Nowhereman Brewing

This week’s brewery is another excellent entry from back over in Perth: Nowhereman Brewing.

Nowhereman is in the very cool and trendy (at least to my east coast eyes) suburb of Leederville.  It seems like every time I’m in Perth, Leederville has  a cool new place to eat or drink.  And leading the way in that regard (especially with the drinking bit) is Nowhereman Brewing.

Nowhereman is tucked in a backstreet on the other side of the Mitchell Freeway from most of Leederville’s trendier locales.  It sits amongst business parks and semi-industrial units.  But once you find it and walk inside, it’s a completely different feeling.  It’s still pretty apparent that you’re in an industrial unit and there’s serious beer making business being done in the back.  However, the bar area is instantly welcoming, comfortable, and a great place to drink beer.  Sport is on the big screen TV, aromas of tasty pizza wafting from the back, and a relaxed, unhurried atmosphere where you could (and I did) happily wile away an afternoon

For me, the strength of Nowhereman’s beer repertoire is the breadth of its variety.  My tasting tray looked like a beery kaleidoscope.  While I didn’t love all of it, I loved most of it, and I reckon that’s the point of visiting breweries and sampling all of their wares.  You’re going to find some you like, some you love, and some that aren’t quite your thing.  But regardless, you generally expand your beer horizons.

The standouts for me were the Crate Digger Pale Ale from the core range and the Cherry Psycho Sour IPA that was a seasonal offering when I visited.  Ironically, after my mini-rant about expanding beer horizons, the thing that stood out about Crate Digger wasn’t that it stretched any boundaries or did anything super funky.  It’s that it just a really really tasty hoppy ale.  And there’s something to be said about doing something simply but doing it damn well.

The Cherry Psycho, on the other hand, was on the other end of the spectrum.  I love IPA’s and am always wary of tweaking them with something slightly left field.  I’ve tried a number of sour IPA’s over the years, but only really enjoyed one or two of them.  However, this was one of them.  Too often when trying to make an innovative beer, it seems like some brewers use different flavours that work really well separately, but just clash when combined.  Although I lack the vocabulary to describe it exactly, I can say that the sourness complemented and didn’t overpower the hoppiness.

So while Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, among several others have legit claims of being Australia’s craft beer capital, Perth is very much in the conversation (and pretty close to the top of the conversation at that).  Nowhereman Brewing is at the front of Perth’s craft beer vanguard.  If you find yourself out west, get over to Leederville and stop into Nowhereman.  Not only are their beers tasty, but they’re unique as well.  And in a craft beer market that keeps getting more and more crowded, a place that can make beers that are both is more than deserving of a visit.