WHITE BAY BEER KEN OATH
Grab a pair of these crafts and invite over a friend to goof off. Then take a half time break from your lounge room version of the world game to start on a convo that could well change the world for your mate.
Origin – Rozelle, New South Wales
ABV – 6.0%
Size – 355mL can
Style – Hazy IPA
Each day workers would rush from the White Bay Power Station across Victoria Road to the White Bay Hotel. Instead of lingering over their beers, they spent an hour crushed up against the bar, spiralling swiftly into crapulence. After 60 minutes of fast-paced, empty-stomach drinking, the ringing of a six o'clock bell announced a 'supping-up' time of 15 minutes. Instead of remaining at the pub, people would head home, pickled as newts. While it was only intended as a temporary restriction to help in wartime, the ‘Six O’Clock Swill’ was an hour of drunken anarchy that lasted through both World Wars, multiple governments, and the invention of Vegemite! In the end, the regulations did precisely the opposite of what they had intended, with consequences that stretched well beyond the last call.
Yet a stone’s throw from the now-demolished White Bay Hotel, the White Bay Beer Co team is determined to undo what 50 years of enforced bingeing did to our drinking culture. Rather than aiding the community to tear itself and each other apart with the supply of mass produce swill, head brewer Dennis de Boer has shown a special love for the locals with what he calls his ‘liquid works of expression, passion and individualism’. And given the area's gentrification, those liquid works understandably include a handful of hopped-up IPA’s and Hazy's. However, the decision to set up a core range revolving around a Euro-style lager and sessionable pale is just as much a throwback to the traditional working-class Balmain Peninsula as the twin smokestacks of the abandoned White Bay Power Station that feature on the brewery's logo.
The post-COVID plan is to physically bring the community together at the soon to be built onsite brewery taproom, which is housed within the corrugated iron walls of a 150-year-old steel mill. Though for now, locals and those further afield have to make do with intermingling over a takeaway. This Ken Oath, the latest release in the ongoing series of one-offs, is a perfect craft for such a coalescence. Exploding with clouds of peach, pineapple and citrusy stone fruit aromas, it is tropical, dank and ever-so-slightly resinous. However, Dennis de Boer's masterstroke comes from the balancing of this hazy’s malt body, where a slight sweetness is soon met by a building bitterness.
A splendid selection for a swill before or after 6pm!
