A compromised industry

The billboard below is a lie. Drinking Coopers beer is one of biggest compromises I can think of.

Coopers is a pre-technology beer. For some reason the Coopers brewery, tucked away in Adelaide, missed the mid-twentieth century introduction of beer filtration, biotechnology and chemical engineering. They kept plugging away with their cloudy dinosaur of a beer and eventually it became the first of the local ‘craft’ beers.

Craft my arse; I call it lazy, tight-arsed, backwards and self-deluded.

When I enter a pub, any pub, I will ask for a Tooheys New. It’s easily the best beer made in Australia.

The closer one gets to the epicenter of the first hipster the less likely it is that a pub will have New.

They will have twenty taps all labeled with names such as pigs trotter, camel back, little fuckers, iron bark, here & now and maybe Coopers (although this is now considered by the hipsters to be old-new-school, or new-old-school, anyway one of these, and therefore mainstream).

These beers are universally over-expressed in flavour, expensive, pretentious, and full of unfiltered colloidal rubbish that will give you a clanger of a hangover.

Even the default backup for Tooheys New, Carlton Draft, comes in an unpasteurized craft version. It’s rubbish. Who knew that pasteurisation improved the flavour of beer so much? Who even knew that they pasteurised beer?

When I was a kid I lived in my parent’s pub. We had two beers on tap. New for the masses and Old for the shop stewards, and 50/50 (a mix of the two) for the odd eccentric and the resident homosexual.

Low alcohol beer was affected with dilution by lemonade. Craft beer involved the addition of Scotch or a Bex Powder, sometimes both. Pretension was satiated with Crown Lager, which was just over-priced and bottled Reschs Draft. Cloudy and bitter beer was simply an off keg

Ah, the easy days.