Illawarra Brewing Co
One of my favourite local breweries I’ve had the good fortune to come across is Illawarra Brewing Co. in Wollongong.
As with many craft breweries these days, Illawarra Brewing Co. is tucked into a row of industrial units along Montague Street in North Wollongong. They also have a brewpub location at WIN Entertainment Centre downtown, but for the purposes of this post I’ll be focusing on the brewery itself.
The interior space strikes the balance of being a comfortable place to hang out while still being very apparently a working brewery. Bar stools and communal tables are interspersed with stacks of kegs and bags of grain. There’s even an upstairs loft from which you can casually sip a beverage and survey all of the goings-on on the ground floor.
On the weekends, you’ll most often find a food truck parked out front and live music on the stage amongst the kegs. They’ve also recently added a pool table and a few arcade games to give you even more reasons to stick around for a bit of a session (as if any additional reasons were needed).
And that brings me to the beer itself. There are usually about 6 or 7 offerings at any given time from Illawarra Brewing Co and usually a guest tap or two to round it out. The beer is generally very good across the range. I personally have yet to have a beer that I dislike here, but for me there are two excellent beers, and one stupendous beer among them. The two excellent honourable mention beers are the Apocalypto IPA and the Shot in the Dark Stout. The Apocalypto IPA is fantastically heavy on the citra hops but somehow manages to avoid tipping over into overly-fruity or even NEIPA territory as a lot of IPA’s these days seem to do. It’s hoppy and it’s tart and it’s great.
The Shot in the Dark Stout is an excellent example of an Australian stout. It has all the richness and depth you want from a stout without being super heavy and while maintaining a light drinkability that makes it just as pleasant on a warm summer arvo as a frosty winter evening.
But as good as those two are, the clear winner, and one of my favourite beers full stop is the Chuck Norris Red IPA (it’s a red with a kick, get it?). As has been established at multiple points in this blog, a red IPA is definitely my favourite genre of beer, and this is a damn good one. It’s a rich, dark red that you almost have to hold up to the light to see that it is indeed a red and not a porter or stout. At first sip, there’s a rich malty and even slightly fruity flavour. Just as you start recognizing and enjoying that initial taste, the hops storm in with a fantastic, bitter, hoppy kick to the teeth worthy of the beer’s name.
I would comfortably place Chuck Norris among my top 10 beers. Admittedly I’m often accused of having a top 10 list that is strongly influenced by recency bias and, in my over enthusiasm for the subject, sometimes seems to include more than 10 beers. But that being said, Chuck Norris is one of my top 10 beers!
Illwarra Brewing Co churns out some really really good beers and serves them up in a venue that’s good fun to hang out in. Ticks all the boxes as far as I’m concerned.