Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
“We have everything we need to be happy,” the hero of Fahrenheit 451 observes, “but we aren’t happy.” Maybe that’s the ultimate lever to pull: the growing awareness that our devices are exhausting and eroding us. - The American Scholar
This website has an endless collection of less-famous Robert Doisneau shots to click through.
The Guardian – If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it’: why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl. People describe their return to physical media – whether to protect data, support artists, or retain control of one’s choices. ‘If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it’: why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl…”
In a system predicated on voluntary compliance, taxpayer privacy is an evergreen concern. But in recent weeks, three disparate events have raised questions about the security of taxpayer data—and what information the government should collect through the tax system.
What are these events? First, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s report on IRS employees’ access to celebrity taxpayers’ return information. Second, allegations that IRS officials leaked an employee’s tax information to the Department of Justice in retaliation for whistleblowing. Third, the controversial inclusion of a citizenship or work authorization question on Form 1040, that hallowed pillar of individual filing and frequent political football.
Details and connections, below the fold.
Things That Are Good to Do
QuarterMile: “I used to struggle with life. I still do sometimes. But things have gotten a lot better since I started writing things down. Things that, if I do them, make life a little nicer to live. And now it’s really easy. I just have to remember all of these things, all of the time.
And I have to do them. Always. Easy! You can live the life of your dreams too. If, like me, you only remember and follow this list. Bonus fact: if you read the below list then you are also exempt from ever having to read a self-help book again. Just a few from an excellent, long list:’
Admit what you don’t know.
Buy less.
Drink water first.
Reply when people message you.
Learn everyone’s story.
Ask for directions.
Read the ingredients.
Take the scenic route.
Finish the book. Or don’t, if it’s bad.
Keep your kitchen clean.
Close the cabinet.
Sharpen your knives.
Own a flashlight.
Carry a reusable bag.
Water the plants.
Wear clothes that fit.
Learn CPR.
Know your blood type.
Stretch before lifting.
Keep in touch.
Bring something to share.
Close the gate.
Lock the bike.
Carry an umbrella.
Expect traffic.
Wear a helmet.
Read the map.
Know north.
Borrow books.
Read the instructions.
Check twice.
Measure twice.
Cut once.
Make fewer assumptions.
Rest before you’re exhausted.
Keep your weekends meaningful.
Put your keys in the same place.
Keep a spare key.
Label the box.
Organize once.
Declutter often.
Look out the window.
Watch the birds.
Notice the weather.
Appreciate ordinary beauty.
Keep fresh flowers.
Open the blinds.
Let sunlight in.
Keep fresh air flowing.
Sharpen your pencil.
Write by hand.
Date your notes.
Wenzel Hablik (1881) was a painter, graphic artist, architect, designer, and craftsman from Bohemia of the early twentieth century, associated with German Expressionism. At the age of six, he found a specimen of crystal, and saw in it “magical castles and mountains” that would later appear in his art. Hablik died at Itzehoe in 1934. The Wenzel Hablik Museum was established in the city of Itzehoe in 1995. The museum contains much of his art, as well as his collections of crystals and minerals, seashells and snails.
Duchess of Swabia, Agnes of Waiblingen (1072–1143), was the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and lived to be about 70 years old. She married twice, had 17 children and became the mother of German kings and Holy Roman emperors. While medieval women rarely ruled in their own right, Agnes’s personal achievement was the deliberate cultivation of an extraordinary network of children and she positioned them meticulously across the geopolitical chessboard of Europe.Agnes was far from a passive political figure. Upon the sudden death of her second husband, Margrave Leopold III of Austria, in 1136, she actively secured the political succession of Austria. She was a prolific patron of the church, co-founding major institutions that remain culturally significant today.
That’s about all the juice you can dig up on her, so this absolutely feels like a research project crying out for a historian.
Now and again, Geiser finds himself wondering what he really wants to know, what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge. (Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, p. 90)
Background knowledge: a neural network, conceptually, has billions of little things called neurons. One goal of so-called "interpretability" would be to be able to look at each neuron and say what it does for the network.
However, there is an observed phenomenon called "polysemanticity" wherein it seems that sometimes a single neuron seems to be for multiple different things. An early example of this was a finding that a single neuron in this image model seems to be for both animals and cars: Dragons and Cars …
For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with a 26,000-word blog post by the AI researcher Nick Cammarata. The document has been called the “the most important essay,” “the most important result,” and “the single best piece of news” of the year, or in the history of AI research—or, perhaps, ever. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded it. Cammarata makes a series of bold, almost astonishing claims about the nature of AI that, if true, would upend some of his industry’s basic assumptions about the very thing it is building. And after months of AI-hacking sprees and mounting public backlash against the industry, many people see Cammarata as offering a glimmer of hope when it comes to not just understanding but also controlling the technology being unleashed on the world.
Boiled down, Cammarata’s main contention is that generative-AI models are not actually black boxes, contrary to the common perception that these systems are so big and labyrinthine as to be nearly impenetrable. In fact, Cammarata argues, there is a relatively clear path toward understanding them. If that’s the case, the material significance could be tremendous: It would provide a way to map AI models’ inner workings and, in turn, perhaps prevent them from wreaking all sorts of harm—autonomously hacking companies and sovereign nations, encouraging users’ delusions, appearing to deceive AI researchers themselves. There is an entire field of research, called “mechanistic interpretability,” devoted to the study of just this.
The argument is just as important as the person making it. Cammarata, a former OpenAI employee, is a respected figure in his field. Years ago, he played a key role in establishing the opposite claim, which is now common wisdom: that neural networks, the software architecture that generative AI is built on, are impossible, or at least very difficult, to understand. In this new essay, Cammarata, who now works at the AI-research company Goodfire, essentially says that he and his entire field have been wrong ever since. “The claims here are viscerally shocking,” one observer wrote. Or, as another wrote on X, they are “big big big big.”
Neural networks, inspired by the human brain, consist of layered connections among individual nodes, or “neurons,” that activate and send information to one another when responding to a query. Earlier research, including Cammarata’s, established that individual machine neurons can activate in response to many different, unrelated topics—for instance, one neuron can correspond to images of cat faces, cat legs, and the front of cars. Nobody was sure why this happened, but one explanation was that, because AI models contain far more information than they have neurons, they have to repurpose these nodes. Regardless, the basic units of an AI model having seemingly arbitrary, multitudinous functions would make it very difficult to understand what is going on under the hood.
Cammarata now thinks that individual neurons can be understood and that each has a self-consistent function. Neural networks are not “tangled knots,” he wrote, but “clean.” He found that the cat-face and car-face neuron, for instance, was actually responding to things with a V-shape—including V-shaped flames and jets of water. This would make AI’s internal mechanisms relatively straightforward and predictable rather than mysterious and nebulous. And if we can harness that understanding, some people in the industry believe, AI will be much less likely to go haywire and, say, kill us all. “This is truly one of the greatest cases for optimism in years!” the OpenAI researcher Adam Majmudar wrote on X.
Not everyone agrees with Cammarata. For one, his 26,000 words were merely a “working hypothesis” for a “forthcoming technical paper” and were thus hard, on a technical level, to evaluate. And the neural networks he studied most closely were vision models, which are generally simpler and better understood than the language models underlying ChatGPT and Claude. Cammarata could be mistaken, or he could be overstating his case. The blog post isn’t peer-reviewed, and the forthcoming paper probably won’t be, either, as is typical in the field. The research itself is something of a black box. (Cammarata, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, wrote on X earlier today that he appreciates all of the discussion and that his approach “seems promising so far” for “bigger modern language models.”)
Discussions of Cammarata’s essay have revealed philosophical rifts. “This is interesting work, but I don’t think it’s a significant update to the big picture,” Neel Nanda, who leads mechanistic interpretability at Google DeepMind, wrotein his appraisal of Cammarata’s findings. Even if researchers could approximate the function of every neuron in Claude Mythos 5.1 or GPT-6 Astra, that’s not the same as understanding how they connect and how the network works as a whole. Physicists have good models of atoms and interatomic interactions, but they cannot from first principles explain or predict every physical event (hence unpredictable extreme weather or, for that matter, the notion of free will). You know all of your friends from school, various workplaces, and the local softball league, but you can’t always know whether they’ll get along at your birthday party. More to the point, insights into the inner workings of an AI model will not necessarily produce insights into how to make the technology more reliable. Interpretability may be necessary to build safer AI models, but it is by no means sufficient.
If generative-AI models are actually legible under the hood, that would undoubtedly help make the technology safer. But many people in Silicon Valley, and especially employees at OpenAI, are discussing Cammarata’s blog post with a breathless enthusiasm that echoes Silicon Valley’s long track record of easy technical solutions and grand promises—an attitude that belies its mixed record on following through.
Any research finding that pertains to AI safety will require an industry chasing multitrillion-dollar public offerings to slow down and take a long, hard look at itself. Perhaps even more concerning than an unintelligible superintelligence is the fact that a group of companies openly state that they don’t really know what they are building—and then continue to push that technology to extremes anyway. If Cammarata is correct, AI companies will have to work with one another, outside auditors, and governments to figure out how to translate such a breakthrough into safe and reliable products. And right now, absent any serious regulation, nobody can decide to take such action other than the companies themselves. All of which suggests that the real black boxes are OpenAI and Anthropic themselves.
Because these scammers have hit on an M.O. to which writers are particularly susceptible, that’s why. And there are a lot of hopeful writers out there, so the scammers can ask for small amounts of money (making it look low-risk to the targets), and make bank on volume. - The Dial
Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have
Dead Parrot BBS: “There are not many computer file formats I would trust to still be readable fifty years from now, but plain text is one of them. That may sound like faint praise. A text file cannot embed a spreadsheet, preserve elaborate page layouts, run a presentation, or provide many of the conveniences we expect from modern applications. What it does instead is store text in one of the simplest and most widely understood forms in computing, and that simplicity is a large part of why it has lasted.
Almost Nothing to Go Wrong – The Unicode Standard defines plain text essentially as a sequence of character codes, without the additional formatting information associated with rich text. Fonts, colors, layout, and similar presentation details belong somewhere else. From a user’s point of view, the important part is simpler: the file contains the text itself without requiring a particular application to make sense of it.
I can create a text file on Linux, copy it to a Windows machine, put it on a web server, open it in a terminal, search it with command-line tools, edit it with any number of programs, or send it to somebody using an entirely different system. Very little about the file depends on how it was created. That is different from many document formats, where the information is closely tied to the application or family of applications that understands the format.
Sometimes that is harmless. Sometimes the format is well documented and broadly supported. In other cases, opening an old file means hoping that suitable software still exists. Plain text has very little of that baggage…”
The vast resorts and luxury hotels of France’s Tarentaise Valley are renowned in the ski world — but just to the south, the less-visited Haute Maurienne offers quieter delights
It was 4pm on a sunny afternoon in the Easter holidays, a couple of days after the last snowfall. From high on the mountainside, I looked across the valley to the upper slopes of Val d’Isère, the ski lifts clearly visible and yet belonging to a different world.
In that celebrated resort, the race for powder means the slopes can get skied out within hours; by now attention would be turning to the terrace of the Folie Douce, where the champagne corks would be popping and DJs ramping up the volume. Here, above the little village of Bonneval-sur-Arc, we were alone, enveloped in silence, standing at the top of a slope of deep, unskied snow that dropped for 700 vertical metres. It was the kind of prospect you might expect on a heliski trip, or as the climax of a long back-country tour, but we’d come straight off a chairlift. We dropped in, relishing the knee-deep powder that sparkled in the sun as it was thrown up around us, and the seeming miracle of having it all to ourselves.
Seen on the map, Bonneval and Val d’Isère are neighbours — just 10km apart as the Alpine chough flies — but they sit at the top of different valleys: Bonneval the highest village in the Maurienne valley, Val d’Isère the highest in the Tarentaise. In summer, they are linked by a narrow road that snakes up and over the Col d’Iseran, the Alps’ highest paved pass. But from November to May, when the road is submerged by snow, they become the dead-ends of their respective valleys, which is where any similarities end.
The Tarentaise, which zigzags west to Albertville, is home to the world’s greatest concentration of ski resorts. As well as Val d’Isère, there are big hitters including Tignes, Les Arcs, La Plagne, Courchevel and Méribel. Together they offer about 475 lifts (more than the total mustered by every resort in Colorado), at least 50 five-star hotels, 17 Michelin stars and a decent chance of rubbing shoulders with a Beckham, a Clooney or a royal.
Meanwhile, the Maurienne curves like a giant U through an altogether less glamorous, less-celebrated realm, also dotted with ski areas but places you’re much less likely to have heard of: Bessans, Val Cenis, Aussois, La Norma, Valfrejus. There are no five-star hotels — in fact, the most famous buildings are five early-19th-century forts, built to cut off the upper valley (then owned by the king of Sardinia) from the rest of France. The closest thing to a celebrity is probably local son Joseph Opinel, the late inventor of the wooden-handled pocket-knife (who even has his own museum). But what it lacks in luxury and gastronomy, the Maurienne more than makes up for in other ways.
I drove with my family from London, via the Eurotunnel and a night spent just outside Cambrai. Entering the Maurienne, we followed the motorway south until, at the bottom of the U, it disappears into the Fréjus tunnel (then pops out in Italy). Instead, we turned north on a local road into the Haute Maurienne, the upper valley getting wilder all the time. Through a forest of spruce and larch we got glimpses of the monumental limestone walls of the forts, the white peak of the Dent Parrachée behind, then finally some skiers, slaloming across snow-covered pastures to the village of Termignon.
You could easily come by train — direct services from Paris to Modane, near the entrance to the Fréjus tunnel, take as little as four hours — but it’s useful to have a car. For rather than a conventional ski holiday, based in one resort, the unique thing about a trip here is that you have the whole of the upper valley to explore. Since 2018, the six laidback Haute Maurienne ski areas have offered a deal whereby any six-day lift pass includes a free day at each of the other resorts. Together they claim 350km of pistes (actually more than Val d’Isère/Tignes, though the lift pass is half the price).
It makes sense to base yourself in the biggest, Val Cenis, itself an amalgamation of three villages, Termignon, Lanslebourg and Lanslevillard (joined by lifts and pistes since 2007). For a first-time visitor or idle website scroller, such a blizzard of unfamiliar names can be off-putting but in practice it couldn’t have been simpler. We were staying at Les Chalets de Flambeau, a collection of self-catering apartments with balconies overlooking the pistes, an indoor swimming pool and sauna — not chic but very comfortable, welcoming and good value, much like the valley as a whole. We arrived in time to pick up our rental skis from the little parade of shops next door — a restaurant, a bar, a pizzeria and a tiny Sherpa mini-market where we sent the kids to buy bread in the mornings.
The next day, we stepped out straight on to the slopes. Val Cenis is a decent “mid-size” area, with 125km of pistes rising from 1,300 to 2,800 metres, so a good mix of above and below the tree line. It’s also north-facing — though it was the end of March, the snow was still in excellent condition and we shot about exploring, from the forests of Lanslevillard up to the Lac du Mont Cenis, a half-frozen high-altitude reservoir beside the Col du Mont Cenis and the Italian border. We only stopped for lunch when we caught the smell of hot cheese coming from La Ferme du XXIII, a cosy restaurant next to the piste serving Savoyard classics, where kids can finish the meal with a trip to feed the goats in the barn downstairs.
For anyone used to slopeside restaurants of the Tarentaise, the prices were a welcome surprise — €7 for a plate of cheeses from the local co-operative, €3.50 for a crepe, €8 for a half-bottle of local red. A nice surprise too to be able to walk in without a reservation, on a Sunday lunchtime, and have a choice of tables.
In fact, the biggest surprise of the day was the lack of other people. Not only did we not have to queue for the lifts, but at the top, we’d often find we had the entire piste to ourselves — a mystery, when just to the north, the Tarentaise would be packed.
In the coming days I tried to unravel that mystery, in which geography, history and state interventions all played a role. Partly though, it was simply a quirk of the calendar: this was the first week of British schools’ Easter holidays but French pupils would be stuck at their desks for at least another week. So Brit-favourites in the Tarentaise would be flooded with families, while the more francophone Maurienne stayed quiet. (In Val d’Isère, for example, UK tourists make up 40 per cent of the market, outnumbering even the French, at 34 per cent; in Val Cenis, 78 per cent of overnight visitors are French, only 4 per cent British.)
All of which would be of little interest to those outside the industry, except the school calendars are the same at Easter next year: for British families in search of silent pistes, opportunity knocks.
But why did the two valleys develop such different clienteles and personalities? Ironically, the Maurienne was once the better connected and more international of the two. Lanslebourg was a busy staging post for travellers heading to and from Italy over the Col du Mont Cenis, a route used by Charlemagne, Napoleon and JMW Turner. In winter, local guides or porters known as “marrons” would bring them back down to the valley on a “ramasse”, a chair set on two wooden skis. A 1643 account describes a group of diplomats from Tuscany climbing back up to the pass on mules in order to make the thrilling descent a second time — possibly the earliest recorded example of alpine wintersports.
In 1868, a British company opened a steam railway up and over the pass, designed to offer a direct connection to the Italian rail network and thus cut two days from the time taken to send mail between London and colonial Calcutta. Edward Whymper devoted a chapter of Scrambles Amongst the Alpsin the Years 1860-69 to this “marvel . . . an important portion of the high road to India”. His enthusiasm was unsurprising. After all, this was 20 years before a railway reached Zermatt, and Courchevel was nothing but a patch of rough grass known only for its tendency to scratch cows’ tongues.
The ingredients were there for tourism to take off, but when the Fréjus rail tunnel — then the longest in the world — opened in 1871, the Mont Cenis mountain railway was abandoned and Lanslebourg found itself bypassed, its innkeepers and porters suddenly without work. The population collapsed — by a third within a decade, and 50 per cent by the 1920s — leaving the upper Maurienne an obscure backwater. Worse was to come in the second world war: most of the residents evacuated when the area was occupied by Italian soldiers, then shelled and set on fire by retreating Germans.
The mountain railway was completely dismantled — most of it sent to Brazil — but, at the end of our first day, we skied down its route, now the 11km-long Escargot, which the resort claims as Europe’s longest green (beginner) run, the kind of modest superlative that sets the tone for the place.
Another morning, we drove the 25 minutes across to Aussois on the southern flank of the Dent Parrachée. Ordinarily, there’s enough hassle involved with skiing to make the idea of moving between resorts deeply unattractive but this was easy: we parked at the side of the road (for free), put on our boots and walked five metres to the piste. Aussois is home to fewer than 700 people and felt even more peaceful than Val Cenis, a fresh blanket of overnight snow muffling any sounds. With no one around we didn’t even bother going into the back-country, instead simply skiing the powder that lay deep on the pistes. When the weather closed in and we retreated into the Montana restaurant, at the top of the main chairlift, we found it empty — beaming staff ushering us in like long-lost friends.
While the residents of Lanslebourg were returning at the end of the war to find their town destroyed, in the Tarentaise grand plans were afoot. Courchevel was founded in 1946 as France’s first purpose-built resort, backed by the national and local governments, designed to stimulate the postwar economy of a depopulating rural area, to compete with the resorts of Switzerland and Austria, and (ironically) to make skiing accessible to people from all walks of life. The topography of the Tarentaise was ideally suited to big, interconnected resorts, with high plateaus and multiple side valleys — rather than the mainly much steeper-sided Maurienne.
Courchevel was a success and prompted the launch of successive state “snow plans”, using subsidies, cheap loans and planning support to encourage rapid ski resort development. There were projects across the Alps and Pyrenees but the Tarentaise was the centre of activity. Gradually the new resorts’ webs of lifts and pistes grew so big they intermeshed to create vast linked domains: Les 3 Valleys, Paradiski and the Espace Killy. When the Olympics came to the Tarentaise in 1992, it supercharged their international appeal.
And all the while,the Haute Maurienne was snoozing, or at least developing far more slowly. We spent the week alternating between Val Cenis and the other resorts of the valley. Up above the 19th-century forts, La Norma was a revelation — purpose-built, pedestrianised, billing itself as somewhere family-focused, but with a cult following among freeriders. As we skied empty, easy runs under blue skies, we looked across at tracks dropping from the ridge above us, steep, sinuous and like something from an Alaskan ski movie.
But the jewel is Bonneval, hidden from view, 20km up the valley from Lanslebourg. The drive there started with steep switchbacks up and over an ancient rockfall, then dropped down across the wide Bessans plateau (a centre for cross-country skiing, with 120km of groomed trails). Afterwards the valley narrowed again, the road running alongside the river Arc through groves of alder and ash. We saw a group of chamois on a high flank, then drove through the remains of an old avalanche, a gap cut for the road between white walls towering above the car, like a portal to an upper world.
Arriving in harsh sunlight, Bonneval felt positively Himalayan — in fact prayer flags flew from more than one balcony. While the villages of Val Cenis, rebuilt after the war, are not going to win beauty contests, secluded Bonneval was spared from destruction. Clustered around a 17th-century church, its old stone houses have larch rafters topped by lauze slabs; the whole village has been protected as a listed natural monument since 1971.
Above rise nine ageing lifts and 32km of pistes but though small, it is exquisite — high, north-facing, with abundant off-piste opportunities. There’s one restaurant on the mountain, Le Criou, a cosy spot with thick stone walls, a wood-burning stove and a sunny terrace hemmed in by snowbanks.
The stone bell tower of the church in Bonneval-sur-ArcLater, Jérémie Silva, the director of the valley’s tourist office told me that when a journalist had previously named Bonneval as their favourite resort, he’d had complaints: “People just don’t want to see it change.” So far, there’s little evidence of that. Bonneval is too small to tempt mainstream tour operators, while the rest of the Haute Maurienne stays happily hidden in the shadow of its illustrious neighbour.
Handing back my skis in the rental shop, I got chatting to one of the staff, a keen young ski mountaineer about to set off to ski the east face of the Dent Parrachée. It’s a beautiful route — the kind you might see on posters and in ski movies, feted on pro skiers’ bucket lists — why wasn’t it more famous, I wondered? The reply was simple: “Ah well, this is the Maurienne . . . ”
Details
Tom Robbins was a guest of Peak Retreats, a UK-based operator specialising in the French Alps, and the Haute Maurienne tourist board. Peak Retreats offers a week in a two-bedroom apartment at Les Chalets de Flambeau from £396 per person, based on four sharing, including a return “FlexiPlus” Channel crossing on Eurotunnel LeShuttle, or from £426 during the 2027 Easter holidays. Dalcin Shophas a week’s ski rental from €84. Lift passes are dynamically priced; a six-day Haute Maurienne pass, with unlimited skiing at one ski area and a day at each of the other five, currently ranges from €158 to €237
Born out of a shared love for revved-up bluegrass and good times, Bardwell Valley Ramblers bring high-energy picking, rich harmonies, and a touch of mischief to every performance.
The band draws from the deep well of traditional bluegrass while injecting their own rambunctious, full-throttle energy into every tune, making for a sound that’s as rowdy as it is rooted
Hidden away from the hustle and bustle on a quiet backstreet in Botany, this small South Sydney brewery opened in 2020 and instantly made a big impression with their modern take on traditional, European-inspired beers.
While most budding breweries launch with a lager or a pale ale, husband-and-wife team Alex and Yvonne Jarman announced their intent early, debuting with a Belgian blonde ale and a saison aged for three months in a wine barrel with Brettanomyces yeast for added complexity.
The accolades soon followed. In their debut year, they won Champion Mixed Culture Beer at the Indies for their Botany Weisse. In 2021, their Threefold Belgian tripel took home trophies at the Sydney Royal Beer & Cider Awards and a gold medal at the Australian International Beer Awards.
Despite their Euro focus, Slow Lane’s origin story actually started in the US, where Alex And Yvonne worked for five years. While living in New York and then California, the couple visited countless breweries and fell in love with those focused on reinterpreting classic continental styles, so much so that Alex, already an avid homebrewer, quit his corporate job to work at breweries before returning to Sydney in 2017 with a vision to start one of their own.
Once home, Alex dove wholeheartedly into his new career, blending new ideas with old world techniques and revelling in funky yeasts, open ferments and can-conditioning. Along the way, Slow Lane’s beer range has evolved and expanded as they experiment with new gear and more modern styles. The purchase of three horizontal lagering tanks means he can now craft the European lagers he’s always wanted to – while he’s also been producing more contemporary styles – hazy IPAs and West Coast pilsners – with dazzling results.
Like the beers, the brewery and taproom channel a similar mixture of traditional and contemporary. It may reside in an industrial warehouse but the stark white walls and oak barrels stacked to the ceiling hint at a beer cellar in Belgium. There’s a feeling of striking simplicity, which is mirrored in the modernist branding and minimalist can art.
More recently, Alex and Yvonne have been busy expanding that space to offer even more options for thirsty and hungry visitors. The wooden-panelled bar now boasts 14 taps (including two Czech side-pour Lukr taps) alongside a large selection of wines, spirits, cocktails, ciders and spritzes, if beer ain’t your beat.
There’s also an in-house kitchen dishing out Neapolitan-style pizzas, share plates, cheeses and charcuterie plus a bigger beer garden out front with wine barrel tables. On the events side, punters can catch live music on Saturday nights and Sunday arvos as well as themed months celebrating different beer styles from around the world.
Wash it all down with some award-winning brews and you can’t lose with this small yet mighty brewery.
