Inside Adelaide’s growing microbrewery scene
IT’S a golden age for fans of craft beer, with SA creativity brewing up new and exciting offerings. Take a look inside the breweries changing the rules.
PRE-EMINENT master brewer Dr Charles Hahn jokes that when he arrived in Australia from the US in 1981, he was introduced to our seven-course meal — a meat pie and a sixpack.
Hahn, 70, from Colorado, is founder of Sydney’s Hahn Brewery — later becoming Lion’s Malt Shovel with its James Squire beers. His audiences always laugh at the one-liner but its sentiment, back then, was indicative of the population’s nonchalance when it came to simple expectations of food and beer.
Hahn’s still in the game and he’s helped push the industry, corporate and independent, a long way. Brewers, like chefs, now travel as heroes. And the kaleidoscopic aroma and flavour spectrum of their four ingredients — malt, hops, yeast and water — is a growing source of wonderment.
Big Shed Brewing Concern’s Craig Basford and Jason Harris typify the rise to commercial ranks of the homebrewer, where the bounds of craft beer get a no-rules workout. The pair launched Big Shed with a rousing meet-the-brewer party at Thebarton’s Wheatsheaf Hotel in April 2014. In a short history punctuated with national awards, their Royal Park brewery has seen a massive expansion and an annual turnover of $3 million.
Basford says the modern evolution of craft beer has come in leaps and bounds, adding that one of the big hooks is a sense of consumer ownership.
“There’s a sense of evangelism on the rise,” he says. “People want to know the stories of where the beer’s coming from and who’s making it and why they make it the way they do.
“And they want more access to people behind the scenes because they want to know that they’re doing something good with the money they're spending.”
At the time Dr Hahn arrived in Australia, South Australia had two breweries — Coopers and West End (or SA Brewing) and occasionally drinkers dabbled in comparative brands from across the border.
“There was a time where you talked to a bloke and he’d say, ‘I drink West End Draught and my dad drank West End and that’s it,” Basford says. “But now, people’s awareness and their want to try new things is more open.”
Now the state’s breweries number about 40 and rising, from micros to pub and big-scale craft brands. And on any given day, there are about 400 SA beers to choose from in bottle shops and pubs.
Aside from good employment prospects for rapidly technical homebrewers, SA has a fair slice of the $454m national beer industry, as recorded by IBIS last year. Yet, still, just 3 per cent of sales reflect craft beer so there’s plenty of room for expansion and diversity.
At the birth of SA’s alcohol industry — with white settlement fuelled by often spurious brewers and distillers — quality was a dubious vaguery. Much of the grog was barely healthier than drinking River Torrens water downstream from a dead animal.
After many decades of basic beers, the birth of big-scale craft beer in the 1980s saw SA looking to WA for inspiration. Brewer Phil Sexton had left beer giant Swan to launch his Matilda Bay beers, widely seen as Australia’s first craft ales. His Summer Wheat, renamed Redback in 1986, among his other styles under national distribution, went off like a box of springs out of the Sail and Anchor Hotel in Fremantle. Suddenly hearing Aussie bands such as the Sunnyboys at the Old Lion Hotel became a heightened experience with a fruity Redback in hand.
And it signalled an SA beer explosion to come.
Pubs followed the brew cult. Among the first were Port Adelaide’s Port Dock (famous for its Lyndon Nelsen recipe for highly awarded Black Bart Milk Stout) and North Adelaide’s Old Lion.
The mid-to-late 2000s saw a groundswell frothing with newcomers and for a while it seemed new brewers announced themselves every month during the eccentric and intoxicating beers-and-beards era.
For now, take a quick breath because more beer labels are on the way. Sure, it’s only beer but it’s an industry fast becoming one of SA’s most-watched.
Sample with gusto but leave the wheels in the driveway.
To read the full story, pick up this week’s (May 10) special edition of The City with the New Adelaide supplement. Find a free copy at our stands in Rundle Mall, James Place, Adelaide Central Market, Adelaide Railway Station, UniSA’s city campuses and at TAFE Light Square.
The annual Craft Brewing Industry Association national conference will be held in Adelaide, July 25-27, australiancraftbeer.org.au; the Adelaide Beer & BBQ Festival weekend starts at the Adelaide Showgrounds on Friday, July 28; and the Royal Adelaide Beer and Cider Awards (now open to New Zealand entries) will be announced on Friday, July 28, also at the Showgrounds