Cascade Brewery Bar — Restaurant in Hobart

How fun is it to eat dinner and drink beer in a 200-year old establishment? Cascade Brewery was originally started as a flour mill and bakery in 1824 by Peter DeGraves, a "dubious" shipbuilder and a notorious liar and swindler and his partner, Hugh MacIntosh. After serving five years in prison for his various deceptions and his many outstanding debts, Peter DeGraves returned to Tasmania from England, and he and MacIntosh turned the flour mill/bakery into a brewery and began exporting beer. Cascade Brewery was off and running! Older workers tell of the "brewery bell" going off at 10, 12 and 3 pm (15:00), which signaled that workers were allowed to drink beer during their shift for 15 minutes. The practice was supposed to keep the workers from stealing beer from the company, since they could legally drink it three times a day. This practice actually continued until 1993!! Not a bad perk if you are a beer lover!!

Today, 200 years later, you can still tour the brewery (we did not have time so therefore, did not take the tour), have a drink, and some food. My husband had the beer flight, which includes four small beers (their lager, draught, pale ale and export stout) and since I don't like beer, I had a cocktail--the "jammin raspberry" (vodka, raspberry mint and lemon), which we both enjoyed very much! Then, we ordered our dinners--my husband chose the export stout braised brisket, which was served with mashed potatoes and gravy, and brocollini. The brisket was tender and flavorful, and the brocollini was crisp and tasty! I ordered the fish and chips. The fish was nicely breaded (quite a bit of breading, which I like) and the chips (fries) were tasty and fried crispy!

I truly believe that any visit to Hobart should include the Cascade Brewery, so why not enjoy a drink and some tasty food while you...

Gardens were absolutely gorgeous as was the interior of the restaurant (we didn’t dare spend more time than we needed to by going through the brewery). HOWEVER, the visitor centre parking specifically signposted for large vehicles is NOT designed for large vehicles. Firstly, the driveway into the parking lot is at such an angle all-inclusive with a large speedhump (?) at the top, it ripped the whole step of our van out from under us. After witnessing the most painstakingly horrendous sound of scraping metal, we found the courage to get out to see the damage and to pick up the sad remains of our step. It was clear this was not the first (and won’t be the last) time that driveway had taken the life of a poor unsuspecting undercarriage of a hire vehicle. Second to that awful encounter (and large payment to the hire vehicle company), if you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to get down the driveway, you’d be surprised to find out the allocated parking is no where near appropriate to accomodate ‘large vehicles’ if by ‘large’ it’s referring to anything larger than a beat up old Ford Falcon. And finally, if you were looking for something to drown your sorrows, you may want to bother with the restaurant, but not for anything other than drinking. Although the gardens, interior and reno is lovely, the food is a shocking waste of money. Unsalted, cold fries should be a crime + coupled with a sad pork chop and uncrisp roast potatoes? Absolute felony. The only possible saving grace they had was that the beer was good (works for drowning sorrows), but cmon, the bar is kind of low if you’re hardly expecting decent beer from a brewery.

All in all, we left feeling defeated by the driveway, deflated by the food and definitive that our time was been wasted at somewhere these brainwashed 5* reviews...

Live Music and a warm Saturday evening vibe at the Bar. We were lucky to get a table as we had a visitor from interstate and were doing the rounds of things to do and drink! Love the beer here and the tasting paddle was enjoyable. For eats we ordered, chicken Parma - was good and a great generous serving, we also ordered mussels in beer and the Ocean trout dish with cavalier Nero. The mussels were a huge disappointment, there were only 10 maybe 11 mussels in the bowl, and considering this is a main course was a very meagre portion. The bread to accompany was two slices of toasted thin French bread which was dry to a crisp. I do believe that with mussels a generous serving of crusty bread would be more appropriate. The beer Jus was just that, beer. We did let the waiter was know that we were disappointed with the lack of mussels, but we got not much of a response. The Ocean trout was satisfactory slightly overcooked, with a sprinkling of puy lentils and cavalo nero underneath it. Not that inspiring. My take on this is, Cascade is a Public house / Bar where people go to sample the beer. Food on offer should be substantial, tasty, (if you want people to drink more) and this is the atmosphere of a traditional pub restaurant. Sadly I think the staff are there for a job and lack passion for the food or drink. The photos are of a previous visit earlier this year which was...