Willie the Boatman: real ale and hearty
Craig Rowlands wanted an English real ale so despertely, he brewed one himself.
Craig Rowlands was a man with a hankering for an English real ale, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He ordered a couple of suitable kegs and a beer engine (hand pump) and had them delivered to Willie the Boatman’s brewery and bar at St Peters in Sydney, which just happened to be his local.
“I guess it was a not-too-subtle hint,” Willie’s Pat McInerney (pictured below) tells The Australian. Rowlands helped brew the first casks with another friend and McInerney installed the beer engine at the bar. Everybody was happy.
Real ale is the rarest beast in the Australian beer zoo. Part of the English canon, it refers to a beer that is cask conditioned (a secondary fermentation in the vessel it is drawn from) and naturally carbonated.
Philistines call it flat and warm but the beer, traditionally served around 10C and less carbonated than the fizzy lagers we all know, has a creaminess you get with artificially carbonated beers by adding nitrogen.
In all my time seeking out different beers in Sydney I have rarely encountered a genuine real ale. In the early 1990s, two casks of a special Theakston’s Old Peculier were imported illegally by a couple of Yorkshiremen and served at a private function at a Paddington pub.
Matt Donelan of St Peter’s Brewery had an engine and casks and around that same time used to put on versions of his excellent beers at a pub in Glebe on a Friday night, but he has moved on.
There are other establishments serving via the hand pump, and some degassing their cellar-temperature kegs, but it’s not a real ale as such as there is no secondary fermentation.
The kit Rowlands purchased for Willie’s came from Grain and Grape home brew supplies in Melbourne and the establishment tells Beer Goggles while it has sold beer engines to a lot of places it isn’t sure if any serve real ales with them.
There’s an obvious problem with the system in Australian conditions. In England casks hold their own at room temperature even in summer. It’s just too hot in Australia to work, but at Willie’s they are storing the casks in a cool room at 10C and they pour at about 12C. It’s working well so far partly because they use small glass sizes but may face challenges in the middle of summer.
Willie’s brewers are using two methods to create the real ales. One sees them knocking up 50-litre batches in a small fermenter and splitting them into two casks; the other sees them run beer from their main production into a small fermenter. They then give the beer alternative hop regimes to keep things different.
The beauty of a real ale is the complex flavour profile achieved by the warmer fermentation, which allows the traditional bitter styles to be brewed at about 3.9 per cent alcohol. This allows you to knock back two or three pints without getting plastered.
“The conditioning makes the beer a lot smoother because the carbonation is self-generated,” McInerney explains. “The mouth-feel is a lot more pleasant than a cold, carbonated beer and the temperature allows the malt flavours, which are lost when it is served colder, to come forward.”
In England, the Campaign for Real Ale formed 45 years ago to halt the alarming loss of local breweries and the traditional beer style.
But just this year CAMRA’s revitalisation project chairman, Michael Hardman, announced that it was another group who had saved the industry: the rise of the hipsters had led to a resurgence in diversity.
When CAMRA formed there were 175 breweries in Britain; today there are 1500 and beer brands have increased from 300 to 11,000.
“Hipster culture has been great for getting young people interested,” Hardman told Britain’s Telegraph in March.
If you live in Sydney, Willie the Boatman is open Thursday and Friday evenings and Saturdays, but McInerney is promising to throw open the roller doors on Sundays in the near future. If you don’t, do not despair; St Peter’s is near the airport so you can make a visit your first priority when stopping over in the harbour city.
While there, order a takeaway from their Canimal, a machine that allows you to take home anything from the taps in a one-litre can that’s sealed on the spot.