Willie Simpson joins Stone & Wood’s to produce Doppelbock Lager
Craft beer pioneer Willie Simpson teams with Stone & Wood’s Brad Rogers to produce Doppelbock Lager.
Back in the 1980s an eccentric Kiwi wandered the streets of Sydney preaching the good news about craft beer. Here was a prophet before his time. There were at best 15 or 20 such breweries in the entire country and only a handful of them made anything worth drinking.
Today beer bloggers are as numerous as the hairs on a hipster’s chin, but Willie Simpson was a lone voice who wrote his first articles about the industry on a portable typewriter and published where he could.
Outfits came and went, a few like Matilda Bay and Hahn maintain a distorted resonation today, but Simpson hung in and saw, after several false starts, the industry find traction in the 1990s.
Time has proved him to be a visionary and compounded his endearing eccentricities. These days Simpson is holed up in the small Tasmanian town of Railton with partner Catherine Stark. Together they started the Seven Sheds Brewery, Meadery and Hop Garden in 2008. Railton, the “Town of Topiary”, is three hours north of Hobart. Seven Sheds reached peak production three years ago and is always available at the New Sydney in Hobart or the Stanley Hotel, Stanley, but rarely sighted off the island. Simpson is happy with a modest output and an excellent product (his beers regularly have featured in The Weekend Australian’s annual Top 20).
Recently Stone & Wood’s Brad Rogers, who has known Simpson for decades, invited him up to his brewery at Byron Bay in northern NSW to create a collaborative drop under the craft giant’s Forefathers label. Simpson worked with Rogers to brew the magnificent Willie Simpson’s Doppelbock Lager. Simpson says it is in part a tribute to another legend of the brewing scene from back in the day.
“I wanted to do something significant flavour-wise and chose doppelbock for a few reasons,” he explains. “It’s not a style produced by many Aussie crafties and it had been a bottom drawer project of mine for some time, and a nod of acknowledgment to Geoff Scharer and his Burragorang Bock — which in some ways inspired me on to the twin paths of beer writing and ultimately becoming the village brewer in this neck of the woods.”
Scharer was a larger-than-life character who set up Australia’s first modern pub brewery at the George IV Inn in Picton, NSW. When he applied for a brewing licence in 1981 the story goes that the government official laughed and said, “Are you sure you don’t mean close one down?”, as this was when the big breweries were closing and consolidating everything in sight. It had been many decades since anyone opened a brewery and nobody knew where the forms were.
Scharer was a fourth-generation publican whose father ran a busy pub in Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay in the 1960s. It was a bloodhouse with 12 taps all serving the same beer, Resch’s Draught. Young Geoffrey’s job was to hose out the sawdust left after the six o’clock swill — this at a time when no sensible man would give up his place at the bar to use the amenities.
Scharer died in 2012 but his spirit lives on and now his Burragarong Bock has engendered Willie’s dopple (double). The new beer is a thick, black beer that packs a 7 per cent alc/vol punch and tastes of chocolate and dark fruits. Stone & Wood uses the Byron Bay premises to produce a range of limited edition beers and it was here that Simpson and Rogers rolled up their sleeves to produce the doppelbock.
“Given that Seven Sheds Brewery is basically a collection of preloved milk vats and other rustic/artisan equipment, it was an interesting exercise to be let loose on the fully automated Stone & Wood system at Byron,” Simpson reports.
“Actually, it reinforced to me that equipment isn’t so important in the final quality of the beer; it just speeds up the process or makes the brewer’s job less physically challenging.”