Whenever we get together to brainstorm what should make up our annual review of the year in beer in Australia, it pays to look back at the previous year's article. In part, it's a handy way of ensuring we don't cover old ground – which would be easy to do given the longstanding nature of some of the issues of today – and it also acts as reminder of the position from which we were starting out 12 months ago.
What such a process has done more than anything in recent years, however, is highlight just how long things have been challenging in one way or another (or a few all at once) for those in beer, hospitality and the industries with which they're entwined.
As we wrote in the intro to this article last year: “It feels like the trials and tribulations of 2019 to 2022 were merely the support act for an unwanted headline act.” Which was followed by: “(Please, please let 2023 be the headliner…)”
Without wishing to labour the musical metaphor too much (we deal with music below, after all), not only was 2023 not the headliner, but you could argue 2024's show was beset by infighting between the band and support crew, poor ticket sales, one of the tour buses getting lost, and rocketing prices for replacement strings. On the plus side, we're not aware of any exploding drummers and at least the rider tastes great.
In between reporting on the high profile lows and plentiful highs of beer in 2024, we've tried to make the time to analyse the issues raised. Rather than relitigate those below, a number of examples can be found here, here, here, here and here.
Instead, as we kick off our end of year coverage – this year presented in partnership with Mogwai Labs – we've looked elsewhere: at trends we might have touched upon previously, or that have become more apparent as the months have passed. We've collected ten of the most pertinent below, a number of which could arguably be tied together under necessity is the mother of invention” – changes or evolution within the industry driven by a need to do something new or differently in order to still be around in 2025 and beyond.
Following this launch article, we're doing things a little differently ourselves when it comes to our state / territory reviews.
Given we launched The Crafty Pint Podcast in July, we're putting together mini-episodes featuring our contributors from around the country as well as people from the beer world who have enjoyed noteworthy years. They kick off in South Australia before heading to WA and Victoria next.
Musical Chairs
When the music stops, who has a seat?
Across more than two years, a spate of breweries have entered voluntary administration and small business restructuring while others have gone into liquidation and closed their doors.
But such closures have brought new opportunities. Tumut River Brewing’s former staff (pictured above) banded together to buy their local brewery, Keeper Brewing are making pilsner in Temple’s old site, across the road Rocky Ridge (pictured bottom left in photo at top of article) moved into Thunder Road, FOUND. Subiaco has just opened in the former home of Golden West, Bailey Brewing bought Clancy’s in Dunsborough, fellow WA South West pioneers Bootleg reopened with new owners, Cheeky Monkey secured Sound's site in Rockingham after the equivalent article went out last year, Great Ocean Road Brewing has moved into Sou'West's site in Torquay, Mountain Culture opened in Redfern after Good Drinks closed Atomic, and Hiker moved into Black Hops Brisbane.
Black Hops is now led by a new consortium of owners which includes some past owners and while it’s less likely to make national news, Casey Wagner selling Westside Ale Works to Jonathan Treloar was widely welcomed by South Melbourne locals.
There’s good news on the horizon for Sydney too as Bracket Brewing move closer to opening their new inner-west home after being pushed out of Alexandria by rent increases.
Of course, there are breweries that haven’t reopened and VAs have continued throughout the year. Compounding that are the owners looking to exit the industry but struggling to find buyers, the entrepreneurs who have lost plenty, and the creditors who continue to count the cost.
But, as 2024 comes to a close, it's worth acknowledging the new beginnings or rebirths that have followed many of the closures or administrations. Taken together with the new openings that continue across the country, clearly there are plenty looking to the future, hoping to still have a seat when the music stops.
Will Ziebell
There’s No Place Like Homes
Breweries running more than one taproom isn’t a new trend but it feels like 2024 brought a greater focus and fresh approach to such strategies.
Range closed their Melbourne taproom but, in its wake, opened Rays in Camp Hill in October. It means they now have three venues across their home city, while their Newstead HQ also features a neighbouring wedding and events space in The Bethnal.
Before Bodriggy was born, the founders already operated Dr Morse across the road; at the start of the year, their hospitality footprint expanded to include The Albion Hotel on Smith Street. For both, it allows them to run distinct venues that have their own focus while still being connected to the parent brewery.
Fox Friday now operate three brewpubs in three different cities; Perth was the latest addition, where Rocky Ridge are set to open a new taproom in Duncraig on top of their South West home and East Coast outpost. Phat Brew Club ran a successful crowdfund to support a second Perth venue opening next year while Froth North Beach venue joined the brewery's Exmouth and Bunbury sites. Following their merger with Nowhereman last year, Otherside turned that taproom into Otherside of Nowhere while Slipstream expanded into a second venue, Social House on the Sunshine Coast.
Mountain Culture joined forces with Wildflower to launch The Village before taking over Atomic Redfern to create a new home and barrel project closer to Sydney's CBD. On top of that, they’ve set up a Base Camp bar inside the New Brighton Hotel in Manly, as well as a summer pop-up in the Melbourne suburb of Ringwood.
Bigger still are Moon Dog’s two, if not three, openings this year: Wild West, Doglands and the forthcoming Frankston Beach Club.
In part, it’s a necessity in the modern market given taps and shelf space are increasingly hard to come by, but with children’s play areas, no pokies, and an ability to think small and pivot quick, many craft breweries have shown an ability to run hospitality better than plenty of pub chains and vast bar groups.
WZ
Limited Limiteds
Have we seen the end of unlimited limiteds or the much-maligned SKUmageddon? Certainly, the number of packaged limited releases from breweries has slowed down from the flood that first hit in the late 2010s only to accelerate during the pandemic.
Some breweries keep the beers coming and continue to find eager drinkers to snap up each and every one but, with less disposable income, it’s a race fewer are eager to run. When such beers arrive, they’ve often been brewed in smaller quantities and look a little different too – out with the double or triple hazy IPAs and in with the hazy pale ale or hoppy lager.
We’ve also seen fewer mixed culture styles hit the shelves: are such esoteric fancies no longer fancied in straitened times, or are brewers less confident to spend several years on a project that might sit on shelves for just as long?
Imports from overseas appear to be at an all-time low too, with the financial and logistical challenges combined with the state of the Aussie dollar making already expensive beers even more expensive to sell in an economy in which there's fewer bucks floating around.
What has remained strong and arguably even become more prominent is the creation of limited release series, often with their own distinct branding. Eagle Bay’s Modern Retro Lager Project (pictured above), Hargreaves Hill's Chaos of the Universe, and Hop Nation’s single and Kiwi hopped beers with a consistent look across the year are good examples. Then there are limited releases with a good reason to exist, not least Holgate's celebratory 25 Years of Beers.
Once upon a time, many breweries seemed perfectly happy to be dropping new styles weekly and seeing what would stick. Now, however, you're playing in that space, it pays to make sure there’s a reason, or that any new releases will be instantly recognised by your fans.
WZ
If I Could Turn Back Time
My earliest experiences of beer – long before I gave any thought to how it was made or what it was made from – were based around English bitters, ESBs and pale ales, Scottish 80 shillings, wee heavies and their ilk.
Why tell you this in a year-end review article in Australia in 2024? Well, on the one hand, it means I’m innately a sucker for such things and, after watching the local beer landscape morph wildly since the late Noughties, I’d figured such beers were done for Down Under. After all, who’s going to opt for an old boozer’s cosy nook when you can experience the fireworks of a festival main stage in a glass?
This move away from all manner of traditional ale styles with roots in Europe is something we’d noted in the past: while brewers and producers were constantly chasing and delivering the new, you could argue there was actually less diversity on offer given the near-total abandonment of old world classics.
But, whaddya know… it looks like there was still a market for such beers.
We addressed the revival of interest of English style ales in particular back in September, with the brewers behind them citing a number of reasons for brewing them (aside from the fact they were selling).
No doubt it’s partly down to the cyclical nature of tastes and trends – a reaction to the fruitsaladification of beer – as well as economics (such beers are typically cheaper to produce, not least as there’s no hefty dry-hopping required), but perhaps it also hints at a desire for simpler pleasures in this complex times.
Arguably, it also ties into the element of nostalgia we’re seeing in beer, whether that’s branding that borrows from the past or the reappearance of beers from the early years of craft beer’s explosion on these shores, such as Burleigh Brewing’s well-received re-brews of a number of their earliest releases.
James Smith
Mainlining Media
The manner in which mainstream media covers the local beer industry has long been a bugbear of mine. With rare exceptions, coverage of craft beer has seemed to come from an entirely opposite mindset to that with which established media approach restaurants, wine and spirits.
At risk of doing exactly what I’m highlighting and repeating myself, for years it seemed that the only analysis deemed worthy took the form of “Why is craft beer so expensive?”, “OMG! Women drink / brew beer too!”, or “This brewer made beer with what?!?”
The craft beer world isn’t without blame, of course – at least when it comes to the last of these. The race to create every more outre beers, the noise they often garnered on social media, and the fact the country’s largest beer festival was somehow perceived as celebrating little else when it was so much more, all played into the hands of those wanting to dismiss this section of the beverage world as faddy and daft rather than innovative, exciting and game-changing.
Over the past couple of years, however, the tone has changed and done so very noticeably. TV networks, print publications, and digital media alike have all run respectful and honest coverage of the industry. Sure, it’s taken the industry falling apart at the seams for that to happen, but it’s been hugely refreshing to watch, read and be interviewed by journalists for pieces that paint a realistic rather than cartoon picture of this wonderful yet under-the-pump industry.
A lot of credit here goes to the Independent Brewers Association (IBA) for the work they’ve done in putting stats and messaging into the hands of media and politicians, fighting for attention and, hopefully in time, action.
Now, it’s a truism that bad news sells, and there’s been plenty of that in the beer and hospo worlds in recent times, but having opened the eyes of people with influence to what craft beer really is, and (fingers crossed) gained some allies along the way, here’s hoping this fair, honest approach to covering the local beer scene outlasts the economic slump.
JS
Listen to Kylie Lethbridge and Sabrina Kunz of the IBA on Episode 019 of The Crafty Pint Podcast.
Staying Small
Industry talking heads have long hypothesised about how difficult it is to exist as a brewery in the middle – larger than a brewpub, not yet a significant national player – and now that seems truer than ever. If you're small, you can aim to sell most of your beer through your own taps and maximising margins; if you’re big enough, you can tap into have economies of scale to run a more efficient operation.
This year, I’ve lost count of how many brewers I’ve spoken to who have openly talked about their aim to remain under the $350,000 excise limit so they aren’t hit with a hefty tax bill. What's more, if you're eager to grow, with a lack of confidence in the industry, investors and banks aren’t leaping over one another to loan the money required for breweries to make the leap.
The last couple of years have seen breweries shed staff and / or pull out of interstate markets; recently Sobah were open about their need to strategically downsize to survive, while Sauce have been looking for a buyer for their wholesale business.
Such a disparity in size and a reduction in production brings new challenges for the industry, not least for the IBA whose work relies on the number and the production output of indie brewers that become members.
There’s also growing conflict between breweries of different sizes. If you’re tiny and don’t can your products then excise tax and CDS aren’t concerns; if you’re bigger, they’re costs that are crippling the chance to grow or, perhaps, survive at a time when profit margins are squeezed in a shrunken market.
Privately, bigger breweries have also expressed concerns about how smaller operations can sell their limited number of kegs far cheaper than they can. It's been way longer than we'd like to remember since we first addressed the issues that cheap kegs can bring, particularly as struggling bar owners are desperate for deals. It’s a conversation that's not exclusive to beer either, with some distillery owners quite vocal about the potential of a collapse in pricing too (although I’m not too sure what Lion-owned and apparently “medium-sized” Four Pillars has to worry about).
WZ
Sell With Your Ingredients
For a long time, it seemed that ingredient suppliers were content to be just that: suppliers of ingredients to brewers. Any promotion or marketing they indulged in would typically be done directly to their customers, or via B2B publications and conferences. Not so these days.
Increasingly, it's becoming commonplace to see the names and logos of hop suppliers, maltsters and yeast farmers – or their individual products – appear on labels and decals. Superdelic hazy, anyone? How about an Abstrax terpene-enhanced XPA with locally-produced liquid yeast? Or an all-Eclipse IPA?
So, who is the message for?
In terms of new hops or hop products, it might be for educated and eager craft drinkers who’ve enjoyed a NZ-106 pilsner and want to see how NZ-109 tastes. But we’d hazard a guess that early branding of advanced hop products is more about suppliers wanting to shout about a product and ensure other brewers try them fresh.
We’ve also seen an uptick in breweries promoting the suppliers with whom they’re working, particularly if those ingredients are from locals. Mallokup Malt and Tolga Farms have featured on many beers in WA, many brewers sing the praises of Ryefield Hops’ environmentally-friendly hops, and those that use the country's liquid yeast producers, Mogwai Labs (NSW), Bluestone Yeast (VIC), and Ferveo Yeast (SA) are also eager to let drinkers know about the partnership too.
Go back to 2021 and Hop Nation made sure Bluestone’s logo appeared on their Rattenhund, which went on to secure an AIBA trophy and helped put the yeast supplier on many brewery’s radars.
Much like that example, it feels like this offers the chance for wins all round: small growers and makers get their products in front of other interested brewers; small breweries get to talk about how closely they work with local businesses spawned by the rise of the independent brewing sector.
WZ
Blazing An Ale Trail
Ale Trails are far from new; indeed, the concept of a pub crawl stretches back way before anyone thought of the term “craft beer”. What’s more, we’ve been publishing Crafty Crawls and regional guides on the site for more than a decade, and festivals such as Bendigo On The Hop and Pint of Origin are based around similar notions too. Yet, in 2024, ale trails have felt very much like The Comeback Kid.
It helps that people can travel freely, and are getting back into the habit of doing so, but more than that it feels like a couple of other things too.
For one, it’s a relatively cheap and easy way for brewers – or diverse groups of producers – to market themselves and drive patronage from one to another and back again. When it comes to funding such trails, they also seem to be handy means to elicit support from government bodies and tourism funds.
Furthermore, it’s one of a few entries here that fit into the “necessity is the mother of invention” category we wrote about at the start of the article. Whether the people driving Newcastle’s Brewcastle maps, Sydney’s Inner West Ale Trail, or the twin trails in the South West of WA (pictured) had contemplated their creation prior to 2024 or not, a need to find ways of capturing potential customers’ attention and, thus, their dwindling disposable income surely played a role in them arriving when they did.
As an aside, it goes beyond trails too. In Brookvale, brewers and other local producers have combined to put on a number of events / weekenders designed to pull in visitors from further afield, while a number of the suburb-based collabs – both beers and events – we’re witnessing are very much of the same ilk. Presumably, it doesn’t hurt to work with others on such things when most businesses are down to bare bones in terms of staffing too.
JS
Take To The Stage
It was more than a year ago that we wrote about the launch of the Independent Live Venues Alliance in South Australia. With Jade Flavell of trailblazing pub and now brewpub, The Wheaty, as part of the committee, its mission was to keep independent live music venues alive in the face of ever-growing challenges from a global duopoly.
The parallels with the situation faced by the indie beer world are glaringly obvious, even if you could argue that in the case of beer the indies are fighting a trio of duopolies in terms of production, retail and hospitality. And, as the old saying goes: a problem shared is a problem halved.
Now, we’re not saying a united front has developed between indie musicians, the owners of live music venues holding out against the might of Live Nation / Ticketmaster, and Australia’s independent brewing industry. Nor, on the flipside, are we saying that the hosting of live music at beer venues is new in 2024. Yet there does seem to be something building, even if those responsible for that something may well be, for the most part, unaware.
As with The Wheaty in Adelaide, you can find breweries or brewery-aligned venues across the country that have made live music a central part of their offer: Freo.Social in WA, indie musician-founded Seeker Brewing in Wollongong, Bodriggy with their fondness for showcasing electronic acts at their Melbourne home, Hobart Brewing’s regular gigs and so on.
There might be an element of necessity and the mother of invention at play in some cases – The Mill Brewery taking over the recently-closed metal pub, The Bendigo Hotel, as they needed a new home, for example, or 3 Ravens converting their storage warehouse into a music and events hub as they explore new avenues to reach consumers – but the collaborations make sense.
Regionally, Shedshaker in Castlemaine cited their support of local music and arts as part of their reasoning for moving to a larger space, while The Welder’s Dog’s Brewery & Entertainment Centre is providing a stage for acts passing through New England.
Add in Heaps Normal’s recent launch of a record label to support new and emerging artists, as well as longstanding support for music by the likes of Young Henrys, and you have a connection that’s both established and evolving. And, perhaps most importantly, that makes sense.
JS
More With Less
We’ve done our best to navigate our review of 2024 without dwelling too long on the damage that’s been done to the beer and hospitality industry, but there is a refrain we hear from pretty much everyone we chat to across the country.
Back in the day, Stone & Wood lived by a mantra of “Less is more”, and it’s fair to say this approach went pretty well for them. The well-documented challenges of recent years, however, seem to have led to most businesses doing the exact opposite: more with less.
A fall in income across the industry has forced owners to shrink their teams and, while this often comes with a reduction in what they take on – less limited releases, a postponed rebrand, no festival appearances, for example – they’re still faced with navigating a way to a brighter future with fewer resources than they’d have wanted in an ideal world.
If we accept that being innovative is part and parcel of staying afloat or, ideally, ahead in the current climate (repeat after me: necessity is the mother of invention), then that entails time, energy and resources too. And there won’t be many small businesses out there, in any field, that have one, let alone three, of those to spare.
Looking at it positively, such a situation should ensure businesses are leaner, meaner and ready to pounce when better times return. The question that lingers – not least as the pandemic was hardly the best springboard for dealing with a cost-of-living crisis – is how long doing more with less is sustainable before that change in fortunes arrives.
JS
The Crafty Pint's 2024 Year In Beer series is proudly presented by Mogwai Labs, leaders in liquid yeast solutions. For the perfect pitch every time, visit mogwailabs.com.au.
Find all future entries in this series on The Crafty Pint Podcast homepage.
