Who is South Fremantle Brewing?
a brief history.
One of the OG Boom-Box bike rides from around 2013. Most likely featured some home brewed beers of ours at some afterparty somewhere.
Pic ripped from the boombox facebook page courtesy of Lucas De Laine
Long before South Fremantle Brewing had ever been thought of, we had unknowingly been creating ourselves a pretty solid foundation within the local Fremantle community. With all of us dabbling in homebrewing to various success (and non success) over the years, people started to enjoy drinking the beers that were being provided at various Fremantle House Parties and community events. As reputations started growing, so did requests for beers at more and more parties and events.
Think back to the days of the fabled Fremantle boombox bike ride, an amazing “little” event with a pied piper style leader riding through town with a sound system on the back of their bike and you followed them around until they stopped at a park/ warehouse/ car park. You stayed and danced for an hour before heading off to the next stop, leaving nothing behind. Those after parties were always good fun and often featured something we had homebrewed.
Countless house parties, engagement parties, weddings, raves, fundraisers and backyard band nights have all over the years had beer home brewed by one of our co-founders. At one point we even thought about using the moniker “if you’ve partied in Fremantle, you’ve already drunk our beer”.
Eventually a great friend and original member of South Fremantle Brewing, Matt converted his old chook shed into a brew house made out of mostly salvaged and donated equipment. Some amazing beers have come out of this clandestine brewery and to this day most South Fremantle Brewing beer gets a final hit-out on this “pilot system” before being scaled up to a commercially available beer. We consider it a solid litmus test, If we can make a good beer on that equipment. We can make a good beer anywhere.
Not long after the chook shed brewery was thrown together, a large group of friends decided to form a brewers co-op. The idea was to meet up every Friday afternoon, brew beer while drinking the beer from a few weeks before and hang-out with a bunch of mates. This was intended as an attempt at improving skills through knowledge sharing but quickly descended into half finished beers getting turned off before heading to the pub or getting side tracked with other things and being left still cleaning equipment after midnight.
Some of the beers actually turned out pretty good and we decided to enter one into a home brew competition for some feedback. To our surprise we actually won it. We then entered the same beer in a few other comps and won those too. One night over a few beers someone raised the question of whether we would be able to get a beer on tap somewhere and how to do it? So after a few weeks of research we decided to give it a crack!
One of the back yard stages from Yardstock around 2016. We had a bar set up over the back there somewhere.
Pic ripped from the Yardstock Facebook Page courtesy of Pablo Walsh
Our first beer! We took this photo after just transferring our first Session IPA batch into the fermenters. We’re pictured here with Mark from Three Rivers Brewing Company.
One of the first things we needed was a name, South Fremantle Brewing was always at the forefront but in typical style we decided to throw a house party and get friends around to put ideas on a board. Most sucked. The overriding winner was South Fremantle Brewing.
From the start we always liked the idea of South Fremantle Brewing as we all lived locally and love the area, it’s hyper-local and we felt would give the community ownership and a sense of home if the brand moved forward beyond a one off beer release. We realised that having a name that was 3 words and 21 letters long could be quite a mouthful considering that 15 of the world’s top 20 most recognisable brands contain 7 or less letters and less than 3 syllables. However we’re Australian, and we give everything a nickname and we quite liked the idea of people ordering a “south freo” at the bar.
We had a few meetings about what we wanted to achieve with putting a beer on the market and whether it would be worth the effort, given that we all had existing day jobs. We all had the same feeling of how stoked we would get seeing strangers love our beer enough to order another one. There was also the fact that it would give us the opportunity to learn new skills we didn’t know beforehand.
The overriding answer was yes that it was worth the effort and so we decided to go ahead with our plans.
With a brand name settled and social media set-up it was time to decide on a beer. As with our name heading in the opposite direction of conventional thinking, we decided to tweak the recipe for the home brew comp winning beer and release a Session IPA at a time when other brands were all releasing Double IPA’s. Our main reasoning for that was we felt it spoke more for the typical South Fremantle lifestyle of slowing down and taking your time with things. Like spending the day in the pub with your mates, rather than having to head home after two beers.
We enlisted the help of Mark and Trina at Three Rivers Brewing Company in Mandurah and on the 11th September 2016 we brewed our first commercially available beer.
At the time this beer was brewed the whole 1000 L batch was already sold out to venues.
The legends at Percy Flint were kind enough to host our launch party on Saturday the 8th of October 2016. We weren’t expecting a great deal, we figured if no one showed up we’d at least get to drink our own beer and listen to the tunes spinning on the decks in the courtyard together.
The deal was to have one keg on for the launch and a second keg in the cool room to go on tap the next day. About 30 mins after the start the second keg was on a second tap and we were asked if there was any more beer. Luckily we had another 4 kegs in the cool room for the chook shed brewery down the road. We ended up carrying the kegs by hand down the middle of South terrace in Fremantle with cars driving past cheering at us.
By the time we got back with the extra kegs there was a line out the door to get to the bar. All up those 6 keg’s were gone in under 4 hours!
The very next day we registered the South Fremantle Brewing name and got cracking with the formalities.
From that initial bunch of mates who wanted to see a beer of theirs on tap five went on to co-found South Fremantle Brewing. Those guys are Peter Lovelock, Graham Rigo, Matt Field, Mark Cornish and Eamonn Barnes. We all come from a diverse background as former and current business owners, managers and different trades, the things we all have in common is we have been friends for years and have a love for good beer.
First pints! Looking pretty stoked with ourselves in the Percy Flint court yard at our launch party. Our original co-founders from L-R, Pete, Matt F, Graham, Fish, Eamonn and Matt G.
Our First Core Range packaged beer released in 2019. Our Pale Ale is now available year round in independent bottle shops and BWS stores.
Our first novelty cheque. Picking up the People’s choice award at Fremantle Beer Festival in 2019.
Upon setting up South Fremantle Brewing we all knew it was going to be hard work. We decided to be as hands on as possible and to do as much of the work as we could ourselves. There were two reasons behind this, one was to stretch the coins as far as we could in a typically capital heavy industry and the second was to learn as much as we could about the the industry we wanted to be a part of.
That included teaching ourselves to use graphic design programs, building websites, social media and basic marketing, accounting, logistics and sales management to work as commercial brewers. We felt that we were afforded this luxury by the fact that we all still have a full time job, which meant our day to day lives would remain the same. This enabled us to slow down and spend the necessary time living by our core values of sustainability and balance.
Sustainability to South Fremantle Brewing is one of our most important values. We not only wanted to be as sustainable as possible from an environmental sense but also from a financial point of view. Learning new skills and doing as much of the work ourselves would not only help our development, but meant that we could help and offer advice to other businesses about what we have learnt along the way. We’ve always been firm believers in knowledge sharing and any information or help we have received for free we also pass on down the line.
By spreading our workload amongst the five co-founders we’ve also been able to maintain a level of work-life balance that has enabled us to push forward with our development while not burning ourselves out in the process.
From that first humble beer we’ve since gone on to release a dozen or so commercially available beers and counting. Those beers are released as a core range or under our odd release brand that's reserved for seasonal, and collaboration beers. With the help from Florian von Guttenberg and the guys at Shizuku Brewing and the good crew at Wiley Canning Co we now have a core range of 3 packaged beers available most of the year in independent bottle shops and BWS. We’ve had our beer sold in venues across WA with even a few cheeky interstate legends jumping on board. Created our Core Range and our Odd Release brands. Have been awarded various medals for beers entered in local and national judging competitions, and were named as winners of the people's choice award at the 2019 Fremantle Beer Festival for highest rated beer over the weekend. Just recently our Pale Ale Can has been added to a display depicting the history of beer in Western Australia at the newly opened WA Museum Boola Bardip.
Not bad for a couple of part timers!!
From the outset of South Fremantle Brewing we’ve always had the plan to create the best brand we possibly can. We want to create something that in the future we can look back on and be proud that we developed something that became a well loved part of our epic little community and added to the already rich fabric of Fremantle and the Australian Independent Craft Beer scene.
We’ll add to our brief history here as we create more of it along the way over time.
SFB Crew
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