I was at the Macquarie last night and feel compelled to write something about the beers I tried there.
First one was the wheat beer. Apparently the brewer is trying to recreate the bavarian style, but it lacks the distinctive banana and clove. There was a bit of banana in there, and there was plenty of wheat taste, but it was more like an Australian or US wheat beer. ie. take a wheat beer recipe and ferment it with a normal ale yeast, rather than a specialty bavarian one.
Then I tried the schwartz beer. It was pretty nice. Liked the roast character, but one of the main flavours in there was diacetyl. For all those who have always wanted to find out what diacetyl smells and tastes like in a beer, now you know where to go. The beer came through as quite buttery (thats diacetyl), but worked reasonably well in the beer. However, by the end of the glass, it was starting to get sickly sweet-buttery.
Finally, I tried the Pale Ale. As far as I can tell from the website: "...with a very nice aroma-hops from East Kent." Well, thats not any sort of east kent hops I have ever had. In fact I have never had hops that pungent or distasteful before. They were extremely intense, and came across as some combination of intense grapefruit with some strong herby character as well. In fact, when I woke up this morning, I could still taste it. The bitterness of the beer seemed to be about right, but I wasn't really concentrating on that at the time.
Overall, I believe the beers were quite fresh, although a bit of age on the wheat beer might explain the muted flavours a little bit. So I don't think the micro has major problems with beer getting too old.
Its such a shame that beers like that are sold to the public. No doubt it gives the whole microbrew/brewpub business a bad name in Australia. There must be hundreds of punters out there who drank at the Macquarie and and vow to stick to their VB 'cos "that microbrewery stuff is awful".
Such a shame!
Berp.