.

Mid-strength. Not a style in any traditional sense but, as noted, a category created by tax law and now embedded in Australian drinking habits. Brewers have become genuinely good at producing 3.5% beers with adequate body and aroma, which is harder than it sounds.

The drinkers

Per-capita beer consumption in both countries has been declining for decades, in line with the global trend the NIAAA tracks for total alcohol intake in developed economies. Wine has gained share — Wine Australia and New Zealand Winegrowers between them oversee an export industry that has, in cultural terms, somewhat overshadowed beer. Spirits, particularly local gin and whisky, have grown from almost nothing in 2000 to a visible category. Beer is still the largest alcohol category in both countries by volume, but the gap is narrower than it once was, and the drinkers are, on average, older.

The pub remains central, particularly in Australia, where the country pub is something close to a piece of civic infrastructure. The licensing laws that govern it vary by state and have evolved considerably since the days of the six o'clock swill, but the pub itself — wide verandas, concrete floors that can be hosed out, a TAB betting terminal in the corner, beer served very cold in a glass sized to the local custom — has proven remarkably durable.

A note on what the regulations do not say

One observation worth ending on. The legal frameworks in both Australia and New Zealand contain no opinion whatsoever about what beer should taste like. There is no equivalent of the German purity law, no protected-origin scheme of the sort the Scotch Whisky Association maintains for whisky or the Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac maintains for cognac. A brewer in Hobart or Hawke's Bay can put more or less anything into a beer and call it beer, provided the alcohol declaration is correct, the standard drinks are stated, and the excise is paid. This is, on reflection, a fairly unusual position for a national brewing tradition to occupy. It produces, predictably, a great deal of stylistic latitude — fruit beers, hopped lagers, oak-aged sours, hazy pales — and a smaller body of agreed regional canon than one finds in Belgium or Germany. Whether that is a feature or a deficiency depends largely on what the drinker thinks beer is for.

Further reading

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