With the Olympics now fully underway, we figured it might be fun to fill you in on the drinking preferences of some of the hottest medal contending countries. For the next two weeks, we will be introducing you to the boozing ways of some of the top territories. Oh, and spoiler alert! The USA is predicted to win the most medals in the 2012 Olympic games, so in the interest of being modest, we won’t be evaluating our country’s drinking habits. This blog is called Drinking in America…we talk about it every day!
The way we see it is if we aren’t good enough to compete in the Olympics, we might as well drink like champions.
Today’s country is: AUSTRALIA
Legal drinking age
18 years old
Alcoholic beverages made in Australia
• Victoria Bitter (beer), brewed in Melbourne, Victoria
• XXXX (beer), brewed in Milton, Brisbane
• Tooheys (beer), brewed in Sydney, New South Wales
• Yellow Tail (wine), produced in Yenda, Australia
• Penfolds Grange (wine), produced in Magill and Barossa Valley, South Australia
• Wolf Blass (wine), produced in Barossa Valley, South Australia
• Anjea (vodka), produced in North Queensland
• Bundaberg (rum), produced in Bundaberg, Australia
• What are the Australians most fond of? Here’s a good list we found.
Brewery Tours
• The XXXX Ale House and Brewery Tour at the Castlemaine Perkins Brewery: This Brewery was established way back in 1878 and is at Milton, just west of Brisbane. If you visit in the early evening, you get a free BBQ dinner on their balcony!
• Cascasde Brewery Co. in South Hobart, Tasmania offers some serious touring options. You can take a 2 hour tour of the actual brewery, a 1 hour “Heritage Tour” which delves in to the history and includes tastings, or just sit your butt down and enjoy a gourmet beer and food matching – they even send you home with your own personalized beer label.
Fun Facts:
• Foster’s beer is “Australian for Beer” and is an Australian brand, but Australians don’t really dig it. If you go to Australia and order a Foster’s, they will know you’re a tourist.
• Australia is the 4th largest producer of wine in the world.
• In 1955, Australian Prime Minister Robert Hawke drank 2 ½ pints of beer in 11 seconds. This landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records.
• Forget “liquor store” – you go to the “bottle shop” in Australia
• Records from Queensland in 1861 show that there was 1 pub for every 39 people.