Sauce Brewing

After a brief hiatus, Cory Loves Beer is back with a trip back to Sydney’s Inner West and Sauce Brewing.  As discussed previously on the blog, the Inner West is teeming with good craft breweries such as Wayward and Staves (plus a number of brewers such as Young Henry’s, Stockade, Grifter, and several others that will definitely be discussed in future posts).  But even with that level of a quality and crowded market, Sauce Brewing more than holds its own using cunning tactics which I will elaborate on shortly.

Like many craft breweries these days, Sauce’s brewery and taproom is located in the backstreets of an industrial area (this one in Marrickville).  However, this isn’t just a non-descript unit is a moderately new non-descript industrial park.  Don’t get me wrong, some of my all-time favourite breweries are located in precisely that kind of location (Last Rites in Hobart springs to mind).  But Sauce’s home is in a cool old-school ginormous warehouse.  Without some conveniently placed signage, on the corner and at the entrance to the carpark, the only way to find the place would be to follow the amazing smell of the various awesome grilled meats wafting out from the barbecue out front. 

The day I visited, it was hammering down with rain.  But that did little to mute the enthusiasm of the hordes of beer-lovers that crowded the warehouse space.  The only drawback was the pleasant looking beer garden at the rear of the taproom was not particularly usable on the day.   Other than that, though, the venue was plenty big, plenty comfortable, and struck the perfect balance between brewery functionality (huge vats and stacks of canned beer) and comfort (welcoming bar and staff and plenty of seating).

Food-wise the options are a few tasty snacks from behind the bar, or the barbeque out front.  I don’t know if the barbeque is a permanent fixture or just on Saturdays, and I didn’t sample either on this particular occasion, but the meat that was coming off of that grill looked and smelled fantastic.

So yes, cool venue, food looked great, but most importanly now onto the beer.  Sauce Brewing had a varied and extensive taplist (something like 14 of their beers on tap for memory).  I was there with a couple of mates so between us we were able to sample them all.  The only one of them I didn’t really care for was the Bloody Mary Sour (which, to be fair, tasted exactly as advertised). There were some good lagers and a good pilsner too. 

But, as I alluded to in the intro, for my money, Sauce’s best beers expertly utilised a not-so-secret (and my personal favourite) tool in the brewers’ arsenal: hops.  It’s not that their beers simply contained a crap-ton of hops.  It’s the type of hoppiness.   I think the term ‘hop profile’ applies here in some capacity.  I love hoppy beers but I love some types of hoppy more than others.  And Sauce’s beers are the exact right type of hoppy for me. 

But it wasn’t just the quality, but the variety of hoppy beers on offer that was noteworthy as well.  Some of the best were the flagship Hop Sauce pale ale and Extra Hop Sauce IPA.  Both have a perfectly balanced hop kick without resorting to pure volume of hops (which is by no means a bad thing in my book, just not what they’ve done here).  Even the Piss-Weak Sauce session IPA was great; probably one of the best mid-strengths I’ve had full stop.

For me, though, the standouts were the Bubble and Squeak New England IPA and the Sabarillo Juicy IPA.  Both are cloudy IPA’s with a mighty hop kick and a citrusy hazy bite.  Here’s where my beer vocabulary fails me a little bit, because these two standouts are definitely different beers despite my identical description of them both.  All I can really say is they are both fantastic, so I think the best way to overcome my poor descriptive skills would be to go to Sauce and get a schooner of each.  Because I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

It’s no secret that Sydney’s Inner West is definitely a hotbed of good craft breweries.   And Sauce Brewing is right up there with the best.  But the hoppy offerings are definitely Sauce’s strong suit.  If you enjoy the hoppy beers I’ve recommended previously on this blog as much as I do, then you will definitely enjoy what Sauce is putting out.