If Australia can be considered to have a national drink, it has to be the beer. It’s the liquid that lubricates the country’s preferred pastimes, which tend to centre on beaches, barbecues and sports.
However, the light-flavoured lagers that are the traditional favourites now face a challenge from a host of new arrivals on the scene. Styles and flavours that are comparatively little known and even less understood are winning converts, especially among tipplers whose palates have been refined by great wine and inventive dishes. In short, beer is getting hip.
One man surfing the craft beer wave is Ron Feruglio, a former industrial designer and sound engineer who got into homebrewing at the start of the decade and is now the high priest at Melbourne’s Temple Brewing Company.
Unlike beer barons of old who required wads of cash to build a brewery, Feruglio and wife Renata have followed a slightly different path. They are brewers without a brewery.
Rather than sink money into building one — at a cost of at least a million dollars for even a fairly small plant — Feruglio turns his beer recipes into thirst-quenching reality at someone else’s brewery, utilising the other brewer’s excess capacity. This has allowed Feruglio to test the waters with his beers, producing them in small batches and putting them on the market without incurring a heavy debt.
“When we started out, it was always our plan to eventually build a brewery,” Feruglio says.
“But brewing is a very competitive business. It’s also very expensive to build a brewery, and with that kind of investment, there is a very small margin of error.”
So as an award-winning craft brewer, Feruglio started work at Melbourne’s 3 Ravens Brewing Company. Beyond gaining commercial experience, the 57-year-old entrepreneur reached an agreement that allowed him to start his own label, Temple, and turn out his product during the brewery’s down time. He has since moved on to a larger brewery as his volumes have increased.
The name “Temple” came from Feruglio’s approach to beer.
“We wanted a name that wasn’t parochial. And we didn’t want to name it after a particular place because we didn’t have a physical brewery and didn’t want to mislead our customers,” Feruglio says. It’s also a name that he sees as having relevance beyond Australia, which fits with his plans to take the beers overseas.
“We called it Temple because beer has had religious connections since its earliest days,” he adds. “
In Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilisation, beer was brewed in the temple. And the name lent itself to a sense of celebration and ritual and sharing, which is what we felt that beer was all about.”
In speaking with Feruglio about beer, it quickly becomes apparent that he has a reverence for this time-honoured beverage that is also perfectly in keeping with his chosen brand name. He talks of crafting his beers rather than simply making them.
“It has worked well for us doing it the way we have because we have discovered that we don’t want a big production brewery that produces lots and lots of beer… we don’t want to be a beer factory,” he says.
“Instead, we have been concentrating on creating beers that have flavour, beers that are designed for people who appreciate fine food and are looking for a beer to match.”
Among Temple’s offerings are a pale ale, a special bitter and a saison.
Temple’s pale ale takes a traditional American-style beer and gives it a serious injection of hops. The result is a spicy, citrusy brew that is bursting with aroma. The secret here is the use of a hop-back. It’s a little-used piece of equipment where hop flowers, rather than pellets or oil, are used in brewing. This process gives the beer a fresh hop flavour and bouquet.
The saison is a fairly rare beer in Australia. A seasonal farmhouse ale that originated in the Wallonia region in Belgium, it was once given to farm workers as a sustaining refreshment. Temple Saison is flavoured with coriander seed, orange peel and Brazilian pepper, giving it a fruity, spiced taste and making it very refreshing on a hot summer’s day.
So, should big-name brewers with global reach be concerned that notoriously brand-loyal beer drinkers may soon decide to switch allegiances?
“I sure hope so,” says Feruglio with a laugh. “Once you come to the Temple, there’s no going back.”
So you want to be a beer baron, too?
Some of Australia’s fastest-growing beer brands are sold by companies — Snowy Mountains Brewery, Byron Bay Beverages and Barons Brewing — without their own breweries.
Stefan Walker from the Mildura Brewery, which specialises in producing contract beers, says that there are two types of customer.
“Some have a beer they’ve developed, and they want to scale it up to production,” he says. “And then there are those who want to brew something along the lines of what we have already done and are essentially beer marketers.”
With a minimum quantity of 250 cartons needed to get started, there’s an outlay required, but it’s modest compared with the cost of opening up a brewery.
“The hard part is getting distribution. Without distribution and places selling your beer, you don’t have a business,” he adds.
Walker has two pieces of advice for aspiring beer barons: “It is important to have a good brand and packaging, but the beer still has to be good.
“Packaging is important because that’s what’s going to make a person drink it in the first place; the beer is important because it’s what will get them back.”
