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Micro-breweries and memories at Australia’s first pub brewery

Australia’s devotion to beer may have waned, but as the brewery manager at Australia’s oldest pub brewery says, our love of a cold ale isn’t ready to die just yet. Matt McDonald reports.

Right now, micro breweries are making an impact on the Australian beer market. As sales drop to a 50 year low and many drinkers give up beer all together, craft brewers have started to come into their own.

But this wasn’t always the case.

Back in the eighties hotel patrons had basically two choices. They could drink a Carlton beer or a Tooheys beer. Coopers was virtually unavailable in Sydney and micro-breweries didn’t exist.

Then in 1985 the license to Sydney’s Lord Nelson Hotel, Australia’s oldest continually licensed pub, was purchased by a consortium which included the current licensee, Blair Hayden.

Blair’s son Trystam Hayden is the current Brewery Manager at the hotel. “Back then it was a bit of a rough old wharfie’s pub, with tiles on the walls and carpet on the floor. So we restored it to its former glory and added a brewery,” he told Food Magazine.

By so doing, the owners were actually breaking new ground. It turns out that this was Australia’s first micro-brewery. And, given that it has been brewing ever since, it’s also our longest running pub brewery.

When asked why the pub decided to start brewing its own beer Hayden is clear. “We just wanted to brew natural ales; beer with a bit of flavour and something different to what was being offered by the two big breweries at the time.”

The owners wanted to attract drinkers by ignoring the established brewers and creating their own quality products. They hoped to build a name based on the flavours and aromas of their beers rather than ubiquity.

The Lord Nelson was the first. But as Hayden sees it, the growth in the popularity of craft beers has paralleled the general maturation of the Australian palate. Over the past 25 years, people have started to learn more and more about food and wine. “Beer was just a natural progression of this trend,” he added.

In the early days, The Lord Nelson’s ales were only available in the pub itself. Then about five ago, they decided to take the next step and start to distribute them to other pubs and restaurants. And two of their products, Three Sheets Pale Ale and Old Admiral Dark Ale are available in selected bottle shops.

As Hayden (pictured below) says, the demand was there. “There are people who passionately drink our beer. And they were prepared to hunt it out and find it.”

In deciding to make this move, the brewery was keen to keep its focus on quality. The feeling was that if the quality was there the market would respond.

“We were passionate about selling to the right people. We wanted to sell to the restaurants who understood it, the guys behind the bar who like drinking it….and also to the liquor stores who had an understanding of hand-made beers…natural ingredient, no added sugars, no preservatives.”

At first, the transition to external distribution raised a couple of difficulties. The Lord Nelson Hotel is a heritage listed building so the options for expanding production on site were extremely limited. As such, some of the brewing and all of the bottling operations have to be done off-site.

Of course, niche producers of any product face the challenge of finding suitable national distributors. Eventually, the Lord Nelson found a distributor in Samuel Smith & Son. The two parties were lucky enough to already have a relationship based on previous wine purchases by the pub.

Market observers might wonder if the current popularity of the niche producers can last. Or is it just a passing trend? Recently, another micro-brewery, Little World Beverages was purchased by the Japanese owned giant, Lion Nathan.

And Coca-Cola Amatil is expected to expand into the premium beer market when the restriction which prohibits it to sell, distribute or manufacture beer in Australia expires on 16 December, 2013. On that date, it will begin to operate through its $46m investment, the Australian Beer Company.

So it would seem pertinent to question the continued viability of micro breweries. Can niche brewers really hold off against the economies of scale that the big players bring to the table? Once the big guys get the message on quality will they take over again?

For his part, Hayden isn’t concerned by the threat. “That doesn’t affect us. We’re not fazed by them. We’ve never followed anything that anyone’s done, especially those big guys. And we never will. We’ll just keep doing what we think is right and what we think works for us. We’re not trying to take over the world. We’re just trying to get our beer into a few people’s mouths who might not have tried it before.”

He respects Little World and likes their beers. But, now that they have been sold, he is sceptical about whether they will really stay the same; he is not sure that their beer will really retain its quality.

“Little Creatures is a quality product…..but it’s gone now and it‘s in foreign hands…..people might say it won’t change but eventually things will change,” he said.

He said that the pub remains the central part of the business. Despite the off-site brewing and bottling, all the organisation’s employees still work on-site at the pub.

He is confident that a cold beer will always be part of the Australian life style and he is confident that demand for his ales will last into the future.

Looking round the Lord Nelson Hotel and sipping on a pint of Old Admiral Dark Ale, it’s hard to disagree with him.

 

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