How Pete McDonald & Howie Croft at Wedgetail Brewing made Australia's best beer: a stunning dark lager

West Australian

4 days ago

Tucked in a quiet corner down the back streets of Mandurah, no one would assume that Wedgetail Brewing is home to Australia's best beer.
But it's official: One of Mandurah's best-kept secrets is officially home to the country's best beer — a dark lager that snagged the champion Australian beer trophy at the Australian International Beer Awards, the world's biggest annual beer competition, earlier this month.
Pete McDonald and Howie Croft opened Wedgetail Brewing about 18 months ago and the taproom has quickly become a favourite among locals.
But the recent success at the AIBAs proved what locals already knew: the beers Howie and Pete and producing are something special.
It's a far cry from the shed on head brewer Howie's property, where the pair first began experimenting with homebrews.
'Our first beers were probably pretty ropey,' Pete laughed.
'Typically with home brewing, you start off with kits, a lot of the work is done for you, it's cheap alcohol at first, and then you start getting the hang of it, and with a lot of learning and reading, you realise there's a bit more to it.'
The duo met while working in WA's north decades ago and decided to take the plunge and open the taproom after Howie was made redundant.
The brewery's name comes from the Wedgetails the pair would encounter while flying choppers over the Pilbara.
The winning beer in question, the dark lager, is something Howie says he's been working on for a decade.
The dark lager is served looking as one would expect but the taste is a surprise. It has all the best tasting notes of a dark lager: coffee, malt, and chocolate.
But it leaves the drinker with none of the worst elements, no overwhelming bitterness and none of that fullness that discourages a second pint.
The dark lager didn't just take out the top gong at the AIBAs but also best independent beer and best dark lager.
Surprisingly, though, the brewery's newly crowned 'best' beer isn't the founders' favourite.
'Mine is the IPA. I keep going back to that, it's an older style traditional IPA and that's maybe my roots, I suppose,' Pete said.
'Mine's the draught, it's quite refreshing,' Howie added.
The venue is always busy and has been embraced by the community.
'This place wouldn't exist without them; we would have fallen flat on our face without that support,' Pete said.
Currently, the only way to drink a beer outside of the taproom is to fill up a growler, but the pair recently invested in a canning machine and are hoping to begin selling their products in local bottleshops soon.
'We'll get our heads around that, and we'll be canning our own product directly,' Pete said.
'It'll be a lot more flexible, a lot more efficient and cheaper. So watch this space, we'll be coming out with cans too.'
Wedgetail's hearty pub grub is also a standout, with young gun head chef Rhys Hura passionate about matching the quality of the beer to the food.
There's a roaring oven producing delicious wood-fired pizzas and Rhys hopes his steak sandwich will make the finals in WA's best steak sandwich awards.
'I've taken all the aspects of what makes a good steak sanga and reinvented it as something that's different, but also quite modern,' he said.
'We chose Scotch fillets because with the fat content, it renders down and comes apart really easily.
'There's a green tomato relish, which I made to be like a normal tomato relish, but green tomatoes have less tartness and less acidity than red tomato does.'
Rhys also uses the beer to flavour the food, with the darker beers going into the sauce on the ribs, the wheat beer in the fish finger batter and the barrel-aged beer being used to make ice cream.
The pair hope to have more success at the upcoming Perth Royal Show and have entered the dark lager, the double red ale and the draught.
'So we're hoping that the product will perform again,' Pete laughed.
Erskine's Boundary Island Brewery also earned a trophy for best traditional India pale ale with its The Deckie IPA, and King Road Brewing in Oldbury took home prizes for two of its King Road Short Stay Series beers: the American pale ale and NZ Cryo.