A quick heads up about a new brewery soon to open in Byron Bay. Stone & Wood is the latest venture by Brad Rogers who was Matilda Bay's head brewer until March this year. Brad has brewed at Sanctuary Cove and Fiji for CUB and this will be his first independent project. He is a top notch brewer who showed that craft brewing was possible even in a huge operation like Fosters.
He is joined by Ross Jurasich, also formerly of Matilda Bay where he was responsible for sales in Queensland, and also Jamie Cook from DIG Marketing in Melbourne - also with an impressive resume in beer and beer marketing. All-in-all it's a brewery start-up with an impressive provenance.
The guys aren't giving too much away about the beers to expect as yet, but they are focusing on draught beer for on-premise sales. The new custom-built brewery is still on a ship headed for our shores, due for installation early September - so all going to plan Brad reckons we'll be able to try the beers by about late October.
I'll keep you posted, in the meantime you can keep up to date on the Stone & Wood blog here.
Incidentally, this is Byron Bay's only brewery. The Byron Bay Ale that you may have tried isn't brewed in Byron Bay, rather is a contract-brewed beer brewed at Australian Independent Brewers. Not that this should concern you. There's nothing wrong with contract-brewed beers, in fact there are some very good ones. The fact that they're not based in Byron Bay does concern some though.
Perhaps more confusing is that Byron Bay Ale is a lager...even winning a Bronze Medal at this year's Sydney Royal Show's beer competition in the Golden Lager class.
Anyway, enough digression from Stone & Wood...looking forward to trying some real Byron Bay beers soon.