John Tierney has put up an excellent and informative post today about the state of the American brewing market.

Short version: the biggest sellers are still the blandest water-beers (Bud Light as #1, Coors Light as #2); but those big sales are dropping fast. Meanwhile craft beers, of which Samuel Adams is by far the largest and Sierra Nevada #2, claim only a tiny sliver of the market but are the main category that's growing. You could view that tiny sliver—10 million cases a year for Sam Adams, versus 300 million (!) for Bud Light—as discouraging. Or you could use the increase for craft beers—Sam Adams up 11 percent last year, while Bud Light was down 1 percent—to give yourself heart. Myself, I always prefer to see the growler as half full rather than half empty.

I mention this to highlight John's post for anyone who might have missed it, and also as an excuse for some growler-half-full news I've meant to mention for months. Australia, which in most other ways has made itself into an astonishingly pleasurable food-and-drink paradise, has badly lagged in the beer department. Many Aussies are annoyed by the yokel image of their country conveyed by the Foster's "that's Australian for beer" commercials, although instead of yokel they would say "ocker." But weak and watery Foster's has been a fair representation of what the country's pubs generally* have had on offer.

[* Yes, yes, there have been exceptions. The Lord Nelson "Brewery Hotel" in Sydney, at right, is a place where I have spent an embarrassingly large percentage of my total time on Australian soil. Its Three Sheets Australian Pale Ale is my standard there. Plus, the MooBrew brewery in Tasmania, and some others—including the James Squire brewpub in the Salamanca area of Hobart, Tasmania, shown below. It's just that, compared with omnipresent good wines and great food, Aussie brews have fallen short.]

Until just now. The picture at the very top of this item shows an 11-beer range of craft beers. They run from Hop Hog IPA, made by the newish Feral Brewing Company in Western Australia (at far left), to Stowaway IPA from the better-known James Squire Brewery in New South Wales (at right). I bought all those bottles and lugged them home on a visit a few months ago to the wonderful Oak Barrel bottle shop in Sydney, below.

The "Aromatic Spelt Ale" in the middle of that 11-beer range turns out to be an acquired taste that I don't really want to acquire. Ugh! The other 10 were very impressive and have removed the only quality-of-life reason not to live in Australia. A recent local ranking put Feral's Hop Hog at the top.

The local press is carrying beer specials (right), and in general it is a great time to be an Aussie or visitor in search of non-watery beer.