BUZZ ABOUT BYRON BREW
Take a walk on the wild side with this honey-infused cream ale from our brewing mates over the border
BEING creative can be code for pushing the boundaries. Brewers, being creative people, are no exceptions to the rule.
From Stone & Wood’s Byron Bay pilot brewery (where the brewers like to play) comes the latest Pilot Batch limited release, Wilderness Honey Cream Ale.
The smaller brewery allows the team to experiment a little and they’ve produced some memorable brews in the process. This one is actually the result of a collaboration between an artist, a local inventor and a chef, with help from the Stone & Wood pros.
With a combination like that, it should come as no surprise that it’s different.
Wilderness uses honey, but while some honey beers I have tried in the past have been too sweet for my liking, this is still a balanced drop.
It has a cloudy, light golden appearance with a frothy but thin head and offers up malts, a slight hop nose due to the Galaxy hops and, of course, a subtle honey aroma. As a cream ale, it is very smooth, with an appealing flavour from the initial mouthful.
Tasting notes indicate the use of natural bush ingredients, which I found hard to detect, but the honey imparts a smooth, slightly rich aftertaste with enough bitterness in the palate to cleanse and draw you back. It’s a full strength beer at 5.3 per cent, but doesn’t sit too heavily in the gut.
Wilderness is definitely a beer to sit back with while watching the Commonwealth Games and would go well with fried foods such as spring rolls or chilli-sauce-dipped wontons.
It is a limited release that you can track down at bottle shops around the Gold Coast and Northern Rivers, as well as on tap at Tugun’s Backbone.
“THE HONEY IMPARTS A SMOOTH, SLIGHTLY RICH AFTERTASTE.”