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Published: March 27th 2012
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It was back to the important matter of beer drinking today as we had lined up tours of 2 breweries. The first brewery tour was at the Carlton Brewery which was a 15minute walk from the flat.Given that it was 10am on a Monday morning we expected the tour to be very quiet but we were surprised at how many people were actually there.
When we arrived we donned our health and safety High Vis vests and met our tour guide. The tour took us through a couple of the Production Areas in the site. The first stop was one of the brewing areas where the beer is sent through the four tanks (mill, mash tun, draining and kettle) when the kettle is operating at full capacity it can get up to 40 degrees in the building but luckily it wasn’t at full capacity when we went into the production area. The tour guide talked us through the general process of brewing beer and explained that the brewery is in operation 24 hours a day, 6 days a week and produces 2 million litres of beer a day. The record turnaround time was a barrel that came into the site
3 times for re-filling in one 24 hour period – evidence Australians’ clearly drink a lot!
From the first production area we walked across to the bottling area, passing the huge chimney that has been built at the site. The local folklore suggests that beer drunk under the shadow of chimney is the best beer you can get so they have built it big enough to cover as much of Melbourne as possible. In the bottling area we saw VB on the production line (the most popular beer in Australia), there were a surprising number of bottles that had tipped and broken whilst on the production line but they had built in several filters to remove the broken items along the production line so as not to slow or stop any of the machines. The brewery can produce up to 1,000 bottles a minute when operating as full capacity. This brewery serves all of Southern Australia and they have another factory in Queensland which services Northern parts of Australia, with a single beer taking around 3 to 4 weeks to create from start to finish.
After the tour we went to the bar that they have built on
site to enjoy a taster tray of beers. There were a selection of beers and a cider that we could select from so we all chose 4 different tasters and sat down to enjoy our beer breakfast! The Carlton Black did have a very strong coffee flavour which made drinking beer at breakfast a little easier to justify, however it wasn’t long before we got the taste for it and ordered 4 more tasters each whilst we watched a selection of the Australian beer adverts from the 1950’s through to present day.
Next stop was the James Squire brewery and pub in the CBD, so we caught a tram into town and walked down to the James Squire pub where we met one of Will’s uni friends Stuart as he had been working on the Grand Prix and had a day off before flying over to Malaysia for the next race. The James Squire brewery is on a much smaller scale than the Carlton brewery and the main brewing site is situated out of town and isn’t open to visitors. But they have set up a small brewing room within the pub which they use mainly for experimental beers.
The brewer talked us through how things work in James Squire and explained how they can play with the taste of the beer by adjusting the types of hops that they add to the beer. The boys ordered another tasting tray, this time with 6 beers, whilst Jo opted out and decided on a soft drink to enjoy whilst we ate lunch at the pub.
After all those beers and a big lunch, we were all ready for a nap! It was a sunny day so we walked over to Federation Square and got a couple of ice creams which we enjoyed on the grass at the banks of the river.
After a rest in the sunshine we walked down the Southbank to take a look at a musical pyramid which had been placed on the walkway. It was a large steel pyramid which made different sounds when people walked past it – changing the sound based on distance, speed and shapes. We played around with the structure for a short while before making our way across the river to Ponyfish Island which is a bar which has been built around one of the legs supporting the bridge
across the Yarra river.
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