What a journey it’s been! It’s now easily been 8 years since we decided this is what we are going to do, and do properly… This newfound passion of ours has slowly morphed into a very full-time job and we are looking forward to the next phase in the journey.
It all started way back, chatting over a couple of beers and it came to us, like most good ideas do! We soon after enrolled in a short course in starting a micro-brewery in Sydney which was run by a popular brewing consultant. Turns out we weren’t the only ones interested in this new and exciting career, there was about 8 independent parties there all wanting to know the same thing. What is involved in opening a brewery?
We pretty soon had decided on the scale of brewery and type of beers we wanted to brew and we started building a pilot kit which we thought would give us the best chance of scaling up one day to the brew house we have now. (For those interested in the technical story behind the pilot kit we may do a blog focused on it in the future. Or you can check it out while doing our brewery tour.) Armed with this dream of a brewery we started pestering suppliers over the next 5 or 6 years. I’m sure they grew sick of us, but we needed information, opinions and prices so that we could decide for ourselves what the best route to take was.
We placed an ad looking for a short-term consultant, turning into a long-term brewer – we were lucky enough to find someone who we now consider a close friend. He wishes to remain unnamed, but he has been a huge help to us, offering his experience of 50 years in the industry. He has done and seen it all and with his German desire for perfection, has been able to help us decipher the fact from fiction. We can’t thank him enough!
We attended conferences in Australia and abroad looking for equipment and answers, often finding answers to questions we didn’t know existed. Not everything meets the eye in brewery and nothing beats experience. Armed with this realisation we try to approach everything with an open mind and never rule anything out. Our approach is to get all the options and accompanying information before deciding on the best route. This can be a lengthy process, but it works for us.
The next few years were a slow grind however we secured the site in 2014, meanwhile it was recipe development and some more recipe development that was taking our time. After hundreds of generations we’ve landed on a couple beers that we feel will be our launch pad into the market. To be continued…
