The long-running efforts of Scottish craft brewer BrewDog to build and open a brewery in Australia look like coming to fruition soon, and co-founder Martin Dickie told TheShout, he is looking forward to what that will mean for the beers he can brew.
The new brewery at Murarrie will house a 25-hectolitre system which will enable BrewDog to work on some one-off brews as well as make more of its core range available in Australia. Dickie told TheShout that over the next few months the brewing equipment will be moved in followed by the taproom and that he was hopeful it will all be open by the end of this year.
And once the brewery is open Dickie said he was particularly looking forward to being able to work with fresh Australian hops, especially having tried a number of local beers.
“The standard of beer that’s been made here is phenomenal,” Dickie said. “What we’re really excited about as well is being able to get some super fresh Australian hops. That’s something we’ve never really been able to develop fully is that engagement with Australian hops.
“It’s quite difficult to get Australian hops in the UK and then you’re always at the risk of someone else’s supply chain in terms of sure that they’re incredibly fresh at the end of it.
“So being able to work with Australian hops and really understand the full potential of those is exciting,” he said.
“We’ve heard amazing things and while we haven’t made many beers with Australian hops, we really love the ones that we’ve tried. And so we’re really excited to do that and also work on some of the barrel aged beers. We do a lot of whiskey barrel aged beers and bourbon barrel aged beers so hopefully we’ll get to work with some great Australian spirit barrels, but also, and probably more excited, is being able to start to use wine barrels in our beers as well, which is something we’ve done twice.
“But it was always very difficult to get good quality fresh wine barrels in the north-east of Scotland, which is not really known for its wine industry. So we’re really excited to be able to experiment again with ingredients and things that we’ve never really been able to get before; we’re really looking forward to that.”
As a result of a brewery with capacity to allow experimentation, such as the one they are building at Murarrie, Dickie said it means BrewDog would definitely be looking to extend the range of beers it has here, as they understand the local market more.
“Having a tap room as well means we’ll be able to showcase lots of one offs and specials, and, it really is about finding what the BrewDog balance is in Australia.
“The beers that we’re brewing in America differ slightly in terms of what are the more popular ones in America versus the ones in the UK and you can imagine that will be equally the case in Brisbane.
“We’ve got we’ve got a very large recipe book over the last 12 years, but, we’ll have Punk, we’ll have Pony, we’ll have Lost Lager. And then it’s a case of ‘okay, what else do the people locally and Brisbane want to drink?’ And we’ll build our strategy around what’s popular.”