GABS beer festival returns for another year, and amongst the new and exciting tastes on offer, you can find an old friend who might just be worth a second look.

People don’t go to the Great Australasian Beer Spectapular (GABS) for something ordinary. They go for bold and brave, sexy and exotic, weird and wonderful.

It’s a place where pacific ale takes a back seat to vegemite gose, and golden ales stand in line behind char-grilled kangaroo wheat beer. But while GABS is the ideal vehicle to experience the huge gamut of flavours and styles that you might not normally be exposed to, you should also take the time to respect the skill and effort that goes into making a clean, beautiful and elegant style that’s altogether more refreshing.

For many years, lager was regarded as a dirty word in Australian craft beer circles, and finally after many false starts, drinkers are now starting to realise its true potential. But why has it taken so long for things to turn around? For Brick Lane Brewing’s Head Brewer, Jon Seltin, part of the problem lies in that many consumers don’t understand lager can be just as complex, and have as much depth of flavour, as a farmhouse style ale.

“The world of lager is a broad church,” he explains. “There are many different iterations, flavours and colours. A lager can be crisp and refreshing; it can be malty, roasty, mouth-coating and full; it can be hoppy and bitter and quite intense.” And Jon should know. This year he is judging Australia’s Independent Beer Awards, the Australian International Beer Awards, Japan’s International Beer Cup and Brazil’s huge Concurso Brasileiro de Cervejas, which received more than 3000 entries.

“But lagers aren’t super sexy; they’re not headline grabbing,” he continues. “When craft beer came along, especially in the US, the first wave of brewers used hoppy ales to differentiate themselves from what at the time was a market dominated by commodified, largely uninteresting lager.

“More recently, there has been a fetish for the new and pushing the limits. There has been a nuclear arms race for extremely hoppy or high-ABV beers, or even beers like milkshake IPA or pastry stout that push the limits of what constitutes beer. They’re fun to make, but they’re also a long way from how a lot of brewers are trained: consistency, quality and repeatability.”

As much as the popularity of a refined lager is growing, as people discover its charms, additional hurdles have so far stopped the wave of lager that many have been predicting for the past three or four years. Significantly, it’s far more difficult and costly to make than other beers, requiring more effort, more space, more equipment and more time.

“Compared to a hoppy pale ale, the turnaround time can be twice as long,” Jon explains. “If you’re a small brewer and your capacity is constrained, and you can make double the amount of ale in the same time, without the needed for expensive filtration systems and stabilisation, it means lager isn’t always within reach.”

GABS 2019 is at Sydney Showground, Sydney Olympic Park on 1 June and the ASB Showgrounds in Auckland on 29 June. Tickets are available from gabsfestival.com. Go for the black forest milkshake IPA, stay for Brick Lane’s fresh-hopped Harvest Lager.