With print magazines in demise, many early beer magazines have been forgotten, if they were ever known, by the beer enthusiasts of today.
The first Australian magazine to be aimed generally at beer drinkers was Beer Matters, which first appeared in January 1984. It doubled as the organ of the Australian Beer Society, a non-profit beer consumers’ organisation that had been founded the previous year by the collaboration of a Gold Coast real estate agent, a Sydney pub-manager and two mechanical engineers from Newcastle.
All were passionate beer advocates, but utter novices in the magazine publishing game. Nevertheless, the humble bi-monthly Beer Matters had evolved into quite a presentable quarterly by the time its eighteenth and final edition appeared in mid-1987.
Brewpubs and microbreweries were unheard of in Australia when Beer Matters first went to press, but the magazine was ideally placed to report on the first stirrings of this country’s small brewery revolution. It reported in 1984 on the attempts by an enterprising publican named Geoff Scharer to create a brewery in his Picton pub, and soon after on Philip Sexton’s Anchor Brewing Company in Fremantle, and John Gilbert’s Old Ballarat Brewery.
Among others, it covered the opening in 1986 of the Loaded Dog, Melbourne’s first pub-brewery.
The gap left by the passing of Beer Matters was soon more than filled by the appearance early in 1988 of The Greatest Australian Beer Guide, a glossy colour magazine out of Sydney’s Federal Publishing Company. The company had been persuaded by Willie Simpson, then one of its editors, that the time was right for a new magazine devoted to beer, and Simpson was given the green light to edit and produce it.
A second edition appeared towards the end of 1988 (under the slightly revised and less grandiose title The Great Australian Beer Guide). By that time the beer-obsessed Simpson was becoming frustrated with his competing duties at Federal, and he left the company to create another magazine, imaginatively entitled Australian Beer Magazine, which first appeared in mid-1989.
Meanwhile, Federal continued to produce its Great Australian Beer Guide, under the editorship of well-known motorcycle writer, Peter Thoeming.
For a while, this placed Australian beer lovers in the luxurious position of having two substantial, professionally-produced beer magazines in circulation at once. Even better, new small breweries were proliferating. More than thirty were in operation around the country by the end of the 1980s, and these provided the principal fodder for both magazines.
Three editions of Simpson’s Australian Beer Magazine were published, the last at the end of 1990, before it succumbed to record high interest rates and colour magazine production costs.
The Guide, its compatriot, continued until early 1993, running to ten editions in total, the last eight with Thoeming as editor.
By that time, beer taxation reforms and ‘the recession that Australia had to have’ had stifled the growth of small breweries, which for a few years had given both magazines great cause to celebrate.
Although small-scale commercial brewing entered the doldrums in the early 1990s, the popularity of home brewing was unabated.
Late in 1991, the first edition appeared of Australian Home Brewer, another FPC title. It was edited by Laurie Strachan, who previously had written on home brewing for both of the general beer magazines. Australian Home Brewer ran to seven editions. Many included stories about commercial microbreweries, such as the feature on Canberra’s Wig & Pen in the final edition early in 1995.
Early in 1993, midway through the lifespan of Australian Home Brewer, a second national home brewing magazine appeared. Ausbeer, the magazine of the newly formed and Victorian based Amateur Brewers’ Association of Australia, eventually ran to twenty-three editions over nearly ten years, the last appearing about 2001. All were edited by energetic home-brewing guru and ABAA co-founder, Colin Penrose.
Two earlier Aussie home brewing magazines are worthy of mention, although not for their longevity. The one and only edition of The Australian Home Beermaker appeared early in 1981. This was the ‘official publication’ of a previous Amateur Brewers’ Association, also based in Victoria, and was edited by Graham Howard and Gordon Clark. Clark, a home-brewer extraordinaire, contributed a home-brewing column to Beer Matters through several editions in 1986 and 1987, and later did the same for Ausbeer.
Howard became a pioneer of the Australian microbrewing industry, both as a manufacturer of pub-brewing systems and as the founder in 1987 of the first pub-brewery in Queensland.
Another early magazine was The Home Brewer, which made its first, and as far as I know only appearance in 1972, published by the Society of Home Brewers, Australia (SOHBA, would you believe). This was another Victorian-based organisation, and by now you should be getting the idea that Victoria was Australia’s amateur brewing heartland.
The most notable thing about The Home Brewer, to my historical mind, is that it materialised the year before making full-strength beer for private use was legalised in Australia.
Beer and Brewer then launched in 2007 at a time when interest in beer in this country is at an unprecedented high, and continues to grow and mature.
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