Small breweries were common throughout Australia in the nineteenth century, but most of them had closed by the 1930s, and beer production had become centralised in a small number of very large breweries, mostly situated in the capital cities. Nearly everyone alive in Australia in the early 1980s understood that beer production in large breweries was normal practice; brewing in small plants was unfamiliar, indeed rare, especially if they were attached to pubs.
In the three decades since the early 1980s, nearly three hundred new breweries have opened in Australia, defying the long-term historical trends of ownership concentration and geographic centralisation. Most of these new breweries have produced beer in small batches, and most have sought to produce beer that is distinctly different from the output of the small number of very large breweries that churn out the vast majority of the beer consumed in Australia. Many of them, perhaps most, produce or have produced what we would today call ‘craft beer’.
Craft beer is something that many of us will recognise when we see it, but which most will have difficulty defining in words. The use of the term ‘craft’ to qualify beer, brewing and breweries in Australia is a fairly recent phenomenon; it made its first tentative appearances at end of the 1990s, adopted from the United States of America where it was already common parlance.
When some dozens of small breweries opened around Australia in the 1980s, the idea was so new and foreign that we didn’t know what to call them. At first they were commonly referred to as mini-breweries, then as micro-breweries (another term borrowed from the USA), but these terms conveyed nothing about the type or quality of beer produced, just a sense of the scale of output. The term boutique brewery also became popular in the 1980s, and implied something about the distinction from the traditional mainstream brewing industry that the new small-scale operators were seeking to establish.
The distinction between large-scale industrial beer production for national and even international markets, and small-scale, hands-on production, catering for local markets was one of the defining features of many of the new wave of breweries in the 1980s, as it remains for many ‘craft beer’ producers today. Indeed, the appearance of these small breweries can be explained as a reaction against the increasing homogenisation of beer in Australia, and a desire for the return of diversity of brands and styles, a desire first manifested in the 1970s in our captivation with imported beers.
The unfamiliarity of small-scale beer production in Australia in the early 1980s became an obstacle to the development of new small breweries, partly because the legal framework for brewing beer, retailing beer and for building new breweries had developed around very large industrial brewing facilities. For instance, when Geoffrey Scharer was seeking to install a brewery in his George IV Inn at Picton in New South Wales in the early 1980s, he was initially prevented from doing so by an antiquated law, a hangover from the nineteenth century, which prevented a brewery from operating within fifty yards of a place where beer was sold by retail.
Another early obstacle was that brewing in small commercial breweries was perceived by the drinking public in a similar light to home brewing, which having been legalised in Australia only in the early 1970s was still usually equated with poor quality beer. This public perception was sometimes justified, as lack of brewing expertise and the difficulty in obtaining good quality malt, hops and yeast sometimes prevented some new small breweries from achieving or maintaining desirable standards of quality. Many in the 1980s adopted the easier and safer route of using wort concentrate. This was usually obtained from Cooper and Sons in South Australia, who had begun making this product for the home-brewing market in 1984, and who even took financial stakes in several of the new extract-using breweries.
Many of the earliest of the new wave of small breweries in Australia were modelled upon, or at least strongly influenced by, a similar but earlier movement in the United Kingdom. Brewtech, the creator of the Sail and Anchor Pub Brewery (1984) and the Matilda Bay Brewery (1985) in Western Australia, and later of joint-venture brewpubs in Adelaide (1986), Melbourne (1988) and Hobart (1988), obtained inspiration from David Bruce’s chain of Firkin brewpubs, the first of which, the Goose and Firkin, opened in south London in 1979. Brewtech also borrowed the name of one of Bruce’s beers, Dogbolter, for one of its earliest brews. Brewing equipment for the Matilda Bay Brewery and for the Old Lion Brewery in Adelaide was obtained from Robert Morton of Burton-on-Trent, England, one of few sources of small-scale brewing plant at that time.
The Old Ballarat Brewery, Victoria, which came into production in 1984, shortly preceding Brewtech’s Sail and Anchor, used equipment from brewpub system manufacturer, Inn Brewing, established in England in 1982 to service the pub-brewing revival there. Old Ballarat also became the Australian agent for Inn Brewing, and helped to establish three more small breweries in this country, all using Inn Brewing equipment. They included the Strzelecki Brewery, which later became the Grand Ridge Brewery, and today is one of the oldest and more successful of Victoria’s craft breweries.
In South Australia, two brewpubs were started in the late 1980s in addition to Brewtech’s Old Lion project. The one that survives, the Port Dock Brewery Hotel at Port Adelaide, used an Inn Brewing system, obtained directly from the manufacturer before Old Ballarat gained the Australian agency. Pub Brewing, the company behind the Port Dock, also established similar operations in Melbourne and Sydney, the latter being the now famous Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel, at which brewing began in 1987. In contrast to the Brewtech establishments, the Port Dock and Lord Nelson both began as extract breweries.
The Lord Nelson was followed closely in New South Wales by Scharer’s Little Brewery at Picton (1987) and by Chuck Hahn’s self-named brewery at Camperdown (1988). Hahn had worked for Tooth and Co. in Sydney, then briefly for Lion in New Zealand, before starting the Hahn Brewery back in Sydney. Its centrepiece is a set of copper Steinecker vessels from a brewery in New Zealand that he had decommissioned for Lion in 1986.
Centrepac, another pioneer of craft brewing in New South Wales, established Britten’s Brewery at Tamworth in 1988, and started brewing at its Pumphouse Brewery Tavern in Sydney in 1989. Both breweries incorporated equipment manufactured by Robert Morton, through Centrepac having engaged the same consultant responsible for the Brewtech’s Robert Morton installations in Perth and Adelaide.
Queensland’s first contribution to the boom came in 1987 with the opening of a small brewery at the Waterloo Hotel in suburban Brisbane. This operation was different from its contemporaries in two main ways. First, its proponent, Graham Howard, came from a home-brewing background, not from industrial brewing or from wine-making, which were common sources of expertise for the 1980s new breweries. Secondly, Howard built his own brewing equipment. Although this operation was short-lived, Howard’s equipment was acquired by Carlton and United Breweries for use as a developmental brewery, which purpose it still serves at the giant Abbotsford Brewery in Melbourne.
The record year for Australian new breweries in the 1980s was 1988, with sixteen starters. Economic hard times and adverse beer taxation laws then reduced the robust flow to a trickle over the next several years. The total number of new breweries in Australia stabilised at around thirty for most of the 1990s. Notable among the new starters during the slump were the Wig and Pen Tavern and Brewery in Canberra (1994), the third small brewery to open in the national capital, but the only one of those three to have survived.
A resurgence in small brewery start-ups occurred towards the end of the 1990s. There were six in each of 1998 and 1999, and seven in 2000. Since then the growth has been sustained, with the total number of new breweries in operation exceeding one hundred for the first time in 2007, and rushing toward two hundred in 2014.
The two big Australian brewing companies at first regarded the small brewery phenomenon as a fad that would soon pass, but even by the end of the 1980s that opinion was changing, if their actions are anything to go by. In 1988 Carlton and United Breweries took a 20 per cent stake in the Matilda Bay Brewing Company (by which Brewtech had become known), then moved to total ownership in 1990. CUB thus acquired a craft beer arm.
CUB also acquired the Sanctuary Cove Brewery (est. 1988) in Queensland, in 1995, and rebadged it as the Gold Coast Brewery, and later as the Masthead Brewery. It has since been closed (2003), and its products have been absorbed into the Matilda Bay range.
The other big brewer, Lion Nathan, purchased the assets of the Hahn Brewing Company in 1993, after that business had been placed into voluntary receivership in 1992. In 1998 the Hahn Brewery was rebranded as the Malt Shovel brewery, and became Lion Nathan’s craft beer arm, operated by Hahn at his original Camperdown premises.
Whereas the small brewery boom in the United Kingdom had been the principal influence on Australia’s in the 1980s, North America became the major source of inspiration during and after the 1990s. The enormous influence of the North American craft beer sector on Australia is clearly evident in the now common use in small-scale commercial breweries of brewing equipment manufactured in the USA and Canada. Most notably, Diversified Metal Engineering (DME) of Canada has had more than twenty of its breweries installed around the country, the first few in the year 2000.
Accompanying the boom in small brewery numbers, and reflecting the growth of interest in craft beer generally, ancillary enterprises such as brewing education and training facilities and beer festivals and competitions have emerged and prospered. The Ballarat Institute (later College) of Advanced Education began running a one-year post-graduate diploma course in malting and brewing in 1971. This course was run annually for seven years and was attended mainly by students from African and Asian countries. Brewing education at Ballarat was revived in 1986 with the running of a one-week introductory brewing and malting course, and in 1990 the graduate diploma course was reinstated. In 2002, by which time the institution had become the Ballarat University, a new 6hL DME teaching brewery was installed.
The Ballarat example was followed in Western Australia by Edith Cowan University, which installed a 6hL DME brewhouse in 2001 and began offering brewing courses; and in South Australia by Regency Institute of Technical and Further Education, which did the same in 2007, also with a 6hL DME brewhouse. All three institutions have contributed greatly to the creation of new small breweries in Australia since the late 1980s by providing training to many of their operators and owners.
In conjunction with its second introductory brewing and malting course in 1987, Ballarat College of Advanced Education hosted a National Beer and Brewing Exhibition. Thirty-two entries were received form Australia and New Zealand, and among them were products from several of the small breweries that had come into existence in both countries during the previous few years. This competition, still hosted by the University of Ballarat, but now known as the Australian International Beer Awards, has grown to become the leading event of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, and indeed the second largest in the world after America’s World Beer Cup. It has provided the inspiration for similar events in other Australian states, such as the Sydney Royal Beer Competition and the Perth Royal Beer Show, which both began in 2007.
As the number of new breweries has grown, spare capacity in some of them has been made available to brewers who aspire to brewery ownership but lack the capital to purchase their own hardware, or who simply wish to test the market and develop a customer base before making such an investment. Two prominent examples are Southern Bay Brewing Company in Victoria, which commenced as Geelong Brewing Company in 1988, and the Mildura Brewery, also in Victoria, established in 2004. Even more significant in this regard is Australian Independent Brewers in New South Wales, known as Brewpack since 2012, which commenced operations in 2005 for the specific purpose of providing brewing services to the craft beer sector. Many of the new breweries created in the past decade or so owe their existence to such contract brewing arrangements, as will many more in the future.
First published on whatiscraftbeer.com.au, republished by permission
