Great idea leads to great brewing

A row of colourful empty cans helped inspire the business now known as Great Ocean Road Brewing.

Starting in South Geelong in 2021, the brewery added its Torquay Taphouse venue three years later and has brought a personal touch to the local beer market.

Mick Ranger, his wife Renae and their best friends Matt and Lesley Shortal have always been fans of beer.

“Matt and Lesley moved to Geelong and in their house they’ve got this really cool bar at the back and it’s got a picture rail,” Ranger said.

“So the first time we went around to welcome them to their house, we had a few different beers and I was like ‘Oh, gee, it would look good to have the empty cans up on the picture rail’.

“It kind of evolved from there that every single time we went to Matt and Lesley’s house, any different beers that were consumed at their place got rinsed out and put on the picture rail.

 

“In the first 12 months they were living in their new house, we sampled 297 different beers on-site that end up lining the room.”

Drinking a lot of beer led to talking a lot about beer, and the quartet eventually thought about making some ales of their own.

“Matt’s from big business – he was a director at MasterFoods – and I’m from small business, and we thought maybe we could get some beers made somewhere and we could sell them somewhere,” Ranger said.

The group took the plunge by buying the Cockies brewery in South Geelong’s Balliang Street from Jamie Roydhouse.

“Jamie was in his early 70s and his wife was keen for him to be home a little bit more than he had been,” Ranger said.

“He said to us he was really keen to keep on brewing but he didn’t want to do any of the rest of the work. We said ‘That’s great; we don’t know how to brew but we can do everything else’. So Jamie was our brewer for about 18 months after we bought it from him.

 

“It was really just a melting pot of ideas between Matt’s big business ideas and my small business ideas and our love of beer. We thought if we could make something we thought was pretty desirable, we were hopeful we’d be able to find enough people around the place to buy it from us.”

Great Ocean Road Brewery now creates its beers under the eye of master brewer Mattias Isaksson and has about a dozen different products, including summer ale, stout, IPA, XPA, mid-strength, ginger beer, and a pale ale and a lager that carry on the Cockies name. There is also a growing “world tour” range including a Mexican cerveza lager and a Czech dark lager.

Ranger said the company used its South Geelong taproom as a testing ground.

“We’ve got a little brew kit that Mattias can use like a little science kit and it allows us to get one 50-litre keg worth of beer out of his test batches,” he said.

 

“He will often come up with crazy ideas and brew something that tickles his fancy.

“We get one keg of it, we put it on tap in Geelong and just ask the people that come in and drink it “What do you think of that one?” And people say “I thought that was beautiful” or “Maybe a little bit more of this or that” and Mathias puts that away in his memory bank and tweaks those ideas for the next time he brews it.

“When something’s really well received, it gives us the opportunity to go big with the batch and start to get some cans made and away we go.”

Great Ocean Road Brewery purchased the former Sou’West Brewery site in Baines Crescent in 2024 and renamed it to Torquay Taphouse.

Ranger said the original plan for the business did not envisage a hospitality venue of that size, but the group had always hoped to establish something near the Great Ocean Road to better represent the brand.

 

“Having the opportunity to double our production size by taking on the brewery capacity there as well as in Geelong was something we’re not quite ready for,” he said. “But to have those assets ready to go so we are able to expand when we’ve got the the sales volume to support that is a pretty exciting thing.”

A common misconception about beer, Ranger said, was that it was all the same and all made the same way.

“Great Northern is made in a 600,000-litre tank, two million cans at a time, and we might make our Passionfruit Pale Ale in a 1,200-litre tank, so the scale is astronomically different,” he said.

“We would love people to come and see the way our brew is set up and see the craftsmanship that goes into it.”

Ranger said Great Ocean Road Brewing was not trying to go head-to-head with beer giants such as Carlton & United Breweries or Lion Nathan.

“The challenge will be trying to compete with the big boys not on price, but trying to encourage people to spend a little bit more for the stuff that we make; and trying to win some tap space particularly around Geelong and the Surf Coast,” he said.

“The main way we try to approach the local venues is the relationship we can have is different to ordering through a portal and everything just turns up on a pallet. It’s the personal touch.

 

“A couple of the venues around town that we do look after, they might just send a message at six o’clock on a Friday night ‘Mick, really sorry to do this, but is there any way…?’ ‘Yeah, mate, no worries, we can get something to you within half an hour’.

“Impressing the local venues with how quickly we can get stuff to them and our responsiveness to them, it’s the main thing we can push as our difference.”

He said people drinking beer, regardless of what kind, made Great Ocean Road Brewery happy.

“It doesn’t need to be our beer because there’s multiple great local breweries in Torquay. So we’re really lucky that there’s so much exposure to good beer,” he said.

“Hopefully all of the Torquay breweries have the opportunity to push harder into the wider Great Ocean Road and Geelong areas because I think the quality of our beer is underappreciated.”

For more information, head to greatoceanroadbrewing.com.au

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