Welcome to our first chapter of craft beer edication series.

There is nothing more important to Australians than beer. Beer defines the Australians.

Australia, even being a nation with a strong tradition of beer drinking, there is little or no information about craft beer - how is produced, the ingredients that go into it, the type/style in which is made, or how it should taste. If we compare craft beer with wine, we will find a huge gap.

Wine tossers go in for the kind of train-spotting: if that year that grape was good, then the wine should be amazing. Fancy label with the tasting notes and food paring. Drinking wine is a culture and if you do not know about wine you are out of that circle. As a beer drinker, I feel bad.

A good craft beer is a delicious beverage with more flavours and aromas than the best of the wines. people consider wines for pontification and beer just to get drunk. Really not fair.

So, first we will start to understand the styles/types of beers. Once we have that clear we will try to understand the terminology. Marketing has not helped and miss-used some of the words applying them incorrectly.

I will bet my house that some of us don not even know the difference between ale and pilsner.

Comparing again wine and craft beer, the boundaries are getting blurry. Everyone could drink wine, it is not the beverage of lawyers, doctors or directors, hence craft beer is not a drink for the masses, each sip of craft beer is being appreciated.

Of course, there is beer for masses: mass produced beer like the types of Victoria Bitter, Tooheys, Heineken or whichever manufactured by the big multinationals like Asahi, Lion (Kirin) or SABMiller. Even those big players are trying to mass produce the artisan way of create a craft beer, with their huge budgets on marketing and cheap production costs, they also want to destroy the craft beer culture.

Anyway, we will try to help you to bring some connoisseurship to craft beer. It is true that craft beer now is consumed differently, and we hope with the education series you will enjoy even more the fantastic artisan craft beers from our independent brewers.