Brewing success despite uncertainty

MAYFAIR Park’s East Bendigo Brewing Co., formerly known as Brookes Beer, is looking towards a bright and hoppy future after a major rebrand and the addition of a bunch of cracking new recruits to the team.

After carrying the Brookes Beer name since its inception in 2013, founder Doug Brooke teamed up late last year with fellow regional Victorian beer industry legend Roy Lever to establish, then reveal the refreshed and expanded set-up.

“My partner Mel and I couldn’t face going through COVID just to fight our way back to where we left off, so we decided we’d come out of it with something to get excited about,” Mr Brooke said.

“We’d known Roy for a while and had heard he’d set out on his own after leaving Holgate Brewery in Woodend.

“Not knowing how he’d respond, I called him with an idea that turned into a conversation.

“We found out that we shared values, that our families were in remarkably similar circumstances, and our views on the industry and how we might find a place in it were very similar. From there it was an obvious decision that we should team up.”

Fast forward nine months and the match made in indie beer heaven continues to bear fruit, to the extent that manufacturing capacity – or lack of it, to be precise – now looms as a legitimate issue.

“Our partnership with Roy has totally re-energised us,” Mr Brooke said.

“He’s brought on skills that we needed and are taking our business forward in leaps and bounds.

“We’re now a team of nine, including Heath, our lead brewer, who’s joined us from Asahi and moved his family up here.

“Every tank is at capacity, which foretells a problem for the coming summer.”

“We’ve moved out of bottles, we’ve got our own canning line and we packed this week what we did in two months pre-COVID.”

In the short-to-medium future, Mr Brooke is cautiously optimistic in general terms, but is less robust when it comes to the region’s pubs and bars.

“The environment is really uncertain,” he said. “We can’t bank on the hospo sector being allowed to open, leaving us with a cool room full of kegged beer that we can’t shift.

“So for us it’s packaged beer all the way.

“We’re moving our distribution into ALM [Australia’s biggest liquor wholesaler], which will give us access to markets beyond our local trading area and market segments that are closed to us with a direct distribution model.”

In an industry that favours the brave, East Bendigo Brewing Co. has plenty of new projects in the pipeline, including a slight direction change into beer of the ginger variety.

“We plan to have a rolling line-up of limited releases, three or four a year, mostly in 500ml cans,” Mr Brooke said.

“We’ve recently released our Rum Barrel Aged Imperial Stout, and are backing that up in 2022 with another barrel release – it’s going to be an amazing beer.

“Later in Spring, we’ll release a ginger beer. We’ll release that in 330ml cans and it’ll give the extract-based bottled ginger beers a run for their money. We think it’ll lift the bar for everyone.

“Somewhere in summer, there’s also a West Coast IPA in the making, but that’s too far out to feel real right now!”