Melbourne had its first ever Steemit Meet-Up!

This week's review is a very special one indeed. This week I was fortunate enough to meet a fantastic group of fellow Steemians at a bar in Melbourne! And even more fortunately, the bar had some local craft beer on tap.

So upon seeing this, I knew that I had the fantastic opportunity to review a beer, and talk about our Melbourne Steemit Meet-up, all in the same post! And just in time for #BeerSaturday.

---

Steemit Meet-Up - Melbourne - January 22, 2018

It was a lovely, warm evening for the Melbourne Steemit meet-up. We all met at a small bar called Father's Office in Melbourne's CBD.

There are a large number of Aussies who chat on the #TeamAustralia channel on the Peace, Abundance and Liberty server on Discord. In the lead up to the meet up, three of us had confirmed on the channel that we would be attending.

So, in all honesty, I was expecting to rock up to this event and have a casual chat with 2 other Steemit users. Which wouldn't have been so terrible given that this was the first ever meet up in our city.

Upon arrival however, I was surprised to find that we had twice the number I expected in attendance, not including myself.

The Steemit users that attended the meet-up were Lyndon AKA @datascience who organised the event. Lyndon's lovely wife Mia also came along. Mia is also a Steemit user under the username @mslillypilly. Then we had Kevin AKA @kevinli who created an amazing video of the event, Vikas AKA @itstime, Kenny AKA @hersnz, Ritchie AKA @ritchieplunkett, and last but not least, Scott AKA @scottweston.

_{My shoddy attempt at a casual group photo}

You never know what to expect when meeting a group of people that you've never met in person before. So it was great to see how well everyone got along and all of the fantastic conversations that were had. Naturally, Steemit was the primary topic of choice and it was amazing to meet a group of people who are just as passionate about this platform as I am.

The group had such a diverse range of backgrounds as well such as Lyndon who is a Statistics Lecturer at a Melbourne university, Kevin who is a YouTube Blogger who recently migrated to DTube. We had Ritchie who is a tech blogger and Kenny who takes fantastic photos and writes for the Korean community from Australia.

Most of us who attended the event only joined Steemit late last year, and some who attended had only very recently joined Steemit. Most of us are still finding our feet on the platform, but have very high hopes for Steemit and a lot of passion to bring to the community. It was very inspiring and motivating to speak with everyone and actually put a face to the account names that I see every day.

Check out @kevinli's excellent video blog of the event

---

On to the beer of choice for the evening!

Of course, many beers were had by all. I chose to try Holgate's Norton Lager on the evening. Holgate are a craft brewer who are located in Woodend, Victoria. They brew a good range of beers and the beer that they had on tap at Father's Office was their Norton Lager. So this was my brew of choice for the evening.

In the words of the husband and wife team who started Holgate:

Holgate beers are brewed with just four basic ingredients – 100% malt, real hops, yeast, and pure Macedon Ranges water. We make it ourselves by hand and unlike many large brewing companies we absolutely DO NOT use any artificial colours, flavours, preservatives, brewing sugars, hop oils, malt extracts or the like. When we’re looking for inspiration from other non-traditional ingredients, we don’t go for concentrates or artificial additives – we go straight to mother nature and use whole vanilla beans, or real cocoa, real fruit etc. It’s messy, but sure is fun!
_Source

You can certainly tell that the brewers used some quality ingredients in this beer. Weirdly though, nor the website or ratebeer.com provide any real tasting notes to work with.

And, as you can see, ratebeer.com really don't have many positive things to say about this beer. Even more oddly though, many of the complaints are about things like the beer being watery, having minimal head, and details that I really don't agree with.

Personally, I found the beer to be quite enjoyable. And after reading the reviews, it almost sounds like the brewer changed the recipe after getting some nasty feedback.

The beer pours a very attractive mild-amber, and pours will a decent head that lasts a reasonable amount of time. Being in a busy bar, it was hard to get much aroma from the beer however I did get some mild bitterness from the hops and a subtle sweetness which may have been from what I think are citra hops in the brew.

The beer is nicely carbonated, and the first impression that I had after my first sip was there were definite notes of citrus on the palate along with some malty goodness. I didn't get any significant bitterness from the beer and the finish was nice and crisp.

Overall I genuinely enjoyed this beer, so I'm really confused about how it has performed so poorly on ratebeer.com. It was a fittingly good beer to have with excellent company and conversations.

And even better, plans are underway for the second Steemit meet-up in Melbourne. So for my fellow Melbournians reading this, keep the 25th of February free next month!

---

The Beer Data

Beer	Type	Origin	ABV	Rating
Holgate Norton Lager	Munich Helles lager	Woodend, VIC	4.3%	3.5

_{All ratings are out of 5}

Rating and Reviews at ratebeer.com

---