Last week I was lucky enough to get to go to the opening day of new brewery called Rocky Ridge, except they are not new and the actual brewery isn't new either, stick with me here.
Plenty of samples happening here
Rocky Ridge are from Western Australia and started back in 2017. They are named after the ridge of rocks on their farm - this is a long way from my home in Melbourne, google maps tells me about 3,500km. They are a pretty darn good brewery and I tended to pick up their beers whenever I saw them, which was probably not as often as I would have liked, as it's tough to ship beer across a country as big as Australia. In fact some of the Rocky Ridge beers I had were in Singapore which is only 400Km further away from the brewery in WA than Melbourne is.
And the brewery itself, well that was the former home of Thunder Road, which was one of the more confusing breweries that existed in Brunswick, which is a inner city Suburb of Melbourne, about 4.5km from my house. They started in 2011 which is early in the craft beer scene in Melbourne, and when I was more involved in the industry (in fact if you google Thunder Road brewery and look at 'News' a story I wrote about them in 2012 when I used to write for a few different publications is still the fifth most popular result) and I must admit I never understood what they were doing, they had an large sized brewery for the time in a craft beer hotspot, but they never seemed to open that to the public, they had good beer but it was released under some weird brands. All in all it made no sense.
A Reasonable sized brewery
Not surprisingly they eventually decided to sell the brewery (and the brands) and Rocky Ridge wanted to brew beer on the East Coast of Australia rather than shipping it across the big old desert that's seperates Perth from the rest of Australia so they bought it, rebranded it as Rocky Ridge and finally opened it to the public.
So 12 years after I rubbished the marketing plan of Thunder Road I sit in their former brewery drinking another brands free beer and thinking this is a amazing venue and this is amazing beer and the world is a better place for having Rocky Ridge buy Thunder Road.
A milkshake IPA and some fries
And what of the beer, well there so many highlights - Untappd tells me I sampled 13 different beers from the 32 odd on tap and I have to say all almost all of them were very good. The lowlight might have been the a green beer called 'Microwave glowstick' which was all gimmick and no substance. But the highlights included:
A Milkshake IPA called 'Never heard of it'
A 16% Barleywine called 'Master of Kettles' this was so good, I had it twice.
A 10% triple IPA called 'Rock Juice 14.1 which suggests to me this is the 14th iteration of the beer, and I'm telling you practice makes perfect
and
a 12.5% Imperial Stour called DB which was just insane.
The Master of Kettles almost all drunk
So all in all it was an amazing afternoon and I'll definitely be back to try the other 20 odd beers I missed.
A lot more beers to be had