"It allows us to break down the raw materials of beer in a way that's educational for drinkers and fun for us," says bar manager Siobhan Karin. "Some hops have a passionfruit flavour that works great in cocktails, and there's intrigue for people in seeing something like a stout added to give a cocktail a little sweetness," she says. "The idea of beer cocktails gives them something a little different and was really popular with a lot of girls over the spring racing carnival." The quirkiness of cocktails aside, the business of beer in Victoria is unrecognisable compared with a few years ago. The main players, CUB and Lion Nathan, still dominate, but sales of brands such as VB are falling. Bureau of Statistics figures show beer as a percentage of total alcohol consumed has dropped to a 61-year low — 44 per cent — as the popularity of wine continues to grow. Yet it's a different story in the craft beer sector. While micro-breweries start from a smaller base, representing only a tiny proportion of overall beer sales, they are bucking the trend. Hard figures are tightly guarded, but Cam Hines, from Melbourne's longest established micro-brewery, Richmond's Mountain Goat, says that five years ago his business was growing at about 10 per cent a year. Last year the figure was 40 per cent.

New micro-breweries are appearing all the time. The Mornington Peninsula Brewery opened in October and two under construction in Brunswick expect to have their first beers ready in months. The first beer from a micro-brewery in Forrest, in Victoria's south-west, hits the taps any day and Gippsland is gaining another micro-brewery at Bruthen. Meanwhile, a group of lads has taken the lease on a site close to CUB's headquarters, with a plan to unleash such wonders as high-alcohol pumpkin and gingerbread beers next year. Then there are the bars. Led by the likes of Beer DeLuxe, the Local Taphouse, Mrs Parma's and Richmond's Royston Hotel, a growing number are offering a kaleidoscopic choice. Biero, in Little Lonsdale Street, installed a world-first "beer vault" system when it opened in May, so drinkers could sample expensive bottled beers, with the remainder kept in pressure and temperature-controlled cylinders behind the bar. Young & Jackson's hosts showcases of small-brewery beers in its Chloe's Bar. It's also becoming the norm to find hundreds of varieties at bottle shops such as Blackhearts & Sparrows, Slowbeer and Purvis Beer. And what of the beer? With many smaller breweries now well established, the quality and consistency of micro-brewed beer is higher than ever. Beers that would have raised eyebrows on their release — Mountain Goat's Hightail or Little Creatures Pale, for example — are now staples. In their place and pushing the margins are 8 per cent-plus Belgian styles, coffee and chocolate beers, fruit-infused ales and those aged in wine barrels.

Feral, in Western Australia, brews a beer fermented with wild Swan Valley yeasts, while a 10 per cent Imperial India Pale Ale called Spartacus, from New South Wales' Murray's Brewery, proved popular in Melbourne. With styles imported from North America, Europe and Japan, the variety, ingredients, strengths and methods of brewing seem endless. It is a change that's been a long time coming — Grand Ridge started brewing in Mirboo North in the late '80s, and Mountain Goat's first beer was released 13 years ago — but has picked up pace now, and even the industry veterans are surprised. "It's reached the point of critical mass," says Ron Feruglio, founder of Temple Brewing. With wife Renata, he is building a brewery, bar and brasserie in Brunswick that will open in a few months. "There are a lot of bars directing people towards new beers and events — with a focus on beer — that are educating the punters, who in turn have embraced it and are quite keen to look at Australian beer," Feruglio says. "Craft brewers have responded with new beers and it has picked up its own momentum.

"It's a good motivation for brewers knowing that when you bring a beer out like the braggots [an extremely rare, mediaeval style of honey beer that two Victorian brewers released last year] you can be confident there's sufficient people to embrace it." Unlike previous attempts at establishing an alternative small-scale beer scene in Australia, it looks as if this time it's here to stay. In Victoria and WA, at least, bar owners have been willing to ignore incentives to stay with the established breweries. A handful of restaurants has realised it makes little sense to have an exquisite wine list sitting next to six commercial lagers. That said, speak to any visitor from interstate with a keen interest in beer and they'll tell you how lucky Victorians are. For a variety of reasons, the situation in other states is quite different. Matt Kirkegaard, Brisbane-based founder of online magazine Australian Brews News, sounds a cautious note. "Until the time that every venue feels the need to have something interesting on tap, then it's really a series of local insurgencies," he says. "Melbourne is the engine room, but when even one of the big two brewers can say that blonde [low-carbohydrate] beer is the future, then any talk of a revolution is premature. "Beer is still very much a subculture. It needs to break out of the inner-city bars and show that it's more than flavour of the month."

The growing popularity of craft beers is attracting people keen to cash in without sharing the ethos of smaller brewers, he says. Brands that boast a fantastic provenance can prove to be little more than a marketing exercise with a pretty label on a beer brewed in bulk by a larger brewery. "Marketing has the potential to damage the industry," he says. "There are people trotting out irrelevant back stories, which damages things for the genuine craft brewers who are leading the drive towards better beer." In Brisbane, Kirkegaard is well placed to sound a note of caution. While Melbourne bars fight over every new limited release from the country's leading brewers, Brisbane has only a couple of venues with a beer list to speak of. In NSW, it's little better. Murray Howe, founder of one of the state's leading micro-breweries, Murray's in Port Stephens, says: "The two biggest brewing companies in Australia aren't interested in allowing the small-brewing movement to grow. The reason that Victoria is the epicentre on the east coast is because local licensing laws around Melbourne have allowed small, artisan brewers to prosper. "The difficulty around NSW is that we have very unenlightened publicans and licensees, who are used to being controlled by the big breweries, who have a lot of money and control the draught beer market in the state." Howe offers a simple demonstration of the difference in attitude. If he has a new beer coming out and calls 40 Melbourne venues, he'll be offered 39 meetings; if he tries the same in NSW, the first thing people ask is what they'll get free. He does, however, believe there have been encouraging signs in the past year, with a handful of smaller pubs willing to take on beers from new breweries.

"We're very fortunate that there's a flavour revolution going on. I pour beers every weekend and get the chance to see what people are saying and how they respond. The younger generation — even some of the older guys — are realising: what's the point of drinking something that doesn't taste great? "Australians are becoming more sophisticated and access to better beer venues is allowing people to have more choice," Howe says. "If they're going to spend $10 on a stubby, then they want some excitement from it. Craft brewing isn't about being the biggest — it's about doing the best." In Victoria, however, the Atrium at Federation Square was full to bursting over two evenings for the last Victorian Micro-breweries Showcase. Eighteen months earlier, it attracted a dozen or so exhibitors and a few hundred visitors; this time, there were more than 20 stalls and the 900 seats sold out on both days, with people turned away at the door. The crowd included a fair number of what could reasonably be called traditional beer folk, but they were far from the majority. Among them was Mariella Mejia, an events organiser and blogger, who says: "For me, it started when Mountain Goat came on at my local, the GB in Richmond, and all of a sudden I realised beer wasn't just one flavour. As the foodie movement has come in, it's spread to beverages and now I'm seeing a lot of my friends move from mainstream sweet ciders to try different beers."

With Chris Badenoch taking his love of cooking with beer from the studios of MasterChef to Iron Chef — and into the kitchen of his Josie Bones restaurant, which opened in December in Collingwood, the movement is reaching a wider audience and changing perceptions. It's a reputation that's even spreading overseas. In the past two years, beers from the likes of Holgate, in Woodend, and the Gold Coast's Burleigh Brewing have picked up top prizes at competitions in Britain and the United States. Late last year, I was contacted by the owners of a specialist beer bar in England, asking for help obtaining beer for an Australian craft beer festival in London. It's a remarkable leap forward for a country where, until recently, the readily available beers were Foster's and XXXX. While experience tells us to be wary and the market for craft beer remains tiny, the wheels of revolution are turning. Murray Howe, despite his travails in the tough Sydney market, is confident.

"We're still two or three years behind New Zealand, and 10 behind the US," he says. "But I always knew craft beer would win." COVER STORY New and coming releases to look out for, from the sessionable to the extreme, in good beer bars and bottle shops. Mountain Goat Rare Breed Double Hightail The Richmond brewery's original beer, the Hightail, but bigger in every sense, has won favour among beer aficionados since appearing under its Rare Breed banner last year. goatbeer.com.au

Stone & Wood Red Relief So named because the Byron Bay brewers are asking publicans to donate profits to the Queensland flood appeal, Red Relief is also a prototype for their much-anticipated third permanent beer. stoneandwood.com.au Murray's Spartacus Murray's monthly specials are always worth hunting down with this, a 10 per cent Imperial India Pale Ale, an impressive feat of brewing. A showcase for big, ballsy hops, it made its debut in kegs last year and appears in bottles for the first time this month. murraysbrewingco.com.au Feral Hop Hog

Not exactly new — it won Champion Ale in 2009 — but only now available fairly widely in bottles, this beauty from WA's most adventurous brewery is as good an American IPA as you'll get without crossing the Pacific. feralbrewing.com.au Moon Dog's first beer If you want to go truly left field, keep an eye out for the first beer from this soon-to-open Richmond micro-brewery. Its two kegs so far are an Imperial Spiced Pumpkin Stout and a Gingerbread Brown Ale. moondogbrewing.com.au