"There's no hurry, we have all the day before us!"

I love to be a tourist is my home town.

This is a convenient way to live as I have called many towns home.

The Crowleys' came to stay for awhile, and mostly we ate and went to the beach and entertained very small people, although only two, did seem to outnumber us.

However, there was one of two tourist items on the list that we could do and that was take a tour of the 'Cascade Brewery'.

Being Tasmania, this would of course be the "longest, continually run brewery in Australia".

I was a bit unsure about taking a group tour but I really did learn a lot.

I could have guessed the origin story- some man in the area of England, heard of the opportunities in the new land and decided to come over and build a water powered saw mill to cash in on the booming building trade. (The brewery part is the more interesting part of the story).

After a false start or two, he made it over, met with the Governor-General and was allotted his 20,000 hectares and 2,000 convict laborers. (okay maybe that was 2,000 or 200 I never can remember anything past the whole "free" land and labor part).

He got the spot he wanted which was below the meeting of two rivulets coming off Mt.Wellington- this is where the name Cascade comes from.

However from the aforementioned false start- some "coppers" came by and put him in jail for two years.  While he served his time, construction continued on his factory but while in jail he came up with the idea to start the brewery instead.  As he owned the only pure water source, all beer in Hobart was made in town with water that ran down past the prisons, the slaughterhouses and other pleasant areas.

Here is the cliff note version of my other fun facts.

The Tasmanian tiger at the bar is actually fake, and was made by an agency for a commercial that everyone except me remembered.

The face of the tiger is not representative of the real animal as it was made to look "friendly".

The brewery was not passed down through the family because the boys did not have children, and the four daughters with the nine grandchildren all "perished" in a boat just off the coast of Wales on their way back to England for a wedding. (!)

Until 1994, there were four times a day a bell in the brewery rang: "Tea, second Tea, after-tea, and dinner", in which all employees and crafty truck drivers with good timing, were given ten minutes to drink all the beer they could in that time.

Apparently very few people every quit their job at the brewery.

Now- the new policy is that each employee gets a case fort-nightly to drink "responsibly" at home.

I also learned that vegemite is made from the sludge at the bottom or was it skimmed off the top? of the beer vats.

I am not sure if this makes me feel better or worse about vegemite.  However its iconic status makes more sense to me now.

I also learned a new word from the ingredient list- wort.

I plan to use it in scrabble as soon as I have the chance.