Market researcher IBISWorld says Australian beer consumption has been on the decline for more than a decade and total beer industry sales are forecast to contract by 1.5% in the period 2011-2012. Bad news, right? Not necessarily.
Great Beer: What Beer Drinkers Want
According to a recently published report by market researcher IBISWorld, Australian beer consumption has been on the decline for more than a decade and total beer industry sales are forecast to contract by 1.5% in the period 2011-2012. Bad news, right? Not necessarily. While it is true that per capita consumption of mass-produced beer is declining in Australia, this only tells part of the story. In fact, this is really a tale of two markets in Australia, one declining, and the other growing quickly.
Researchers like IBISWorld refer to this faster growing sub-segment of the beer industry as “Premium.” It includes boutique craft, independent Australian beers and imported products growing in double digits. Why? IBISWorld puts it like this: “Rising disposable income, international trends, growing health awareness and consumer demand for variety and quality drove the emergence of new premium segments in the beer market.” All good. We put this into plain English like this: Australians are tired of drinking average beer!
At Thunder Road, we believe that quality and freshness is what our customers want. It’s really common sense. 
When we look around at other food products like bread, cheeses, organic fruit and vegetables and the like, consumers are selecting freshness and quality over mass produced, highly processed foods. 
Why should beer be any different? Turns out it isn’t. Which is why we feel so strongly about making great quality beers that are un-pasteurized, have no preservatives, are amazingly fresh and delivered cold. After all, that’s the kind of beer we want to drink too!
“Bubbling away in Brunswick”
“It’s boom time for the emerging craft beer industry.”… A double page spread in The Age Newspaper Epicure magazine about our brewery, Brunswick and craft beer in Melbourne. The article was written by James Smith, here’s some excerpts.
“IF YOU enjoy a good beer, you might want to consider moving to Brunswick. If you’re a beer lover and live there already, then count your blessings, as two breweries, just a few hundred metres apart, have become the latest additions to Victoria’s thriving craft brewing industry. To the west of Lygon Street, Thunder Road has taken over a warehouse and heritage bluestone cottage and released its first beer into pubs in June.”
For Thunder Road founder Philip Withers, who has enjoyed success overseas with other businesses, choosing Brunswick represents a return to his roots. ”I remember having beers with my dad and grandfather, who are no longer around, and they were always really good times,” he says. [...]
In the centre of the brewhouse floor at Thunder Road is a striking wooden bar lined with 30 taps, through which they plan to one day pour 30 of their own beers; surrounding it is a money-is-no-object brewery of the kind to make engineers go weak at the knees – plus a 400-litre pilot brewery that is an exact replica of the main brewhouse. [...]
”I used to spend weekends in the State Library reading about the history of brewing,” he says. ”I’d look at the old brewers’ journals and read every page. In 1889, there were 307 breweries across Australia; the number steadily declined.”[...]
Withers’s research led him to Keith Deutscher, the author of The Breweries of Australia, who gave his opinions regarding the demise of Australia’s old breweries. ”He said they went bust because they were undercapitalised, couldn’t control the quality or were lousy marketers,” Withers says. ”We thought if we could avoid those three things, we could create a worthy history.” [...]
Signs are that they are steering well clear of all three. Withers has invested heavily in the set-up (by microbrewery standards, at least), imported a brewer with a reputation for creating the cleanest of beers, [...]
He found his brewer at the end of a mind-boggling coast-to-coast tour of 83 American breweries in 14 days, when he was blown away by a beer at Chuckanut Brewery in Washington state. Chuckanut owner Will Kemper informed Withers he had developed his state-of-the-art brewing technology with another brewer, Harvey Kenney, who had since gone on to work at breweries in Europe and South America. Before long, Kenney was bringing his highly scientific and technical approach to Melbourne. [...]
The goal at Thunder Road is to create ”brilliant, beautiful, clean, bright beer”, and anyone who has sampled its first release, the Full Steam Pale Lager, can vouch for its brilliant appearance; glowing in the glass like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, it’s of a standard that would be right at home in a Munich beer garden. By launching with a lager, Thunder Road is making another of its goals clear: to win over those Australians still drinking mainstream brands.
”It’s important to respect the 98 per cent of beer drinkers who don’t drink craft beer, because they are the ones we need to convert,” Withers says. ”They deserve to have as close to what they enjoy already but better. We would love people to all be drinking IPAs but some are going to be scared off.”
As Withers says: ”We’re all driven by a desire to put a finished product into people’s hands to make them smile.”
Second in charge is much more fun
Setting up a brewery in Brunswick, Australia has its complications.
But combine a flustered boss & hard working crew with great music from the Detonators, Australia’s hardest working pub band, things just come together…sort of!
Drink “brilliant” beers
Don’t buy boiled beers! Bad beer is the enemy. Boiled beer is the killer. Our aim is brilliant beer. Perfect beer. Cold beer at all stages.
And cold beer from brewery to glass is one of the many ways to keep the enemy away, assuming the beer was brilliant beer when kegged!)
Specifically, a real enemy of brilliant beer is temperature fluctuations and heat. We work hard to make sure the beer is brilliantly clear, and when beer is cooled and heated repeatedly, or even once, this clarity can be compromised. We call it ‘chill haze’ when beer is made at low temperatures, is allowed to heat up to ambient, and upon cooling down to serving temperature, ‘throws’ a haze.
Consumers do not like the look of a haze, especially when expecting a clear beer. Finally the taste perception of a hazy beer is almost always fundamentally negative, unless the beer is unfiltered. Then a lot of these negative aspects no longer come into play as yeast will protect the beer from oxygen and the lack of filtering means any sort of haze will not be noticed. We find this to be a relatively careless approach.
To make things worse, heat accelerates reactions in beer we don’t like-bitterness perception degradation (weaker, less bitter, increasingly disharmonious character of bitterness perception), oxidation which gives a stale, cardboard flavor, and difficulty in maintaining correct carbonation levels. Its a signal of a commitment to excellence to use only refrigerated trucks and refrigerated shipping if an imported beer . It speaks volumes about the care we put into our beer.
That’s why the best craft breweries from anywhere in the world never ship their beers to Australia – the cost of refrigerated transport is prohibitive.
So next time you spend $16 + for an expensive bottle of imported beer, think twice.
Look for fresh local Australian beers that promise nothing but refrigerated transport from brewery to tap. Also, if you must buy bottle beer, …don’t bother with any beer unless you can find the brew date or best before date.
More about this later…
A point of view: Beer & Health
With so much press and media news about the evils of alcohol and now, a health scare campaign about alcohol and breast cancer, it is time to put the beer case in perspective. Moderation. That’s the key.
To just about anything. Speed, food, loud music, running, skipping, jumping . Beer is the drink of moderation. This is not new. Just don’t over indulge in moderation.
Beer is part of the diet. It’s a liquid food. Other forms of alcohol do not supply nutrients, vitamins, and calories like beer does. In times before advanced filtration this was true to a greater extent, beers being often dynamic in nature, fermenting at the point of service. Things like insoluble fibre and protein flocs were part of the experience, along with our friend of ages, yeast.
Low protein cereal mixtures with water could become protein fortified with fermentation and could therefore be more nutritive than the cereal mixtures alone, plus the antimicrobial effect of the alcohol generated during fermentation allowed for humans to absorb the nutrients present, rather than some sort of microbially compromised state where the GI tract cannot absorb nutrients.
This sort of stability allowed for the next step in what is often considered an organ within an organ, with its own bacteriome and virome-the stable state of intestinal flora that is directly related to our ability to absorb and nutrients in stable times and toxins in the destabilized times.
Beer is not a health drink. But should not be seen as unhealthy. Beer is especially enjoyable with food. Especially craft beers. Whatever you see or read in the media , put it in perspective.
Enjoy your beer. Cheers,
TEAM TRB
Welcome to our blog
Thank you for taking the time to read our first blog entry. Our blog will primarily function as an online diary for our brew team and as a way for us to share our worldview of craft beer as a staple part of a modern lifestyle.
In addition, there will be regular entries of commentary, events or other material about craft beer and brewery-related activities in Australia and around the world. Any comments are welcome on our Facebook
Ultimately, however, we want to meet you all in person. We encourage everyone to come down to the brewery (when we finally open!) and chat to us. There will be numerous events every year (1000+) and you will share your time with like-minded people drinking beer and chatting in a relaxed, friendly environment. And don’t forget, we will be running daily tours so you will be able to learn and understand the complexities of brewing great craft beer.
Setting up Thunder Road Brewery (TRB for short) has been and continues to be a fascinating labour of love. We have really appreciated the thousands of people who have registered with us online and given tremendous words of support. We read every single one! As you read the blog entries, you will better understand the many reasons we set up TRB. Yes, part of the aim was to enjoy the fruits of our hard efforts and drink fresh craft beer. But there is much more.
From the start, like you, we have this kind of instinctive fascination with beer. And it’s real. It applies equally to menand women. We are definitely not talking about the blokey beer culture of big advertised industrial beers. That never interested us.
What we have is in our genes; it’s a respect and interest in the 6000 years of beer and brewing culture that existed before us. Beer has been considered a staple part of a well-rounded diet in many cultures throughout this time. And for most of those 6000 years, craft beer has been the beer of choice. That means small independent breweries, family brewers and local communities.
Craft beer is beer!
Thunder Road Brewing Company is an independent craft brewery. And it’s our goal to bring the heart and soul back into the Australian beer culture.
Our view is that fresh craft beer, brewed locally, in moderation, is a staple food. And craft beer, seen from this perspective, is the only way to drink and enjoy beer as a food.
And we want to spoil you all. That’s our mission. We hope you will spread the word. And enjoy our great Australian craft beers.
We’ve decided to leave the ability for readers to comment on the Facebook page rather than on the blog. But feel free to start a Facebook discussion and leave comments whenever you wish to do so.
