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I'm Willie Simpson from the Seven Sheds Brewery.
We're based at Railton on the Northwest Coast.
We opened five years ago. We only had Kentish
Ale
so people who came for the Cellar door only
had one beer.
And y'know it's a beer, we brew the beer because
we like to drink it
but if other people didn't want to drink it
and buy it then we didn't have a business.
We're here five years later and now we've
got ten different beers on tap so I guess
it must have worked.
So, um this is the porter beer which you can
see is a pretty dark, complex brew.
Um, now that's available at the moment
but this single batch of porter we also fill
two very special casks,
French oak casks that have previously held
some
very fine Tasmanian pinot noir.
We filled them with this porter, um,
we stowed them on board the Spirit of Tasmania,
and the plan is to leave them there for two
months going backwards and forwards between Devonport and Melbourne
about fifty times which we reckon is about
equivalent to
the sea journey from England out to Australia
and by doing that we're recreating
um, the journey of the first official record
of
beer arriving in this colony of Australia
was some um,
casks of porter
of all of the second fleet in 1792.
So it's having a bit of fun and trying to
recreate some history.
So Gerry Gaffney also lives in Railton and
he's the manager of
hospitality services aboard Spirit of Tasmania
and we had an open
hop picking day and Jerry fronted up and picked
hops for a few hours and had one or two beers and yeah, helped the process.
I probably did all of the hard work in it.
Stood out in the rain and picked the hops
so we could get them all done on time.
Willie and I loaded the barrels on board Spirit
of Tasmania
on the twentieth
of April
at nine-thirty in the morning where they'll
stay
for fifty trips or the equivalent of 25,000kms.
I'm very much looking forward to being involved
with the "Flavours of Tassie" aboard the Spirit of Tasmania this
winter.
We'll be doing an informal
pre-beer tasting before dinner and I'm sure
it won't be hard to get a few people to roll
up.
Hopefully it will encourage more people to
come and visit us or try our Seven Sheds beers.
So when passengers arrive in Devonport in
the Spirit of Tasmania when they get off in their car
we're only twenty, twenty-five minutes away.
Um,
but we don't open our cellar door until eleven
in the morning so they might just want to do a sidestep to
Amber's Chocolate Factory and have breakfast
or
Christmas Hills Raspberry Farm.
If they're heading up to Cradle Mountain we're
on the way.
If they're heading south, or further northwest
we're only ten minutes off the main highway.
So we hope
and we know when you do come and visit us
at Seven Sheds.