Professional elbow bender and alcohol oracle, Gregor Stronach from Beer & Brewer magazine sheds some light on the fascinating trend of Australian craft beer.

It’s no secret that the average Australian bloke likes his beer – and if you and your man have been out with your friends to your local, you’ll probably have noticed that there’s been a pretty big shift in the way beers have been turning up at the table.

That shift is because of the rising popularity of craft beers and microbreweries. Aussies have embraced craft beer to the point where it’s not at all unusual to see beer lists on the bar that look like the wine lists of years gone by – a seemingly never ending roster of brands and variations, each one as enticing and perplexing as the next.

The secret is – pretty much every craft beer brand started its life as a home brew. And home brewing is very quickly becoming the most effective, not to mention interesting, way of getting your hands on some truly unique beers.

The good news is that brewing beer at home has also undergone some pretty major changes in the past few years. I won’t lie - it suffered from a bit of an image problem among many Australians for decades, when home brewing was regarded as the kind of thing that someone’s slightly mad uncle might be into – causing a sense of creeping dread when he arrived at Christmas lunch with a cartoon of his latest brew under one arm, insisting with a gleam in his eye that “this batch is heaps better than the last one…”

But these days, things are very different. For starters, it’s a lot simpler and a lot more compact than the traditional set ups that have occupied the spare rooms of history. Secondly, it’s actually pretty easy to do, and the results can be both spectacular, and loads of fun to share (in a responsible fashion, of course) with mates. I’ve been to a number of home brew parties over the years, thrown by guys and girls whose passion and do-it-yourself attitude has led them to create some of the best beers I’ve ever tasted.

It’s worth noting that most, if not all, of the brewers that are knocking out the craft beers finding space on the table between the ciders and glasses of the house red in pubs around the country, started their passion for making top quality beer by rolling up their sleeves and brewing their own at home.

Home brewing is pretty much the same as cooking. Find a beer you like, hunt down a recipe for it, get your ingredients together and off you go. And, just like cooking at home, the real fun begins when you have a bit of a tinker with the recipe on the way through, to create your own twist on an old favourite.

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