A suburban brewery can be different things to different people. To those who live in the ‘burbs nearby, it’s a welcome oasis that provides lazy drinks on a Friday afternoon and merry times on the weekend. To those who live closer to the city centre, it’s a puzzle to be solved – you want to go there, but it’s not near your usual haunts, and it’s one helluva taxi fare.
When you step into All Inn Brewing, it doesn’t take long to realise the patrons are split about 50/50 between regular locals and visitors from further afield (as well as a few dogs for good measure). The Banyo brewery is all about gathering together different kinds of people, and it’s been around long enough - and built a strong enough reputation - to lure punters from all over. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s only a few hundred metres from Nudgee train station. Or that there are two other breweries nearby, also on the train line. Brewery crawl, anyone?
In 2012, with no investment and a tiny budget, owner Harley Goodacre turned an industrial warehouse into a brewery using a bunch of repurposed equipment and bucketloads of elbow grease. But while the corrugated iron shell remains (earning the nickname The Shed from the regulars), almost everything else about All Inn has been upgraded over the intervening years. The wood-clad brewhouse and milk vat fermenters (as charming as they were) have been replaced with shining stainless steel. The solar panels added to the roof of The Shed are more or less enough to cover the brewery’s power usage. There's even a centrifuge to clarify the bright beers and evenly distribute haze in the hazy beers. It’s an expensive piece of equipment that few small breweries would shell out for, but since Harley’s dedicated to always improving the quality of his beer, he reckons it was worth it.
His exact words: “Worth its weight in gold.”
The changes were slow and organic. “Nothing happens fast here,” Harley says. “We always take our time.”
But while there’s truth to that statement, it belies the intentional and persistent attention to detail, the drive for growth, and the constantly improving quality of the beer itself.
While all of the above changes have been critical to the success of All Inn, they haven’t been a transformation so much as they’ve been an evolution. All Inn’s beers have been winning hearts and snagging awards for years, and that hasn’t really changed at all; in the ever-growing and shifting market that is the Aussie beer scene, All Inn have continued to adapt and thrive and, most importantly, tantalise tastebuds.
A new core range can design in early 2022 saw the beloved characters previously on the cans replaced with clean, uncomplicated branding to make it easier for punters to distinguish between their favourite styles. The cans bear the tagline Good Beer for Good People, which highlights the straightforward and inclusive mission of All Inn. You’ll find the core range tinnies reaching ever farther up and down the east coast as more people get a taste of All Inn, and if you’re in Brisbane you can head in to The Shed for beers fresh from the source - core range and seasonals alike.
In a move uncommon in the Aussie craft beer scene, All Inn also makes many of their beers available as fresh wort kits: 15 litre of unfermented beer that you can buy from home brew shops to finish the brewing process yourself at home. You can follow the recipe exactly to make your favourite All Inn beer, or tinker with it to experiment with flavours.
A suburban brewery can be different things to different people. It can be a place to play pinball and trivia, to listen to live tunes and feast from food trucks, to work your way through sixteen beer taps and a hand pump (though maybe not in a single sitting). It can be the producer of the fresh wort kits you brew in your garage and share with your mates. It can be the source of clean and classy cans that fill your fridge hundreds of kilometres away.
What’s All Inn to you?
Mick Wust
