Mitta Mitta is a community of approximately 200 people in North East Victoria. It’s over 400km North East of Melbourne, is stunningly beautiful & is about the last place you’d expect to find a craft brewery. But find a brewery there you do! Just off the Omeo Highway, over the Mitta Mitta River and you come across this charming looking brewery.
Firstly, some backstory on how Mitta Mitta Brewing Co came to be. Tim Cabelka & Alec Pennington had been mates for years. Tim was working as a brewer at Red Hill Brewery, where he had been since 2007, while Alec had just completed building his own home in North East Victoria. He needed a new challenge & had a block of land in Mitta Mitta.
Brewery Type
Physical
Region
High Country
Tasting Room
1639 Mitta North Road, Mitta Mitta
Food
Modern Australian
Pizza (Night Only)
Price
Slightly Pricey
Alec put in a call to his mate Tim in 2012 & asked if he’d be interested in moving up to the High Country & starting a brewery. Tim, with family in tow, moved to the Mitta Mitta Valley to pursue his dream of running his own brewery. Although, it probably took a little longer than he was expecting to come together.
The journey from idea to finished brewery took almost 6 years! They, along with their respective partners Jen & Chris, built everything by hand using their own savings & the help from some generous family members. In late 2017 they were close to opening, but needed a little more cash. It was then that they became one of the first Australian breweries to use formalized crowd funding, when they used Ready Fund Go to raise about $10,000 to pay for trades & things they weren’t able to do themselves. They smashed the goal; ending up with over $35,000!
This money meant that they were finally able to open the doors to the brewery they’d built themselves. The taproom is approachable & has been made using local timber & re-purposed materials. From the car park in front of the brewery you get a lovely view over the beer garden to the brewery itself; ostensibly a tin shed, that has had some wood fitted to it to make it look homely & inviting.
The beer garden is exactly where we took our place on a cold but sunny winter’s day. It’s a tree lined, grassed, fenced area where there were a number of kids running around. Dogs are also welcome on leads. The seating is quite heavy looking wooden benches and tables & is located in a perfect sun trap. The views from the brewery looking towards Mt Bogong are stunning!
Mitta Mitta offers one of the widest brewery food menu’s that I’ve seen. What Lizzie & I had was excellent, from the picking platter complete with a wide array of local offerings to the chicken with wasabi mayo and citrus & fennel salad. They do pizza’s in the evening, which I assume are as good as the day time offerings! If you’re looking for local High Country food – you’d do worse than stopping in at Mitta Mitta.
The beer I’m reviewing is their Pale Lager. It’s a really impressive lager, one of the better ones you’ll find in Australia. The base malt is clean with some slightly sweet cereal grains, I’d also wager there’s a touch of wheat as the mouthfeel is quite full. There’s good grassy bitterness from the hops that they produce on site. I’ve also got to give a shout out to their Maibock, which was superb!
Remember it’s always Beer O’Clock somewhere in the world!
