About Beer & Brewer

Beer & Brewer

Overview

Beer & Brewer is an Australian beer magazine and news service covering beer in Australia and New Zealand for passionate consumers, trade professionals, home brewers and casual drinkers alike. Published by The Intermedia Group from Glebe in Sydney, it combines a magazine heritage dating to its launch in 2007 with a busy daily news website at beerandbrewer.com, which in October 2026 was leading with brewery expansions, venue openings and industry policy news. Its content mixes lifestyle and specialist features: brewery profiles, beer reviews and panel tastings, industry and operations news, events coverage, and a dedicated home-brewing strand that descends from the print magazine's Homebrewer section.

The title also runs the Beer & Brewer Awards, its program recognising breweries, venues, retailers and people across the Australian beer industry; the 2025 awards, reported in October 2025, named Mountain Culture co-founder DJ McCready Brewer of the Year and the Bob Hawke Beer & Leisure Centre Brewpub of the Year.

History

Beer & Brewer was launched in 2007, as the craft beer movement was gathering pace in Australia. The Intermedia Group's own description of the title notes that since that launch its blend of lifestyle and specialist features has been aimed at "the passionate consumer, trade professional, home brewer and casual drinker". For most of its life it was a quarterly print magazine, sold nationally through Dan Murphy's, First Choice, newsagents and independent homebrew shops and bottle shops across Australia and New Zealand, with each issue including a flip-cover Homebrewer section of tips and recipes. A digital edition app carried the magazine to subscribers on a four-issues-a-year subscription.

The print magazine's masthead in its Summer 2017–18 issue gives a snapshot of the title's organisation at the time: published under Intermedia's Food and Beverage Media imprint at 41 Bridge Road, Glebe, with Simon Grover as managing director, Paul Wootton as publisher and Deborah Jackson as editor, supported by assistant editor Tam Allenby, consulting editor Ian Kingham and homebrewer editor Chris Thomas. Wootton's editor's letter in that issue recorded that Jackson had edited the magazine through 2017 and that Annette Shailer was returning from maternity leave to the editor's chair in January 2018. The magazine's awards program was revived in that period, with a judging panel selecting winners across 12 categories including People's Choice awards voted by readers.

Print issues continued into the 2020s — a Winter 2022 edition was sold through digital newsstands, and the website was still drawing on "our spring magazine" and "our Winter magazine" in 2023 — but directories now list Beer & Brewer's format as digital, and its centre of gravity has shifted decisively to the website, which publishes news daily. The print run's exact end is not documented in the sources consulted for this profile; what is documented is a title that has moved from quarterly print to a digital-first news service while retaining its magazine brand, tasting panels and awards.

Content and Coverage

The website's coverage is organised in deep channels: its Beer & Breweries category alone held more than 1,400 articles when viewed in October 2026, alongside People (more than 700), Homebrew Recipes, Operations, Industry, Craft Beer, Features and Events. Daily news in October 2026 included a Melbourne brewery's expansion and tenth anniversary, a major brewer's closure of a Brisbane brewpub, industry lobbying on alcohol tax reform, new product launches and venue reopenings — reported by a small team of staff writers including Sienna Martyn, Molly Nicholas and Deborah Jackson, with further contributions from Andy Young.

Features and franchises give the service its magazine character. A tasting panel program puts categories of beer before expert judges — pale ales and IPAs in an August 2025 call-out, stouts and strong ales earlier that winter — with results published as magazine-style roundups. A Recipe of the Week series, fronted by noted American homebrewing author John Palmer among others, serves the home-brewing audience, and a "What's Brewing" strand collects shorter features and guides. People coverage profiles brewers, executives and industry figures, and the site reports the wider drinks business — keg logistics, malting, freight — in its Operations channel, reflecting its dual consumer-and-trade readership.

The Beer & Brewer Awards anchor the brand's events presence. Reported on 23 October 2025, that year's awards recognised BentSpoke co-founder Richard Watkins for a lifetime of achievement in craft beer, named Mountain Culture co-founder and head brewer DJ McCready Brewer of the Year, crowned the Bob Hawke Beer & Leisure Centre Brewpub of the Year for a second time, and gave the Tait Micallef Best Beer Retailer Award to Melbourne's Carwyn Cellars. The title also covers the industry's festival circuit closely, including Sydney Beer Week, whose 2026 program it previewed in September 2026.

Audience and Reach

Beer & Brewer addresses two overlapping audiences: beer enthusiasts and home brewers, and the trade — brewers, venue operators, retailers and suppliers. No current audited audience figure is published for the title, and none is claimed here. The only circulation-style figures in the record are dated ones from the publisher itself: an Intermedia recruitment advertisement for the title in the mid-2010s cited a print readership of 38,000 per issue and more than 11,000 subscribers to its weekly e-newsletter, figures that describe the print-era magazine rather than the present digital service. Its social following is material to its reach today; one current media directory lists roughly 9,300 Facebook followers for the title. The awards program extends its presence into the industry calendar, drawing entries and attendance from breweries and venues nationally.

Digital Presence

Beerandbrewer.com is now the title's primary platform: a WordPress news service publishing multiple stories a day across news, features and recipes, with author archives for its writers and hundreds of pages of news archive. The site maintains the magazine's tasting panels, publishes the results of the Beer & Brewer Awards each year, and carries the title's home-brewing recipes and guides. Historically the brand also published the Ultimate Beer Guide, a travel and buyer's guide book, and ran a Beer & Brewer Expo alongside its awards, as recorded in older publisher descriptions; its present digital operation centres on the website, its social channels and the awards.

Ownership and Organisation

Beer & Brewer is published by The Intermedia Group, the Sydney publisher of more than 20 business and specialist titles, from its offices at 41 Bridge Road, Glebe NSW 2037. Within Intermedia the title sits in the group's drinks portfolio alongside National Liquor News and The Shout, and its editorial resources are shared across that portfolio: Deborah Jackson, who edited Beer & Brewer in 2017 and is now Managing Editor of National Liquor News, remains one of its principal writers, and its 2026 news pages carry bylines from Sienna Martyn, Molly Nicholas and Andy Young. No single current editor for the title is named on its website — some stories are bylined simply "Beer & Brewer Editor" — so this profile records the writing team as observed rather than asserting a masthead. The Summer 2017–18 masthead documented above (Grover, Wootton, Jackson, Shailer) is the most recent full masthead sighted in preparing this profile.

Contact and Availability

Beer & Brewer is available online at beerandbrewer.com, where its news, features, tasting results and recipes are published free to read, and readers can follow the title through its social media channels. The publisher, The Intermedia Group, is at 41 Bridge Road, Glebe NSW 2037 in Sydney, telephone 02 9660 2113. Print-era subscriptions were sold through newsagents, bottle shops and the title's digital app; current readers should use the website for subscriptions and enquiries, and breweries can submit beers for the tasting panel through the calls published on the site ahead of each tasting round.