The annual festival of fun and suds, the Bendigo Craft Beer and Cider Festival is on again at the Tom Flood reserve today, and it’s always a bit of a hoot scanning the brewery names each year.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Among the local craft (and that’s one word rather than an acronym for Can’t Remember A Flaming Thing) breweries, this year we’ll host the Flying Brick Cider Company from Wallington, Melbourne’s Old Wives’ Ales, Castlemaine’s Shedshaker and South Australia’s The Cide Project.
Then there’s The Blue Elephant Beverage Company from the Harcourt Valley, Bandicoot Brewing from Echuca, Prancing Pony from South Australia, plain old Franks from Franklin in Tasmania and you can’t go past the Angry Cock from the Yarra Valley,
It seems these people have as much fun making up the names as the the not-so-heavy bevvies.
+++
As Bendigo changes, so does our urban etiquette behaviour.
Ticketed electronic parking machines have almost totally replaced the hated old parking meters in central Bendigo, and that’s supposed to be a good thing.
Maybe in terms of reducing street clutter and increasing municipal revenue.
With the old meters there was a sense of unexpected triumph over the system when you parked and found the meter had a lot of time left on it.
Now, you just fork out and hope.
With the old meters, motorists virtually left unexpended money in the meter for the next parker, whereas now, you virtually take the unexpended time home with you.
It means that a meter which once was able to produce, let’s say, $1.50 an hour, could now produce many multiples of this in busy spots at busy times.
But we have noticed a growing rebellion among Bendigo’s motorists.
In one of the rebellious actions this week, we saw an electronic parking ticket change hands four times in Hargreaves Street before it finally ran out.
We suspect if it’s not illegal, it soon will be because it’s nice and courteous.