They say that Guinness doesn’t travel well and therefore the best you’ll get is in in the brewery in Dublin. And there is something to be said for being able to smell the hops and barley while enjoying a tasty ale.
I got a taste for it in my teens. My Dad worked in a brewery and each Christmas, he would take me there to a check all the pipes and tanks. We’d end up in the tasting room where I was introduced to the delights of lager and learned how to make up excuses for being late for dinner and the Christmas one in particular.
Over the years I’ve dipped into a few other breweries. You have to do the tour first and pretend you are interested in the different techniques for making ales and stouts. But actually people are only interested in the free beer at the end. And the quicker you can get there the better. The Guinness warehouse is Ireland’s biggest tourist attraction because it has a lift that takes you straight to the bar on the top floor.
So when I went to Perth last weekend, I made it a point to visit the Little Creatures brewery. Their Pale Ale is one of my favourite tipples and I was delighted to see that they don’t bother with a tour but just let you drink their products while gazing at the Indian Ocean that laps against the back wall.
The other thing I like about Perth is that the standard drink size is a pint. You can get that size in most pubs in Australia but you sound like Barney from the Simpsons if you ask for one. They say Perth is the most popular destination in Australia for English emigrants looking for a new life and maybe the pint glass reminds them of home. Apparently there are entire suburbs full of people walking bulldogs and drinking warm beer.
The city centre looks the same as any other Australian city, full of chain stores and surly young teenagers. But English accents were everywhere. Banks had posters advising you on how to transfer your UK pension, pubs argued about which was the oldest English style tavern in Western Australia and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was as common as kebabs are in the rest of this country.
I went to a cafe at 10.30am on Sunday morning and was told that only the “Big Breakfast” was available from their morning menu. They had thoughtfully included a picture, which made it clear that the big adjective wasn’t an exaggeration. It contained so much fried food that my arteries were hardening just looking at it.
So I decided to be healthy and ordered a pie. Perth was the only state capital I hadn’t visited before last weekend and comparing pies across Australia is one of my favourite pastimes. I was asked if I wanted chips with it and a quick look around the café informed me that I’d be out of place if I didn’t. But the waitress wasn’t finished with her upselling. She leaned closer, possibly making a judgement on my ample belly. “Would you like peas and gravy with that?”
I could have been in Barnsley, if it wasn’t for the sunshine outside and lack of tattoos among the general population.
Just down the road from Perth is the historical port of Fremantle. As we neared the coast I realised that I’d seen every ocean in the world except the Indian. All that changed as the train came over a brow and there in front of us was the mighty sea that separates Australia from the east coast of Africa.
That ocean of course delivered lots of convicts to Western Australia and I took myself up to the fine old prison that stands on the hill overlooking the town. It was the last place in Australia to accept convicts and the photos adorning the museum showed hardened Victorian men with bad teeth and steely eyes. Many of them were Irish and I had to admit to a smidgen of pride when I read that the only people to successfully escape from the prison hailed from the Emerald Isle.
They were Fenians, possibly the first underground terrorist group in the world. The ones the English didn’t hang, they sent to Fremantle. That included John Boyle O’Reilly who had a street called after him in my hometown, which we managed to mangle into a one syllable word. He escaped from Australia on an American whaling ship and had the decency to send another boat back from the States to pick up six of his mates.
Strangely the prison seemed proud of its escapees. You couldn’t imagine a bank for example, promoting its best robbers.
I escaped from the prison in time to make it back down the hill to the brewery. The sun was starting to sink into the Indian Ocean and the beer was going down well. Unfortunately time waits for no man and I had to make my way to the airport in the hope that I could make it back to Melbourne. An ash cloud is hovering over Australia and air travel is a precarious activity. Volcanoes have been erupting since the dawn of time and airplanes have been in the air for over one hundred years. But it seems that it is only since that volcano in Iceland, with the unpronounceable name, blew up last year, that air travel has been affected.
Thankfully I got away and made it back to chilly Melbourne in the early hours of Monday morning. Australia is of course a huge country and the temperature had dropped by about ten degrees on the way back.
I’ve now visited all six states and just have the two territories (Northern and Canberra) to go. Neither is famous for breweries or Irish history however. So it might be a while before I get there.
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