Things are busy at Byron Bay’s Stone & Wood brewery, with the brewery rapidly expanding with two new 100hl fermentation tanks soon to be arriving as the first two of six they have on order. As their announcement below outlines, they will need them…

Media Release

Announcing the birth of Jasper, a brother to Pacific.

For some time now we have been working on brewing a beer that would be more suited to the cooler months, a beer that contrasts our current range of Stone & Wood beers. We are really happy that we are now in a position to be rolling out our new brew just in time for the change of season.

Joining Stone & Wood Pacific Ale and Stone & Wood Lager in our permanent line up of beers will be a shiny new beer called Stone & Wood Jasper Ale.

Our Jasper Ale reflects the red volcanic soil of our hinterland and is brewed from a blend of pale and crystal malts. Jasper Ale is deep red, has a rich malt character and is well balanced with a firm spicy hop bitterness.

If you’re looking for a pigeon hole to stick it in there’s probably no neat fit, but the inspiration comes from German Alt, American Amber Ale and an English Brown Ale styles. We love the spicy bitterness that a German hop such as Hersbrucker brings to a beer to balance that rich malt character.

Over the last couple of years we have been trialling elements of the brew in things like our fund raising beer Red Relief and our Stone Beer brews, and it was just a matter of us having the tank space to brew it in so we could get it out there. That day is not far away now so here comes Jasper Ale!

So what is The Mash Collective?

The Mash Collective is an opportunity for people from all walks of life to come together to share their seperate obsessions and collectively create a brew from a common ground … their love of beer.

We have experienced it ourselves when we first established Stone & Wood. Then as the team has come together to help build the business we’ve seen a collective form, which is a broader group of people with even wider interests come together and everyday share a common goal … making good beer.

We all work pretty hard at Stone & Wood, but we also like to make sure we also enjoy the community that has formed around it. So The Mash Collective is a vehicle for the team and that community to work together on a series of projects that help us all celebrate our love of beer.

We have an open approach to how we run the business and although we have often talked about the idea of doing collaborative brews with other brewers and other brewing companies we always felt that approach was a little too industry focussed and introspective.

The Mash Collective won’t just be about the people here at Stone & Wood. For each project we are going to reach out and select a group of people from our broader community to work as a group to create a beer.

We’ve met some great people over years … there are musicians, writers, surfers, artists, chefs, and all sorts of artisans and people who are specialists in their chosen fields.

So for each of the beers from The Mash Collective we will have a diverse group of people, each with their own personal obsession, that come together to collaborate on brewing a beer. To share their beliefs, their perspectives and their ideas about beer. From selecting a style to formulating a recipe to designing the label and of course coming together on the brew day to bring it all to life.

For them, they get to share in the creation of something special to them as a group, and to experience that satisfaction of seeing other people enjoy their creation, and for us, and everyone else, we get to witness that collaborative process and of course we get to taste the fruits of their collective creativity … and really to us, that’s what brewing beer is all about.

So each beer from The Mash Collective will be very special, not just the beer, but more importantly the who, the why, and the how that went into it.

Note: The first beer from The Mash Collective will make it’s debut at the Great Australian Beer Spectapular (GABS) in early May.

www.stoneandwood.com.au