No Aussie beers: Here’s the pub that brewed its own instead
IT rose from the ashes, dodged becoming a housing estate, and brews its own beer. Now it’s taking on the world.
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THE Airey’s Inlet pub has a habit of doing things its own way.
When it burned to the ground in the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires it reopened two days later in a tent, the smoke still rising from the ashes, to safeguard its liquor licence and offer sideswiped locals a beer.
In 2011 when it closed, was put up for sale, and developers circled, the one-pub-town looked set to be a none-pub-town, until a group of eight locals got together and bought it.
And when those same locals realised they couldn’t supply it with totally Aussie beer, they started brewing their own.
Almost two years on, the pub’s Rogue Wave brewery is riding Australia’s new wave of homegrown and owned craft beer successes, and sticking it to the multinationals.
Earlier this year their brews picked up a trio of medals at the 2016 Australian International Beer Awards.
Among them was a silver for the hugely popular Moby Pale Ale, one of three core brews permanently on tap at the pub (the others are Salt and Cranky Missus) and are now stocked in bottle and tap form along a series of venues along the Great Ocean Road.
The awards are proof says pub licensee Tim Wood, that Australian drinkers are surfing a new wave as they realise their mainstream drops of choice aren’t quite as Australian as they think.
“The big names might be brewed locally, but they’re all foreign-owned,” Wood says.
He was shocked to discover when he and business partner Phillip Johnson resurrected the pub in 2011 that while the big-name beer companies would help them out setting up their new taps and beer systems, it would limit their choice of what beers to have on tap.
“I was naive — I knew Carlton and Fourex and those were big players in the marker, but I hadn’t realised they had been bought by overseas companies and were foreign-owned,” he says.
“When we bought the pub it had been gutted. They came to us, and said they’d pay to put in your beer system (at a cost of about $40,000) and then we supply their beer.
“I thought ‘hang on, whose pub are we in?”.
They opted to fund their own fitout, and poured brews like Little Creatures and Mountain Goat.
But when those brands to went on to be owned by multinationals, the duo decided to bite the bullet, and take total control of their taps.
They set up Rogue Wave Brewing Co at the hotel 18 months ago. It’s not a new move, but the awards recognition in their first year means they’ve stamped their place in Australia’s burgeoning craft beer market.
“When we won those, we sort of knew we were on the right track,” says Wood.
“To me, it’s simple. About 95 per cent if the beer we drink is this country is foreign-owned. But it’s beer and this is Australia, we should be making it ourselves.”
The most popular of the three beers overall is Salt, a traditional-style lager which Cook describes as “a straight-up beer because I don’t think every beer has to taste of elderberries”.
Their pale ale, Moby, is a big seller on tap and has generated the most interest because of its relationship with environmental warriors, Sea Shepherd.
The brewery has done a licensing agreement which sees it donate part of its profits to Sea Shepherd under the banner of “Drink a Pale, save a whale”.
Originally published as No Aussie beers: Here’s the pub that brewed its own instead