“Leena, look–balls, hee hee.” Meet my older brother Dilip. Dilip and I are alike in many ways. We both love to talk a lot and tell jokes in a really loud voice, we are both brown, and we both giggle at silly things like the Malls Balls in Adelaide. Dilip was the fourth guest that visited us in Australia. Now, Dilip is no ordinary guy, so I made sure his trip to Adelaide would be the same. That, and if I went to another wine tasting, I was gonna go all Paul Giamatti in Sideways and drink the spit bucket. This is also clearly becoming a food AND travel blog, but I guess that is what happens when an Illinois girl moves to Australia. It wouldn’t be an Australian trip without alcohol (I swear drinking is a national pastime), so instead of wine, we went for the next best thing: beer. Contrary to popular American belief, Aussies don’t drink Fosters beer, especially not in South Australia. South Aussies drink Coopers, which is locally brewed and internationally distributed. The Coopers Brewery was started in South Australia in 1862 and according to the website, is the only prominent family-run brewery in the country today. They specialize in ales, stouts and lagers and all of their ales are chemical and preservative-free. Not too shabby if you ask me.
For $20 AUD (proceeds go to charity), you get a 45 minute brewery tour and an extensive beer tasting. And I mean extensive–I think there were at least 5-7 different beers to try. But more on that later. The tour itself wasn’t terribly exciting, but seeing all the equipment at work was. And by equipment, I mean kegs of beer.
These bins looked small at first, only coming out of the ground about ten or twelve feet. But when you look in the little window, you can see it extends at least 20-30 feet below ground, where it heats and stirs the hops (I think…I know some sort of stuff in thrown down in there, heated, and stirred!).
As we walked through the factory, we watched the beer and homebrew kits get assembled and packaged. Noisy, but really fun to watch. Especially when one of the bottles of beer got jammed in the packing line, sending dozens of other bottles of beer crashing on to the floor. Damn, those factory workers respond quick!
And then, the drinking commenced.
The ales are the most popular of the Coopers products. They are brewed by a method called top fermentation (apparently a method dating back to the Middle Ages) using only natural ingredients. There were too many beers to follow, so I want to point out one that I know you won’t find in any American liquor stores: Coopers Extra Strong Vintage Ale.
Our tour guide likened this beer to Coopers version of a fine wine, and indeed, it can be aged for better flavor like a fine wine (up to 18 months), if you are into that sort of thing. It is brewed using an extended top fermentation and had 7.5% alcohol. Yum. Leena fact #579: I don’t “love” beer. I’ll try a few in a tasting (I love the Coopers Dark Ale!), but I am much more of cider and ginger beer sort of gal. So while the rest of my group drank their weight in Coopers, I wandered around the tiny museum attached to the tasting room, where I found this:
Yup, a bunch of really old beer labels, all from South Australian breweries! Upon closer inspection, I saw that many of labels advertised something known as Dinner Ale.
I was mesmerized by this name that not only represented both food and liquor, but also promoted eating and drinking liquor at the SAME TIME! I started hunting out other Dinner Ale labels on the board. Before I knew it, I was snapping photos left and right, singing the song “Addicted to Love” but replacing all the words with “Dinner Ale”. Yeah. I’m not gonna even try to explain that one. Or this:
or this:
We were a bit hungry after all that, so my mate and South Aussie pal Andrew pointed us in the direction of the place that sells the best chicken and leek pies EVER. Otherwise known as the Walkerville Terrace Bakery and Patisserie.
So what makes this the best meat pie ever? Well, the crust is really flaky and buttery on top, and holds up pretty well on the bottom. See, most meat pies leak their sauce through the bottom crust, making the entire thing hard to eat.
See the innards of this pie? Just enough sauce to bind the whole thing together. I also dig the shredded chicken, because other pies have these huge chunks of meat that can be dangerous when they come at you from inside a steaming hot pie. I’m just saying, one time I almost lost an eye to gravy and a chunk of steak.
After our magical pies of goodness, we headed off towards Cleland Park in the Adelaide Hills, but not the one where you feed the kangaroos and emus. There are other sections of the park where you can picnic or hike, and since the park is on the Adelaide Hills, there were great views of the city and the ocean, as well as wildlife.
The path we were on was really pretty at the start, but it wasn’t clearly marked. Then it just got plain weird, making us walk next to train tracks on top of rocks, down into areas where there was nothing to look at but random cables and the bottom of trees. Oh, and we got to listen to a really loud, screechy train. Lucky us. When we finally got back up to where the other paths merged, we turned and saw a sign that said, danger, do not use this path, live wires and trains. Hmm. We were almost killed, but hey, at least we got to see our first koalas in the wild. Look at these chunkies support themselves on tiny branches really high up in the air!
The next day, we headed down towards the ocean and Victor Harbor, a popular tourist area in South Australia and also where I first surfed! We decided to hike up Granite Island, which is an island just off the coast that is home to a colony of penguins (that wanted to hide when we were there) and also has some amazing views off of it’s cliffs. We started down the long walkway to Granite Island that also serves as tracks for a horse-pulled wagon. It was a looong way down.
We started walking and suddenly realized Dilip wasn’t with us. Where was he?
Oh, just off being what Andrew likes to call A-D-Dil. Dilip can’t stay still for longer than a few minutes, and always wants to wander off somewhere or do something else. This ADD-like tendency is what abandoned me as a child in Disney World while Dilip went to play video games. So you see, I can’t help but poke fun. I’m bitter.
After we gather A-D-Dil and got to the island, we saw interesting things like this giant dead tree that looked mummified.
And large rocky cliffs from which we could sit and ponder the bigger questions about life.
And to pose like conquerors.
Of course, after that excitement, we needed to eat. We headed up towards Aldinga beach to the Victory Hotel Pub, a gastro and wine pub I had heard a lot of good things about. You might remember my last meal at the Victory Hotel from when Matt came to visit. We only had lunch and were impressed, so I wanted to try the place out for dinner at least once before I left the country. Damn, that feels weird to say! We started our meal with my favorite, the chicken liver pate,
and the spiced calamari with garlic aioli.
The pate was great, but I did find the massive pieces of brioche to be a bit filling for an appetizer. I would have preferred a nice melba toast or some crackers. The calamari were the best I have ever eaten in my life. They tasted fresh, not at all rubbery or fishy, and were just so damn flavorful, a nice mix of garlic and spices, that the table was fighting over who got the last pieces. Dilip went with a steak and fondant potatoes for his main, and he seemed to enjoy it.
Andrew went for the leg of duck confit. I believe it had a sort of Asian, 5-spice flavored seasoning, but I am sure Andrew will correct me on that one if I am wrong.
Adam wanted a really big cheeseburger, and that is what he got. He really enjoyed this burger because it was cooked perfectly and had a nice, toasted bun. I enjoyed it because it was beef.
I ordered the pan-fried veal with parmesan polenta and fresh mushy peas. It was delicious, but it was basically a veal schnitzel, which made me a bit mad. They had a separate veal schnitzel on the menu, so I assumed a piece of veal that is lightly pan fried wouldn’t be a schnitzel. I can’t eat schnitzels because they are deep fried and hate my stomach. This was deep fried and therefore no matter how delicious it was, it too hated my stomach. Boo. But I should have known. South Aussies look for any excuse to eat a schnitzel.
Other than my dish, the meal was a success and a nice end to Dilip’s time in South Australia. A-D-Dil left his mark on Adelaide (I think somewhere near the Malls Balls) and was off to Sydney. Thanks for coming, brother! ~LTG!
