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Laying Down Firm FOUND.ations ft Steve Finney & Will Irving
On paper, FOUND. is one of the younger brewing companies in Australia – they only opened their brewpub, FOUND.LAB, in Byford in the middle of 2023, after all. Yet, between them, the key players driving the operation have decades of experience in craft beer.
It's not only decades of experience, however. It's decades in which their stories are interwoven with the very fabric of the WA beer industry. Between them, they've risen through the ranks, and held central roles, at the likes of Little Creatures, Feral, Gage Roads, Otherside and others, and have been involved in the creation of a number of the state's most iconic beers.
The story of FOUND. also predates last year's tapping of the first batch of Super by a long time too; as the brewery's originator, Steve Finney, explains in this episode of The Crafty Pint podcast, he was working pretty much daily on the plan for what would become FOUND. for years. Will Irving, who he first met when detouring from his Little Creatures sales calls to the Feral brewpub in the Swan Valley – where Will was brewing – has been part of those discussions for much of that time too.
As such, it's perhaps little wonder that, even though their initial plans to open a vast venue and production brewery on the site of the former East Perth Girls School have been pushed back, they already operate the Byford brewpub south of Perth, a pop-up venue in Maylands, and this week started brewing at the former home of Golden West in Subiaco, which will become their main home – at least for now – when it opens to the public for summer 2024.
They have pretty grand, although also grounded, ambitions, forged by lessons learned and wisdom passed on by a series of mentors over their time in beer. And in this episode they share many of those with us from their work-in-progress Subi venue.
Our conversation – recorded the day after we hosted an event together at their FOUND.FRIENDS Maylands bar – covers their respective backstories, their first meetings at Feral and subsequent time together at the iconic brewery, their vision for FOUND. – including how they're trying to create the ideal beer business and conceptualise what a modern Australian brewery venue should be, their thoughts on the future of beer in WA and further afield, bringing new people into the world of craft beer, a spot of running repairs that brings to mind Trainspotting, and plenty more besides.
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