Lactose is the surprising ingredient in a range of hit craft brews

No experiment is too out-there for Australia’s craft brewers these days, and beer lovers are embracing the results. Milk stouts and other styles using lactose are among this new wave.

In a time of barrels, bugs, punchy light beers, low-bitterness big beers, fruit beers, beer-wine hybrids and sours, there’s arguably little that can be regarded as ‘unlikely’ in brewing anymore. That said, the use of lactose – a sugar that naturally occurs in milk – in all manner of beers is a trend few would have predicted. It’s not that adding lactose to beer is new – milk stouts were brewed in early 20th-century England, for example – but it’s where it’s popping up that’s interesting.

Before we get to the parties it’s gatecrashing, first a brief explanation as to what it does in beer. Lactose is a form of sugar that, unlike glucose, is not broken down into alcohol and carbon dioxide by the yeasts brewers use. Therefore, it sticks around post-ferment and adds body, as well as other benefits, to beer.

Phil O’Shea is among the Australian brewers who are fans of using lactose.

The founder and head brewer of Five Barrel in Wollongong, NSW, launched his brewery in 2016 with a milk stout in the line-up. More recently, his Milkshake IPA has won plenty of admirers. “I’d always been familiar with lactose adding an extra element to beer,” he says. “It has the

ability to take an edge or sharpness off.” When it came to adding lactose to an IPA – once the preserve of highly aromatic, high-bitterness beers, but now a playpen in which brewers run wild – he’d been keeping an eye on US brewers pioneering hazy New England styles, as well as those adding lactose, fruits and spices to their IPAs. After a series of small-batch trials, he introduced both a New England IPA and the Milkshake IPA, but with one guiding principle at the heart of both. “You can still tell there’s a beer in there,” he explains. “You can’t get carried away with them.”

Ultimately, he believes that as long as a brewer retains a focus on what makes a good beer – paying attention to carbonation, mouthfeel, balance between bitter and sweet, and so on – it doesn’t matter how far innovators stray from the formula of water, malt, hops and yeast.

“If you make a bad beer, you can’t mask it with more hops or with lactose and fruit and toffee flavours,” he says. “It has to be good beer in its own right.”

Sailors Grave, in Victoria’s East Gippsland, has become known, almost by accident, as a ‘cream sour’ specialist. Former restaurateurs Gab and Chris Moore have become some of the country’s most adventurous brewers since launching Sailors Grave, using all manner of foraged and unlikely ingredients in beer. But one has arguably had the most impact on their direction.

In designing a beer for the 2017 GABS, an occasion that encourages brewers to take flights of fancy, the couple opted to recreate the milk-based Japanese soft drink Calpis. “We wanted something refreshing and sour, but creamy as well,” Chris says of Milky Way, which also featured custard apples and vanilla beans, and was soured with yoghurt. “Before the event, I was talking to a bottle shop owner about it and said it could be disgusting.” Yet it proved a hit, as did subsequent cream sour Peach Melba Pavlova, which took two iconic Aussie desserts as inspiration. The brewery has now released six beers combining lactose with lactobacillus and other adjuncts not typically found in beer, as well as a series of highly hopped IPAs also featuring the milk sugar. “Now we can’t stop making them as people keep wanting them,”

Chris says, also explaining that lactose can act as a welcome “sponge” in beer. “We add heaps of hops, yet they don’t taste like hoppy beers. The sheer weight of hops we add to some beers can give a slightly vegetal note, but we find the creaminess softens those edges. For me, it’s personal preference: I like that softer edge. It’s like an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

As with the other extreme tangents beer has been taking, there’s the danger that this proliferation of colours, flavours, aromas and experiences – all a million miles from what Australians had come to understand as beer – might cause observers to view it as gimmicky. Yet

Five Barrel’s Phil says customers he talks to at his taproom are enthused by the innovation on display, even if the likes of milkshake IPAs or fruit sours are potentially keeping the converted sated rather than enticing new drinkers.

“I don’t think [my customers] feel this is a flash in the pan,” Phil says. “They genuinely enjoy drinking these sort of beers. It’s not a new issue for the beer world. People had the same criticisms for IPAs when they started being popular.” He adds: “Australia is a nation of wine drinkers. We pride ourselves on being able to distinguish a pinot from a shiraz. Milkshake IPA is so far removed from a Tooheys New yet still meets the definition of beer [so] it comes back to being able to articulate in a very short and concise way what that beer is. It’s an awesome platform for a lot of creativity and I really hope people aren’t dissuaded from being creative by naysayers.”