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Queensland has XXXX, Victoria has VB and NSW has Tooheys, but Canberra lacks a beer with which local drinkers can identify their city. Canberra's brewers are hoping to change that, with one company opening a second site as demand grows for local lager. BentSpoke Brewing received the keys to its new premises in Mitchell on Monday, paving the way for a brewery, cannery and retail space to open in the first half of 2016. Wedged between annexes of the Australian War Memorial and National Film and Sound Archives, the warehouse will complement BentSpoke's microbrewery and taphouse in Braddon. Once the new facility is fully operational, the brewery will distribute cans, cartons and kegs to customers both onsite as well as at bottle shops around the ACT, while trying to tap into the rapidly-developing housing belt from Gungahlin south along the proposed light rail line. "You'll be able to walk in, you'll see all the brewing in operation, you'll see the packaging in operation, you'll be able to sit down and have a beer or grab a pizza," owner and head brewer Richard Watkins said. "The demographic is a family-focused area so we're going to cater to families coming in, especially on weekends." Mr Watkins said Canberrans had embraced locally-crafted beers since BentSpoke and fellow brewers Zierholz, Pact Beer and the Wig and Pen came on the scene over the last decade. He said regardless of which brewer came out on top, there were plenty of opportunities for the city's beer aficionados to find a parochial choice of beverage. Packaging the beer into cartons and cans was part of that ambition. "I hope we're not the last if we are the first [to package beer locally], because I think it would be great to have three or four breweries that would put their beer in a package and sell it at local bottle shops," Mr Watkins said. "I think Canberrans are a lot more passionate about local products than the New South Welshmen or maybe the Victorians, but one of the things that we don't really have a choice with at the moment is picking up a beer in our bottle shops that's brewed in Canberra." Canberra Beer Week will launch on Thursday and run through to Wednesday, November 11, but Mr Watkins said the timing of the key handover at the Mitchell warehouse was coincidental. He also said the delineation between the "craft beer" market, compared to major national and international operations, was not as marked as many believe it to be. "I'm in a beer market; I don't want to segregate us into craft beer, everybody in the industry is about beer," he said. "That doesn't mean to say that people in Canberra aren't passionate about local produce. There's no reason we can't produce beers that people taste once and go, 'you know what, it's not too bad, it's made just around the corner, let's try it again'."

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