As an Englishman in the USA I have learned to be careful when ordering many food items. For example, go to any breakfast establishment and order tea and you will likely get iced tea. Ask for tea with milk and you may well get iced tea and a glass of the pale liquid produced by the mammary glands of cows.

Care is also needed when ordering pies. A pie in the USA is a pastry crust containing a sweet filling, usually fruit (as well as local specialities such as pecan pie):

For those who can't get enough calories in one slice of pie, there's always fried pies:

But again, still only containing sweet fillings.

Avid readers will recall my discussion of the Hostess Fruit Pie (famously noted as containing natural and artificial flavoring, as if there is a third kind).

Savory pies are a staple of British food, with a wide variety available at any supermarket or gas station. If you know where to go, you can get some exceptional pies, like Sweeny and Todd in Reading:

As a savory pie lover, the lack of pastry stuffed with minced beef, steak, lamb or other delicious options is frustrating. To be fair, there are some options, such as Boomerang's Handheld Aussie Pies, started in Austin by two Americans who had experienced the delicacy in Australia, and so decided to dress up like they'd just been shearing sheep:

The shortage of savory pie options is obviously recognized as a problem. BBC America has a guide, where to find British Savory Pies in the US. All of these pies are ok in desparate circumstances, but to get a real fix I need to go to the UK or to Australia. And so off to Australia I went. On arrival in Brisbane, Queensland, I had a 5 hour journey to Chinchilla, a remote coal mining and coal-seam gas area where the residents were extremely excited when McDonalds opened a store (previously the nearest store was 50 miles away). At the work camp I was delighted to find this fridge, full to the brim of savory pastry delights:

Better still, Merritt's Bakery, Chinchilla's own pie shop offered a fantastic option: a meat pie with integral mushy peas:

Why on earth anyone would get excited about McDonalds when this is available is beyond me.

And so to wash down all these pies? Australia's most popular beer: Castlemaine XXXX. Castlemaine Brewery was started in 1857 in Castlemaine, Victoria but moved to Brisbane. XXXX was first brewed in 1924 and has been brewed there ever since. Confusingly XXXX is called a "bitter" but is actually a lager. Seems like the US is not the only place where you have to be careful what you order:

On a visit to the brewery I tried all four of the above beers, XXXX bitter, XXXX gold, XXXX gold pale ale and summer lager and had trouble discerning any difference. One way to try a slightly different version of XXXX is "on-the-wood". Castlemaine Brewery still puts XXXX into traditional wooden kegs for delivery to a very small number of local places. One such place is the Breakfast Creek Hotel:

It was actually slightly different from the version in the brewery, but still not bitter!