Brewing business is all about the craft Brewer Mike Jorgensen at his Ekim Brewing Company microbrewery in Mt Kuring-Gai just outside Sydney. Picture: Croucher James Source: TheAustralian LATE at night in a northern Sydney cul-de-sac, Mike Jorgensen is slaving over cold bottles of beer. Like a home brewer, he seals the precious product one at a time and marks each label with the date of production by hand. A landscape gardener, he was converted to brewing by a trip to Tasmania's Moo Brew, did some work around the industry to learn the trade then branched out on his own. Jorgensen's carefully crafted Ekim beers (Ekim is Mike backwards) are testament to his passion for the craft. Working flat out, the owner-brewer can pack eight cases of beer in an hour - not quite 200 bottles. Ekim shares the space and the equipment with Happy Goblin, another passionate and tiny operation working on a similar scale. Eight hours up the highway, Brad Rogers is looking for more elbow room. The chief brewer and part-owner of Byron Bay's celebrated Stone & Wood brewery has, after four years in the game, outgrown his original site. The semi-automated bottling machine the brewery has been using cranks out about 1000 stubbies an hour and has been working almost every day of the week since it started production, but in the new premises there is a machine that will do it at 12 times that rate. For years, the brewery struggled to keep up with demand for its Pacific Ale and Lager, but with the increased capacity comes the room to experiment with other brews. Craft brewing in Australia is a thriving and varied phenomenon. There are big breweries, small ones and even smaller ones. There are one-man operations and two-women operations. There are brewers who look across a room filled with stainless steel and know they are masters of their domain. There are new entrants who arrive naked, but know no shame. The pub with no beer is a place of mythical repute, but what about the beer with no brewery? Today, there are craft brewers who don't even have a brewery. "Contract brewing" where people pay others to produce their product, is on the rise. There are also those who are known - pardon the political incorrectness - as "gypsy brewers." Brewers who come into whatever brewery is willing to lease them a fermenter and storage tanks. It was only two decades ago that you could count Australia's craft brewers on your fingers and toes. Today there are almost 200 and they have even formed themselves into a collective known as the Craft Brewers Industry Association. Some members churn out millions of litres; others slave day and night on limited equipment that produces such small amounts they would struggle to sate the thirst of a single big drinker. The CBIA has broken its members up into representative groups: national, regional, micro, nano/pub and contract brewers. The big three are Matilda Bay, Malt Shovel and Little Creatures. All started out independent, only to be consumed by big breweries. Carlton owns Matilda Bay, which began life in Perth, Lion Nathan swallowed James Squire and last year leveraged its minority share of Little Creatures into a full-scale buyout. The trio were pioneers in the 1980s and 1990s but have shifted shape significantly since. WA's Matilda Bay, started by Phil Sexton in a brew pub, was the pacesetter but it was bought out early by CUB and these days its products are a pale imitation of what they were. Chuck Hahn started brewing his Hahn beers in the late 1980s, but was killed by the blowout in interest rates and was eventually bought out by Lion. His Hahn Premium had once been a unique European pilsener, but it was soon dumbed down for the popular market with great success. Hahn stayed on as a head brewer with the multinational and eventually convinced it to allow him to return to his old brewery and start up the James Squire range. With its backing the beers have become iconic. Around that time, Sexton started up Little Creatures in Fremantle. His Pale Ale and the Squire's Pilsener were soon recognised as two of the better beers in the country. Others are following in their wake as Australian drinkers woke from their lager-induced coma to discover a higher beer consciousness. Few are as big, but the industry seems to be able to support various business models. The CBIA is not the only group representing craft brewers. The Australian Real Craft Beer Association argues that Malt Shovel, Little Creatures and Matilda Bay with their multinational backers cannot be considered "craft" and the "Real" in their title is pointed. Their members complain about their beers being bumped off taps in pubs by the big breweries who offer their products as a replacement craft line. Hahn did work hard to establish craft beers in this country and has worked since to protect the integrity of his product. "My biggest challenge now is keeping the craft in James Squire and all the other beers - we're up to 20 million litres a year," he admits. Craft has multiple definitions, part of it is delivering on that flavour that people expect and having the credibility of a brewmaster behind it and who identifies with brands and controls all stages of the process. Our craft industry in Australia was nurtured and invigorated and driven by breweries that were owned by the larger brewers. Hahn is delighted by "the vibrancy" of the industry these days and remains a keen advocate. Today, production volumes mean some of the Squire brands have to be produced at Tooheys. Brewer Jayne Lewis, along with business partner Danielle Allen, are Two Birds Brewing - women in an industry where men have traditionally worn the overalls. They produce two excellent beers but have no brewery as such. Two Birds is one of a growing number of "contract brewers." Lewis was a Margaret River winemaker who fell in love with the competitors' craft while drinking at Little Creatures' outlet in Fremantle. She got a job there and then worked around the traps for the next decade before going into business. "We were keen to see if there was a market for our product, to see if people would like our beer and buy it and now that we are sure of that it makes it a lot easier to access the finances to start a brewery," she says. If we had gone out earlier looking for finance a lot of people would have turned us away, but now we have some runs on the board from two years in the business and that makes things more attractive for investors and we are also confident that things are going to work out. Two Birds has its bottled beer made in Perth at Gage Roads and its kegs are produced in Geelong. "All the beers are my recipes and we're there as often as we can be when they are brewing or bottling, actively involved in the process and making sure it comes out the way we want it to," Lewis says. I brew by feel. Sunset Ale is a beer I had in mind for a number of years and so it was nice to see that come to fruition. There are various types of beers made under the contract arrangement. Some are of dubious integrity, little more than a generic beer knocked up to be the product behind some clever creative's marketing plan. Supermarkets are also trying to hitch on to the craft segment. Woolworths now owns a quarter of the Gage Roads line of beers, which it sells through its bottle shops and ALH hotel chain. Like the big breweries of old, the pubs have become territorial. Where once, say, James Squire or a Two Birds beer might have been on tap in such establishments, it now makes a lot more business sense for the company to push its own products. Back in Sydney's northern suburbs, Jorgensen is still bottling by hand, but like many small brewers has found that kegs are convenient and more profitable. Through hard work and persistence, his beers are finding taps in select pubs around town. "No one is in my situation, I call myself a co-operative brewer, I share everything with Colin (Larter) at Happy Goblin and technically my beers are produced under licence by them," he says. He is the licensee but I am in charge of the process and a lot of the capital expenditure is mine. We will get our own brewery in the future but we have some growing to do yet. I don't want to get too big, (but) I want to be bigger than we are. My main concern is product integrity, I always set out to create great beer - good beer for me is not good enough - and I never want to lose that philosophy. I want our product to be specialist. I am a perfectionist. People think we are mad, but we love what we do and there's never been a better time to be making beer. If Byron Bay wasn't famous already then this local beer would have made it so. A unique beer, it stands out in a sea of American pale ales. Refreshing, fruity and ridiculously drinkable. A distinct combination of malts creates a reddish ale with toffee flavours contrasted with US Citra and Australian Cascade hops whose citrus/grapefruit notes make this a great session beer. Rich and flavoursome, its luscious malt notes are offset by generous hopping. This is a bold beer whose flavours speak of craftsmanship and a dedication to flavour that doesn't baulk at cost or compromise to process.