Australia’s oldest brewery mixes dark chocolate with stout

The brewery, which is almost two hundred years old, offers a mixture of traditional and experimental flavours in the beers they produce. Whilst their pale ale is, in their words, “the oldest continuously brewed beer in the country”, they have also previously made a stout flavoured with coffee. Cascade Export Stout Old Gold combines one of Australia’s most celebrated chocolate bars with dark-roasted malt to create a “bittersweet blend”.It may not be well known at all in the UK, but Old Gold is still going strong in Australia, 106 years after the dark chocolate bar was first put on sale. During the pandemic, there was an Old Gold rush, with Tom Kimpton at Mondelez (the company which owns Cadbury) noting a 35 per cent increase in sales from late 2019 to mid-2021. Mr. Kimpton suggested that the resurgence may have been due to how Old Gold was a fixture “through two World Wars, the depression and a range of other national challenges.”Hoping to tap into this nostalgia for the chocolate, Cascade Brewery has its own historical pedigree, having survived through family struggles, financial ruin and bushfires. They are now owned by Carlton & United Breweries, who have been an Australian subsidiary of AB InBev since 2015.This fusion of two classic Australian brands is to be marked with the creation of 5,000 cases of beer – but they are only available for purchase in Tasmania. Though Cascade’s beers are difficult to source in the UK, for those seeking a taste of this limited release, Old Gold is available from online retailers.

Ironically, breweries making unusually flavoured beers is not an unusual phenomenon: Guinness recently released a breakfast tea flavoured ale for St. Patrick’s Day, for example.