Growing the Craft Niche
For the Australian beer lover, it can be frustrating to watch the brewing scene exploding across the Pacific. But it is easy to forget that in Australia, like in America, mainstream lagers outsell craft by more than ten-to-one and craft beer is still best described as niche market.
While in Australia the number of breweries and contract-brewed beers has doubled to almost 140 this decade, Australia’s population is only 21 million and is densely clustered with almost 13 million living in the five mainland state capitals. Australian brewers look longingly at the population of the United States, where even a niche market can be viable.
Though it can be difficult waiting for the market to grow, another U.S. expatriate brewer is working hard to take Australians on a beer journey with him.
Brennan Fielding learned his craft in Honolulu at the Brew Moon brewpub. Brewing more than twenty styles, he won gold at the 2002 World Beer Cup for his schwarzbier, as well as numerous awards at the Great American Beer Festival.
When he and his Australian-born wife Peta decided to move to Australia, Brennan was employed to set up a brewpub in Brisbane. He was surprised to discover that, in addition to the brewery’s own beers, his employers also planned to sell beers from the major brewers.
“I said, I think you’re missing the point. If you’re going to have a brewery and make your own beers, why would you have any beers on but what you are making?” Brennan recalls. “Their attitude was that we won’t get enough people to drink these beers and if we don’t have the mainstreams we’ll turn off too many people.”
It was an eye-opening experience for him, but he quickly won people over with his well-made, distinctive beers—sold side-by-side with the mainstreams.
After a couple of years at the brewpub, his plans were in place to open his own brewery, Burleigh Brewing, on the southern end of Queensland’s Gold Coast. There he is adding to his reputation, currently brewing three beers under the Duke label: two premium European-style lagers at 3.5% and 4.8% and an American-style pale ale.
Fielding admits he’s not trying break any taste barriers with his beers: instead he is going for quality.
“At the moment, we’re only making three beers and you’ve got to admit that, so far as craft beer styles go, our three beers aren’t real crafty. They’re not schwarzbiers, not hefeweizens and not Belgian abbey ales. But we picked our beers for a strategic business reason, which was to get Burleigh Brewing Company on the map. We figured if we could get people to try the lager and it was flavorful and they enjoyed it—and not so flavorful that they wouldn’t buy it again—then we’ve achieved what we wanted to achieve.”
In a market where Corona is the most popular imported beer and 14 of the top 15 sellers are largely interchangeable mainstream lagers, this is a sound business strategy.
“We need to get them out of the shell of only drinking one type of beer—lager—and if I can get them to trust us, then I can bring on my hefeweizen, then I can bring on my schwarzbier, then I can bring on my Imperial pale ale,” Fielding says.
