From Barley to the Bottle in the Heart of the City

What do you do with a slab of unused space in the middle of the CBD? You plant a barley crop and open a brewery, of course. As part of Street Works, a landscape design competition hosted by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA), the Beerline project will see Quay Street transformed into Haymarket's very own self-sustained brewery.

Following its installation amongst traffic lights and tram tracks, the public harvesting of the barley crop last week marked the first step in the three-month process that takes the crop from barley to bottle. Throughout December, the barley will undergo the process of malting, brewing, and fermenting, ready to be bottled and served to the public in the January Beer Festival. Brewing will take place on site from start to finish, aiming to promote awareness and appreciation of the value of our food, more than just a 'vacuum sealed container on a supermarket shelf'.

But the social initiative doesn't stop there. The crop will produce around 500 beers, all available for online 'adoption' through a pledged donation to Oz Harvest. Once you've adopted a beer, you can attend regular brewing events to keep an eye on your little tike as it grows up from grass, to make its social debut as an icy cold bevvy.

The visionaries behind Beerline are a pair of bright young architects who go by the name of the Bean Factory. The Beerline is the first in a series of small ideas they intend to release into our city, in the hope that they grow (quite literally, in this case) into something bigger. The four other projects featured in the Street Works initiative will grace our city streets until the end of January.

Check them out at www.streetworks.org.au