Cooper’s enjoys an equally revered position in Adelaide. The brewery was once laughed to scorn as the producer of Sparkling Ale, the beer that nobody wanted to drink when lager was in its ascendancy. But the company has had the last laugh. It’s flourishing. It has broken out of its South Australian heartland and now enjoys national sales. It’s family-owned, run by the fifth generation of the Cooper family. When Lion Nathan attempted to buy Cooper’s in 2005, 94.6 percent of the 117 shareholders, mainly family members, turned down an offer worth 450 million Australian dollars. The family is now buying back the shares owned by the tiny minority who wanted to sell.

The brewery was founded in 1862 by Thomas Cooper, who immigrated to Australia from England with his wife, the daughter of an innkeeper. She brewed beer at home and when she fell ill Thomas tried his hand at brewing. She recovered and friends were sufficiently impressed with Thomas’s beer that they encouraged him to brew commercially. The success of Cooper’s in modern times forced the company in 2001 to leave its original site and build a new brewery in Regency Park, with a potential capacity of 250 million hectolitres a year. The brewing plant is firmly traditional, based on mash tuns, mash filters and boiling coppers, designed in the far-off home of pale ale brewing, Burton-on-Trent in England.

“We brew an ancient sort of beer―it was old in 1862,” operations director Nick Sterenberg says. “The Coopers are unswayed by fashion. In the 1980s, Bill and Maxwell Cooper developed markets outside South Australia with the slogan ‘cloudy but fine’.”
While the brewery’s biggest-selling brand, Pale Ale (4.5 percent ABV), is hazy rather than cloudy, the flagship beer, Sparkling Ale (5.8 percent), belies the name. It takes a certain kind of chutzpah in Australia to deliberately produce a beer called sparkling ale that’s opaque in the glass. Part of the skill of the brewers at Cooper’s is to make a beer that keeps yeast in suspension during fermentation and conditioning.

The company is developing new styles. It brews its own lager, makes a wonderfully oily, creamy stout and has recently introduced Mild (3.8 percent) and Dark Ale (4.5 percent). Dark has a fine roasted malt and chocolate character and is based on Brain’s Dark, a beer Tim Cooper discovered on a visit to the Welsh capital, Cardiff. In the late 1990s, Cooper’s launched an annual Vintage Ale (7.5 percent), with massive vinous fruit and bitter hops.

Draft beer accounts for only a quarter of production. Bottles are filled directly from conditioning tanks and the beers are neither filtered nor re-seeded with fresh yeast. The yeast strain is powdery, which helps explain why it doesn’t settle in the bottle and gives Sparkling Ale its cloudy appearance.

The success of Cooper’s gave me a warm glow. How stimulating―in this age of marketing hype for bland, boring beers―to find a company once dismissed as an out-dated joke winning acclaim and increased sales. Here’s to their cloudy future.AA

What a difference at Melbourne airport. “G’day, Roger, what brings you to Australia?” the beaming official at the passport desk asks. “A beer festival? Jeez, mate, I’ll see you there!”

Australia lives up to its image. Everyone is “mate” because it’s a matey kind of place. As someone originally from London’s East End, where “mate” is also common currency, I felt immediately at home Down Under.

There’s a second, potent reason for feeling at home there: it’s a great beer drinking country. Only the Czechs out-drink the Aussies and in Australia the beer scene is changing rather more dramatically than it is in the Czech Republic. If Foster’s is your favorite tipple, don’t bother to go. What was once considered an iconic Australian beer―the “amber nectar”―is hardly featured prominently in the scene. In a week in Melbourne and Adelaide, I don’t recall seeing a single tap for Foster’s.

Even Crocodile Dundee shuns it now and the company that makes it has reverted to its original name of Carlton and Union Breweries. CUB’s main brands are Victoria Bitter, the biggest-selling beer in Australia―and a lager in spite of the name―and Carlton Draught.

With Lion Nathan (owned by Kirin of Japan), which brews Castlemaine XXXX, Toohey’s and Swan, the two giants command 95 percent of the Australian market. Cooper’s of Adelaide, doughty brewers of Sparkling Ale (see sidebar), has a further three percent, which doesn’t leave much room for anyone else. But an astonishing number of small craft breweries have sprung up to grab the remaining two percent of the market.

The craft brewers were on show at Beer Expo in Melbourne in the spring―autumn in Australia. It was the brainchild of David Lipman, publisher of Beer & Brewer Magazine, a glossy publication dedicated to all things beery in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to the efforts of craft brewers and writers, Australians can now move beyond bland lagers and savor pale ales, an abundance of IPAs, porters and stouts, alongside Belgian and German-inspired wheat beers, golden ales and true pilsners.

Australia is a country marked by unfair stereotypes. Aussie beer drinkers are often seen as cowboys who spend their nights in dusty country bars, chugging giant cans of bland lager. Truth is, most Australians are city-dwellers, and the big “oil cans,” while still sold overseas, were abandoned in Australia decades ago.

What is true is that Australians do tend to prefer international-style lagers. Walk into a typical Australian beer store and you’ll find lots of brands—Victoria Bitter, Carlton Cold, Foster’s Ice, Toohey’s New, Swan Lager—but very little difference in taste.

True, in the US beer market, the big three brewers produce 80 percent of the beer, most of it in the international style. That still leaves 20 percent of the market available for over 1,000 small breweries to launch the American beer revolution.

But the Australian picture is extreme: just two mega-brewers, Foster’s and Lion Nathan, produce nearly 95 percent of all beers sold.

In the past five years, a rising number of independent brewers—both Australians and a surprising number of expatriate Americans—are struggling to make Australia’s beers more interesting. These little brewers face formidable obstacles but they are slowly introducing Australians to the global beer revolution.

Nine decades of consolidation

Australians have been consolidating breweries ever since six Melbourne breweries joined forces in 1907 to form Carlton and United Breweries, or CUB. One of the six breweries was Foster’s. Over the past two decades, Foster’s Brewing has used Foster’s as its international brand name while calling its Australian division CUB.

In 1983, Foster’s was taken over by Elders IXL, a farm equipment manufacturer. Under Elders’ control, the firm went on a global buying spree, purchasing Courage in Britain in 1986 and Carling O’Keefe in Canada in 1987. (When Molson merged with Carling O’Keefe, the deal gave Foster’s control of 50 percent of Molson.) The company grew to be the world’s fourth largest brewer, and Foster’s chairman boasted that he would “Fosterize” the world. But the stock market crash of 1987 left Foster’s overextended and bleeding red ink. By the time Ted Kunkel became Foster’s CEO in 1992, the company’s future was in doubt.

It’s fair to say that the company had hit desperate times,” Kunkel told The Bulletin (an Australian news magazine) recently. “We were fighting for our very survival. With the debt load we had, we virtually had to ask our shareholders to save us.”

Under Kunkel’s leadership, Foster’s split off from Elders and issued new shares to help pay off its debt. It also sold several foreign subsidiaries, earning A$2.2 billion (US $1.6 billion) from its sale of Courage to Scottish and Newcastle and A$1.1 billion (US $750 million) from selling Molson the 50 percent of its stock that it owned. The result is that, under Kunkel’s leadership, Foster’s stock price has tripled and its debt has been sharply reduced.

Australia’s second big brewer didn’t come into existence until 1985, when financier Alan Bond, who already owned the Western Australian Swan Breweries, purchased Castlemaine Toohey Breweries (which owned breweries in Queensland and New South Wales).

The stock market crash of 1987 put an end to Bond’s brewing ambitions. His personal financial collapse left his breweries alive but suffocating from debt. In 1990, he sold his properties to the New Zealand firm of Lion Nathan, whose best-known brand is Steinlager. In 1998, Kirin purchased 45 percent of Lion Nathan.

Both Lion Nathan and Foster’s have been buying steadily in the 1990s. Lion Nathan’s purchases in this decade have included South Australian Breweries, a well-established regional brewery, and Hahn Breweries, a Sydney-based firm started by an expatriate American. Foster’s has purchased both Tasmania’s Cascade Brewery and the Northern Territories’ Darwin Brewery.

Foster’s and Lion Nathan have tried to keep some distance from these recent acquisitions, much in the same way that Miller keeps Leinenkugel as a distinct division. This ensures variety in the Australian premium beer market. Cascade products tend to be hoppier and more assertive than other CUB products; South Australian Breweries produces a stout that the Beverage Testing Institute names as one of the 10 best imports of 1999. And Michael Jackson praises two other Lion Nathan products: Hahn Premium and Toohey’s Old Black Ale.

In 1999, Foster’s controls 56 percent of the Australian market (up from 48 percent a decade ago), while Lion Nathan has 38 percent. Two surviving Australian independent regional brewers—Coopers in Adelaide and J. Boag and Son in Tasmania—each control 2 percent, leaving the remaining 2 percent for smaller brewers and imports.