Shebrew crew taps into Tassie talent for creating you-beaut beers

A DARK-style beer celebrating the role of women in the brewing process will be on taps within a month.

Kristina Short of Mount Stuart, left, Sarah Parr and Isabelle Bishop both of Lindisfarne with Karen Brooks of Battery Point mixing up a batch of Shebrew at Captain Bligh's in North Hobart

THE perfect storm is brewing for craft beer and ales when Tasmania’s high quality raw ingredients are mixed with local creativity.

Steve Brooks, head brewer and chief floor washer of Captain Bligh’s Ale and Cider, is bringing history alive by making ales in accordance with the colonial laws of Tasmania in the 1800s.

The British Empire had its own Purity Laws, like the Germans, but stipulated all ingredients had to be grown in Tasmania.

“We grow the best hops in the country, along with excellent malt, and the water is the best for brewing. It’s the perfect storm for brewing and an ideal time for people to rediscover beers at pubs who support craft brewers because without them the local industry would be dead,” Mr Brooks said.

He invited four “assistants” into the brewery to produce a beer celebrating women’s traditional role in the process.

“When brewing was a farm-yard industry, it was women who did it,” Mr Brooks said.

Not only were they working the grain mix (mash) paddles but developed a recipe to make 10 kegs of a dark style beer, vanilla chai porter. It will be on taps within a month.

Waterman’s Beer Market pub manager Sarah Parr said people were becoming more interested in the provenance of what they were drinking.

“We are excited to be only the free house on the [Salamanca] waterfront giving people opportunity to try new beers and ales,” Mrs Parr said.

Recent MasterChef contestant Kristina Short said she was “obsessed” by beer and found stirring the mash therapeutic.

Mr Brooks is holding Bligh’s July at the brewery’s bar on Friday, July 10, from 5pm-10pm in the heritage Tasmanian Brewery Building, on the corner of Warwick and Elizabeth streets, in North Hobart.