The team at Dave’s Brewery tours have packed up their bus and headed to Canberra. Some 3 years since commencing tours in Sydney, Dave’s has launched in Canberra with their first tours kicking off in October. Establishing itself as part of the Sydney craft beer scene, Dave’s has progressed from Saturday tours run by Dave Phillips to a team delivering behind the scenes tours 7 days per week.

“The expansion to Canberra was a some-what natural decision” said Dave Phillips. “For us, our focus is NSW first and foremost and we are well progressed on our plans for other NSW locations. However a number of factors came together which made our next step for Brewery Tours to be in ACT. We had been going back and forth to Canberra for some time checking out the local scene and knew there was a potential tour product with the number of breweries open to the idea. But a major part of what we do is being local, so we decided early on that for us to go outside of Sydney would only make sense if we had a local to run and operate the tours. So when we found our local partner, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place and we kicked off.”

Dave’s Brewery Tours – ACT is a partnership between Dave’s Travel & Events Group and Canberra local Shane Jasprizza. Jasprizza had attended a tour with Dave’s and was interested in the possibility of launching locally which he put to Phillips earlier this year, resulting in the formation of the partnership, a training program and business management package aimed at enabling the ACT business to hit the ground running.

“Expanding has really focused our efforts in bedding down our policies and processes, meaning we are now enabled to bring our other plans forward with confidence and provide our regional partners and staff an awesome platform. We had advice previously around franchises, but it didn’t make sense to me. Although we have basically established a quasi-franchise model with the Canberra business in terms of the “Dave’s in a box” kit we provided, our skin is in the game there and I can’t see any reason why we won’t adopt the same model elsewhere.” Straddling both the brewing and tourism industries, Dave’s has established deep relationships and partnerships with Destination NSW and Visit Canberra along with Tourism Australia aimed at bringing more awareness and traveller spend to local breweries. Dave is confident the move outside NSW is a positive one with major drive underway in both state and federal tourism policies to widen the traditional “food & wine” marketing to include beer and spirits into the tourism product mix.

“We’ve got a seat at the table now and are talking to some great people across the tourism spectrum to find more ways to showcase our local beer scenes. Our aim is making sure local beer tourism is elevated as a strong contribution to the Australian Tourism roadmap and marketing over the next few years as tourism becomes a major economic driver in 2020. We’re stoked to be heading to Canberra and working with everyone there. It has a great beer scene and there is a fair bit of buzz in the tourism circles with what we bring to the local offering so Shane has definitely got an exciting challenge on his hands.” – Dave Phillips.