Beer #1: I Wanna Live with the Cinnamon Girl

PL is reunited with one of the original classics of the craft brewing industry

I wanna live with the Cinnamon Girl, I could be happy the rest of my life with the Cinnamon Girl.

Neil Young’s Cinammon Girl, the tour de force opening track on his second album with its thumping intro, incendiary outro, and celebrated one-note guitar solo (the same note played 38 times), was also the subject of a curious liner note on the Canadian’s three-record Decade compilation, where he admitted the tune was “hard to explain to my wife”.

Around the turn of the century, Matt Donelan, a no-nonsense brewer with an independent streak, converted a couple of stainless steel tanks, previously been used to store milk and soda syrup, into a brewing kit, hired a gritty split-level factory on May St in Sydney’s inner-west, hung up a sign that read St Peters Brewery and started to brew a couple of beers, including one named after the song we both love.

Such events have become commonplace over the past decade and a bit, but these were desperate days for discerning beer drinkers and Donelan’s independent outfit was out front of a revolution in brewing few could have predicted.

In those days, the craft brewing industry was not yet in its infancy. I’d drive across the city and the state to try a new beer. Green shoots were appearing, however. Chuck Hahn, his pioneering start-up bought out by Lion when the banks foreclosed, had found a second life with the Malt Shovel/James Squire brewery in Camperdown. There were a couple of pub breweries (who remembers when pub breweries were a thing?), which varied in quality. Little Creatures was rising from the ashes of the Matilda Bay Brewing Company in WA. Down in Melbourne, Cam Hines and Dave Bonighton scaled up their passion for home brewing and started Mountain Goat. It was a path many were to follow.

I had been the weekly beer columnist at The Daily Telegraph for some time and welcomed every new player with tears of joy in my eyes. It was a tough gig being a beer writing was in those days. Seriously. Desperate for content, I wrote a lot about home brewing, and leaned heavily on the motto “sometimes the story is better than the beer”.

I'd first come across Matt when he was working for another small brother and sister outfit that made a great beer called Full Sail Ale, in a small outlet, Harbour Brewing, in Marrickville, but like most who had a crack at that time, they’d crashed and burned. That was a shame, it was a good beer and my first experience of Matt’s independent style.

Matt Donelan brewing up a storm at Mountain Goat in Newtown.

I can’t remember what lured me to Matt’s jury-rigged brewery at St Peters the first time, but I know I made regular visits, and I’ll never forget the first time I tasted his Cinnamon Girl Ale; a subtle, spicy, brown beer that was chasing the moonlight had me in raptures. I’d often sneak in the back lane and have a Cinnamon Girl or his Blonde straight from the tank. There is nothing on this earth better than good beer straight from the source.