Australia's first airport brewery is up and running with Stomping Ground's brewers firing up their six hectolitre system in Melbourne Airport's Terminal 3 today.
The brewpub venue has been open and serving beers since last Saturday but this is the debut brew – and they've chosen a memorable beer for the occasion too: their version of the Resilience Beer being brewed by 200 breweries worldwide in support of bushfire relief.
The joint venture with global hospitality company Delaware North was announced last year and becomes the second Stomping Ground venue in Melbourne – as well as just the fourth operational airport brewery in the world. Their home base in Collingwood was the first to brew beer in the suburb in a century, while a third Stomping Ground brewpub is scheduled to open in Moorabbin in July.
Co-founder Justin Joiner described the project as "a unique beast", but said the enthusiasm of the airport management and their venue partner had helped overcome the singular challenges of building a brewery in a busy passenger terminal.
"Everyone out there has been amazingly keen for it to happen," he says, going on the describe the process of moving in the brewhouse and fermentation tanks – a scene that sounds like it could be lifted straight from a Steven Soderbergh crime caper.
"Getting the brewery in was a crew of six of us – [brewery co-founder] Guy Greenstone, myself and four brewers," he says. "We got there late one night and rolled the tanks in. They moved the security scanners out of the way for us, we were going in through exits...
"It was challenging but as good as it could be under the circumstances."
When we first spoke to Justin about the plans last July, he talked about everything – every bag of malt – having to be scanned through security, but says they're already getting into a groove at the 160 seat venue that sits roughly halfway along Terminal 3 (the Virgin Australia Domestic Terminal) on the site formerly occupied by Fly Bar.
"We've got 16 beers on tap plus half a dozen wines," he says. "The setup is pretty much the same as Collingwood: 30 taps – six wine, 23 for beer and one Willie Smith's cider. Some [beer taps] will double up but we could reach 20 different beers."
Of those, they hope in time at least two or three will be brewed at the airport by lead brewer Conna Mallett. Following the Resilience Beer brew they're planning a hoppy pilsner and inviting the public to come up with its name, a move inspired in part, Justin says, by an email conversation with Stomping Ground's third owner, Steve Jeffares, in which I suggested a few punny titles for airport beers.
"Really, we're trying to recreate the Beer Hall in Collingwood – taking a lot of the cues from there but reflecting the environment it's in," he says. This includes the tramcar seats that have been a feature of Steve and Guy's venues since The Local Taphouse in St Kilda, beer fonts that are very similar to their original brewery venue, and the large communal tables. There will be an extensive menu plus takeaway cans too.
"It's a bit slicker than what Collingwood is [and] we had a bit of trepidation but when you see it you realise it would have looked a bit faux if we'd tried to rough it up.
"If you've been to Collingwood you'll feel that it's a genuine reflection of that," he adds. "Plus there's a view of the airfield, which is pretty cool."
Initially, they plan to brew there once a week and focus on beer styles that are likely to sell well. Later on, they may go down a more experimental route and share kegs with their other venues. But already they're confident the venture will attract more customers than the pop-up bar they ran for a few months a year outside the airport.
Over that time, they found travellers' habits to be pretty ingrained: people don't stop moving until they've got into the airport, dropped their bags and made it through security – not ideal when your bar is landside, less of a challenge when you're airside.
"We're only five days in but there's significant breakfast trade that then transitions into a pretty humming vibe from lunchtime," Justin says, before adding with a laugh: "Flight delays are our friend now!"
Stomping Ground's airport brewpub is in Terminal 3. It opens daily at 5am and operates through to 9.30pm. And, even if you're not flying with Virgin Australia, you can still visit the brewpub.
James Smith launched The Crafty Pint in 2010, two years after moving to Australia from the UK. He was taken to Mountain Goat within weeks of landing in Melbourne, joined their indoor cricket team, and is still navigating the rabbit hole that is craft beer to this day.
The beers that turned you on to good beer:
- Watching pints of McEwan's 80 Shilling settle when visiting family in Edinburgh.
- Pints of flat Bass from the jug at the Cap & Stocking in Kegworth.
- A first Paulaner Hefeweizen when working in Munich in 1998: “This smells of bananas!”
- Castle Rock Harvest Pale – how could a 3.8 percent ABV beer be so good? (It turns out it was an early example of the three Cs – Cascade, Centennial and Columbus – in an English bitter).
- Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA poured through hops at the Sunset Grill in Cambridge, MA, in the company of a man who turned out to be the Beer Nut (while we were both covering a double murder case at the time).
- Ordering a Mountain Goat Hightail on my first day as an Aussie resident as it was local and I’d never heard of it; “A dark Australian beer; well I never…”
- Murray’s Icon 2IPA at Beer DeLuxe Fed Square, recommended by a guy I’d not long known who's now the main man at Fixation, served by Mik Halse, now head of sales at Hawkers. How could an Australian beer smell as good as that?!?
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Any really good, fresh and balanced West Coast style IPA. Punchy hop aromatics are the most obvious way to capture someone's attention and these IPAs, done well, present the key components in beer (if you're sticking to just water, malt, hops and yeast) in harmony yet with the volume turned up.
- Saison Dupont. Arguably a selfish choice here as I bloody love the broad saison style and dearly hope it will finally take hold in Australia one day. Given a choice, I'd probably crack one enlivened with Brettanomyces like Molly Rose Matilde for myself but, when it comes to turning on someone new, you've got to go with the classic.
- Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. Because if you don't enjoy or can't appreciate this beer, I'll never win you over. And because Filip, the fruit and wood specialist at Rodenbach that designed it, is a beautiful human.
The last beer you enjoyed:
Fixation IPA at The Incubator.
Three things that represent you:
- The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Golden Plains
NB All articles written by James in the first eight years of the site appear as By Crafty Pint. Today, that's used for collaborative efforts by the wider team.
