What a difference at Melbourne airport. “G’day, Roger, what brings you to Australia?” the beaming official at the passport desk asks. “A beer festival? Jeez, mate, I’ll see you there!”

Australia lives up to its image. Everyone is “mate” because it’s a matey kind of place. As someone originally from London’s East End, where “mate” is also common currency, I felt immediately at home Down Under.

There’s a second, potent reason for feeling at home there: it’s a great beer drinking country. Only the Czechs out-drink the Aussies and in Australia the beer scene is changing rather more dramatically than it is in the Czech Republic. If Foster’s is your favorite tipple, don’t bother to go. What was once considered an iconic Australian beer―the “amber nectar”―is hardly featured prominently in the scene. In a week in Melbourne and Adelaide, I don’t recall seeing a single tap for Foster’s.

Even Crocodile Dundee shuns it now and the company that makes it has reverted to its original name of Carlton and Union Breweries. CUB’s main brands are Victoria Bitter, the biggest-selling beer in Australia―and a lager in spite of the name―and Carlton Draught.

With Lion Nathan (owned by Kirin of Japan), which brews Castlemaine XXXX, Toohey’s and Swan, the two giants command 95 percent of the Australian market. Cooper’s of Adelaide, doughty brewers of Sparkling Ale (see sidebar), has a further three percent, which doesn’t leave much room for anyone else. But an astonishing number of small craft breweries have sprung up to grab the remaining two percent of the market.

The craft brewers were on show at Beer Expo in Melbourne in the spring―autumn in Australia. It was the brainchild of David Lipman, publisher of Beer & Brewer Magazine, a glossy publication dedicated to all things beery in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to the efforts of craft brewers and writers, Australians can now move beyond bland lagers and savor pale ales, an abundance of IPAs, porters and stouts, alongside Belgian and German-inspired wheat beers, golden ales and true pilsners.

While it is a great tagline and Fosters is Australia’s most successful beer brand export (the beer itself isn’t exported), it is rarely consumed in Australia. The title of most popular beer in Australia instead falls to another label from the Fosters stable, Victoria Bitter—or, more simply, “VB,” with just over seventeen percent of the national market.

Although they won’t find Fosters, visitors will find plenty of beers that taste similar. In a blind tasting between Fosters, VB and many of the other mainstream beers, most Australians would be hard pressed to pick “their” beer, such is the similarity of the Australian lagers—and to most Australians lager is beer and beer is lager.

But a quiet and flavorful revolution is starting to take place, one that in many cases is inspired by American beers and even American brewers. It’s a revolution that had its seeds sown in the late 1980s.

Like the United States, the Australian brewing industry spent much of the 20th century in a period of slow consolidation resulting in a handful of breweries producing mainly lagers. Despite their similarities, these brews were sold almost exclusively within state borders. Whether this was due to drinker parochialism or gentlemen’s agreements between brewing companies not to encroach on each other’s patch is debatable, but it meant that in enormous states like Queensland you would have the bizarre situation of the “state” beer, XXXX, being shipped 1000 miles north to Cairns but not 70 miles south to towns the adjacent state of New South Wales.

The 1980s ushered in a period of wheeling and dealing in the beer industry that saw the spectacular rise and fall of brewing entrepreneurs such as Alan Bond, whose Bond Brewing briefly straddled the globe—including a foothold in the United States where he owned G. Heileman—before spectacularly crashing in the early ‘90s.

In the washup, two major brewers, Fosters Group and Lion Nathan, remained, controlling between them in excess of 95 percent of the Australian beer market. Like all of the major international lager producers, these companies made beers that were perfectly consistent, light and unchallenging for the average drinker. They were popular but they also call to mind a famous joke involving Coors and a canoe.

The great irony of the Australian craft scene is that the man who is perhaps most identifiable with the current growth of flavorsome craft beer led the team that developed Coors Light in the 1970s.