The Good Beer Project

Ep 5 - Saisons with La Sirene and Nowhereman


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“Obsessed and dedicated farmhouse inspired brewers that are pretty committed to making beer with a sense of place and time,” Costa Nikias, co-founder of Victoria’s La Sirène Brewing with his wife Eva.

Apologies for a few moments of less-than-ideal audio quality, you may hear the wind in the introduction and the background noise during the first interview proved to be beyond my editing capabilities!

We interviewed Costa when he was in Perth in November for WA Beer Week. We get sidetracked often from the topic of saisons and cover everything from the origins of the brewery, the Darebin Parklands from which they cultivated their own house yeast strain, how the yeast has evolved and the critical role it plays in all their beers. Costa talks passionately about a sense of place in their beers and reveals that La Sirène started as a hobby while he studied wine. We chat about their Urban Pale Ale and Saisonette and a few current projects such as one with the University of Melbourne and another that’s focused on capturing more local yeast and investigating the impact of seasonality. We speculate about the future of farmhouse beers, it’s growing popularity and consider the sheer number of barrels Costa would need if the style took over IPAs in popularity.

Apologies for the poor audio of our interview with Costa.

A few days after and heading out of the city, we find ourselves at Nowhereman Brewing* sitting amongst the tanks talking to head brewer Paul Wyman about why he joined Nowhereman, the journey of his brewing career to date, how they put the Nowhereman core range together and, of course, we chat a lot about saison.

*Full Disclosure: Pia will be working for Nowhereman as of 6 March but at the time of recording there was no affiliation

Guests

Costa Nikias from La Sirène Brewing (Alphington, VIC)

Paul Wyman from Nowhereman Brewing (West Leederville, WA)

Contact  

Find us on Facebook at The Good Beer Project and on Instagram

Blainey is on Instagram at The WA Beer Runner

Pia can be found as girlplusbeer across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat (though she’s not good at using Snapchat) and also on her blog

Music

“Keeping Stuff Together” by Lee Rosevere

From the Free Music Archive

CC BY

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The Good Beer ProjectBy Steve Blaine & Pia Poynton