IT may not seem like an obvious beer choice but punters can't seem to get enough of the Outback Brewing Co's Strawberry Milkshake IPA.
It might sound like a gimmick, but the dusty pink Indian Pale Ale has some serious beer credentials.
It has become a firm favourite at beer festivals around the country - and isn't coming off Outback Brewing's brew schedule any time soon.
The creation is among a growing list of regular and occasionally out-there flavours devised by twins Adam and Peter Watts, who spent about two years and a bit under $200,000 building their own microbrewery on Peter's block at Lower Chittering to indulge and expand on their home brewing hobby.
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The brothers have a decade of mateship and brewing experience with Graeme White, at Ironbark Brewery, in the Swan Valley and since their first public event at a Taste of Chittering in August 2018, they have attracted a loyal following and plenty of interest and invitations to beer festivals around Australia.
They picked up the BWS People's Choice award at BeerFest in Perth in January last year for their offering, which included the Strawberry Milkshake IPA, a Raspberry Cider and Session Ginger Beer.
"I bought it out at a festival last year as a trial and error brew,'' said Adam of the strawberry IPA.
"It is now one of our biggest sellers as our festival beer.
"It is an IPA with crushed strawberries mixed in it and lactose instead of milk, lactose gives it the creamy, milky texture without milk.
"It literally tastes like a strawberry milkshake, but it is six per cent (alcohol per volume).''
Their latest idea, which will come to fruition over the summer, is for a 500 litre batch of wholly Western Australian-made Pilsner - which will be made with all WA grain, saaz hops grown by Great Southern Hops and a base malt farmed at Tammin.
The hops will be from the first commercial harvest at Great Southern Hops and Adam and Peter are planning on heading down to Aaron and Laura Alexander's hops yard at Youngs Siding, between Denmark and Albany, to help them pick the crop.
The plan ties in with the brothers "all natural'' brewing philosophy.
There are no preservatives in the brews, they are not pasteurised and the pair use rainwater collected on the property and top quality Australian ingredients.
Fruit for the ciders is crushed on site.
"We get apples from farms in Manjimup and Donnybrook and the ginger from Bundaberg, in Queensland,'' Adam said.
"We use Coopers' malt, it's Australian malt and still a family-owned business and Bintani's signature malt."
Adam said the brothers got into home brewing in the early 2000s, when craft and microbreweries such as Little Creatures, in Fremantle and Feral Brewing, in the Swan Valley, emerged and captured their and other drinkers' attentions.
The brothers are both refrigeration engineers from Midland and while not huge drinkers, they enjoyed a beer, decided they liked drinking their own product and so developed a home brewing hobby.
About 18 months ago, the pair decided to "roll with their own'' microbrewery, inspired by their decade-long mateship and work with Graeme.
Their marketing is still a work in progress, but Outback Brewing Co and its social media hashtag #MadeForMates sits perfectly with their larrikin, Aussie-style humour.
"We pretty much bit the bullet, got a liquor licence and a brand name - we acquired it from a receiver from a company that had gone bankrupt - and we went with it,'' Adam said.
They built their production facility at Lower Chittering themselves, using an existing shed and their trade skills to concrete the floor, build up the walls and set up a cool room.
"We are debt-free, we own it all, we have a good advantage,'' Adam said.
"We are priced competitively to go against the big boys."
It's a salient point in the fast growing national craft brewing space - with industry estimates of 693 craft beer breweries, brew pubs and contract brewers now operating around Australia.
About 95 breweries opened in Australia just last year, according to Craft Beer Reviewer Australia, including 11 new breweries in WA.
It might seem a lot, particularly considering that the rate of alcohol consumption is going down in Australia.
But the national beer market is still worth $6.5 billion annually - and within that craft brewing is growing at a rate of about 10pc a year.
It is the only category within the market that reports continuous growth and offers seemingly bountiful opportunities for existing and new players - with many craft brewers struggling to keep pace with consumer demand.
Craft brewers make up about 5pc of the beer market, about 65pc of them are based in rural and regional areas and they represent a generational shift in the beer drinking market, towards high quality, boutique production from small, local and independent providers using locally-sourced, high quality ingredients.
But it can be tricky for consumers to find the true independent craft beers as the market is constantly changing and many successful boutique labels get bought out by the biggest players - including Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev (Matilda Bay, Yak Ales and Cascade), Japan's Kirin (James Squire, Little Creatures, Furphy and White Rabbit) and Asahi (Mountain Goat, Green Beacon, Cricketers Arms) and America's Coca Cola (Feral).
In WA, Gage Roads is focused on its craft beer brands, such as Atomic, Single Fin, Little Dove, Alby and Matso's.
Award-winning Gold Coast-based brewery Balter became the latest independent to be acquired earlier this month, after being sold to Carlton and United Breweries (a subsidiary of ABinBev), joining 4Pines and Pirate Life in the CUB stable.
Adam is mindful of the trend and the huge marketing imperative for breweries to stand out from the crowd and said Outback Brewing Co would consciously remain small, family-owned and local.
The brothers limit their output to 1200L per brew and are sticking to a core range of a ginger beer, apple cider, Aussie Pilsner and a new Outback Lager, plus some limited batch, trial and error festival brews.
"Brewing has become a marketing industry now,'' Adam said.
"But we literally do everything ourselves - we do our own deliveries, our own sales, our own brewing and our own marketing - we run it all in-house.
"And we try to keep it small, up to 1200L per brew.
"The bigger you go, the more inconsistent you are.''
They keep the process pretty simple too - they don't run a cellar door - only the production facility and they distribute within their local area via Nesci Estate Wine Farms, the Gingin Hotel, Swan Valley Brewing Company and the Henley Brook Tavern.
They are working on expanding that network and are in the process of building a website to allow for direct orders.
They sell off tap and smaller 1-2L 'squealer' kegs direct to consumers at festivals and a lot of their production gets sent to the Eastern States for the extensive and popular beer festival circuit there, which now runs year-round.
"In the past 18 months we have doubled our output to what we wanted to do and the forecast for the next 12 months is to pretty much double it again,'' said Adam, of the business which is still run pretty much part-time.
"We had to do some quick upgrades and get more equipment to cope with the load that we have got coming through.
"Mid-2020 we are going to start canning and bottling ourselves.
"I was hoping to do it this year, but time ran away from us.''
Adam said they had regular requests from home brewers and so will also clean, refill and deliver 20L home brewer's kegs and potentially a bulk lot of mates' squealers, which are popular for parties.
"The only reason we do our own deliveries is we keep them cold the whole way,'' Adam said.
"We have no preservatives and we don't pasteurise it.
"It's a natural product, but that does means it's going to go off if you leave it out in the sun.''
The brothers keep it interesting - and have had success - with their smaller, experimental festival batches.
It takes them about three to four weeks to make a specialty beer, which is trialled in a 150L pilot batch - which can be poured out if the contents are no good - and then run in 500L batches.
Along with the Strawberry Milkshake IPA they have experimented with a mango beer, a cold drip coffee stout and a Jacks 'n' Cola beer and cider aged in Jack Daniels barrels (made with Rogue Brewing and Ellerslie Hops).
They emptied a keg of blueberry cider, made from Chittering Valley blueberries, at Whalebone Brewing Company in Exmouth to raise money towards Movember.
And last August the brothers were approached by the Shire of Chittering to recreate in ale form the renowned Bindoon Bakehaus Banoffee Éclair - once famously scoffed by Prince Harry during an army reserves training stint in 2016 - for this year's Taste of Chittering festival.
"We said we would have a crack,'' Adam said.
"We got the custard flavour in there, we got the creaminess flavour in there with the lactose, we actually hit it pretty spot on. People were like 'wow'.
"It is trial and error to get the flavour right.
"You brew a base beer and you add custard essence, apples, chocolate.
"We had an éclair sitting there that we would taste as we went."
A bubble gum flavoured cider proved more of a challenge - but was worth it in the end.
"It was a pain in the arse to make,'' Adam said.
"We used a couple of hundred packs of Hubba Bubba, melted it down and thinned it out.
"But actually it was surprising, it tastes like fairly floss and it is one of our biggest sellers as well.''
