Taphouse upbeat, despite retail closure

By James Atkinson

Melbourne and Sydney craft beer mecca, The Local Taphouse is upbeat about its future prospects despite announcing the permanent closure of its St Kilda retail outlet over the weekend.

The Local Bottle Store and Provisions – which adjoins The Local Taphouse pub in St Kilda – closed its doors for the final time last night, but co-owner Guy Greenstone told TheShout there are plenty of positives to take from the decision.

"Because it sits next door, we'll bring it into the fold and turn it into some more on-premise space," he said.

"It's a beautiful space, let's use it for what we do best, which is on-premise beer, food and entertainment."

Greenstone said the Taphouse had given retail a "red hot go" but in the end it was just too hard.

"Retail is a pretty tough gig in Australia unless you're one of the big guys," he said.

"We created a store that looked beautiful, but at the end of the day, it just wasn't paying its way."

Greenstone said The Local Bottle Store aimed to mitigate the tough retail environment "by being extremely specialist and appealing to people who wanted to get really 'out there', different beers that you couldn't get anywhere else".

"[But] retail liquor, now we know, is kind of a volume game. You really need to be getting that volume in order to make it work," he said.

"We were getting great customer feedback, and we had really busy Fridays and Saturdays, but it just wasn't enough to make it viable."

Greenstone said the remaining on-premise component of The Local Taphouse business has "never been better", with the recent addition of a hugely popular rooftop space at the Darlinghurst, Sydney venue.

He said The Local Taphouse St Kilda is also having huge success with its new function spaces on the other side of the pub to the bottleshop.

"One of the most positive things is that we're keeping our staff that we had from the bottle store – they've accepted positions in the Taphouse," he said.

"That was really important to us because it was a great team of people."