Kay Serrar wrote:
Precisely my point. A list of top Australian beers is about 50% foreign imports of big box brands.I'm guessing you don't realise that "imported" beers are a very niche product in just about every significant world market.
Any foreign beer that achieves decent sales will soon start being brewed locally under licence. You might expect that the licence strictly controls the recipe and methodology, but not even that is necessarily true. Recipes are often customised for local tastes. It is all about marketing.
Peroni in Australia is brewed in Australia by Asahi. It's as much Italian as Australian as Japanese. It's beer....
Fosters is no longer available in Australia (except for a literal handful of venues popular with tourists). It is widely available globally, but it is brewed by multiple brewers, and with multiple recipes, none of which exactly match the original which was once popular in Australia.
The list is bogus, but you can be sure that the "top" Australian beers (by sales) are all brewed in Australia from Australian ingredients, although most of the ownership is now foreign, and the labels (which is what many people really pay for) are based on designs from all over the world. The same is pretty much true in the US.
I once had a girlfriend who worked in marketing for Chanel. We used to laugh at the black magic of marketing required to convince people to pay $4000 for a product that cost $25 to make. A case of beer might be pretty cheap by comparison, but the level of voodoo in marketing is at least as high.
It's beer. Buy it cheap, drink it cold, don't overthink it.
And Australia? Yes. Why would you want to be anywhere else?