Phil Sexton to rejuvenate Australia’s Matilda Bay brewery

Australia | Nearly 30 years after leaving the brewery he founded, Phil Sexton is re-opening Matilda Bay as a boutique brewery in Healesville, near Melbourne, in partnership with Carlton & United Breweries (CUB), now owned by Asahi.

Trained as a brewer, Mr Sexton set up Matilda Bay in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1983 and sold it to what was Foster’s (today CUB) in 1990 for AUD 23 million (then USD 18 million).

As says The Australian Financial Review (AFR) newspaper, Mr Sexton was also an integral player in the establishment of the craft brewery Little Creatures in 2000, which was subsequently acquired by Australia’s brewer Lion (which is owned by Kirin) in 2012.

After beer, he turned to wine and became a serious player in the Yarra Valley, building a winery in Healesville, which produces the labels Innocent Bystander and Giant Steps.

The new Matilda Bay brewery is being constructed on a site which is the current home of Mr Sexton’s Giant Steps winery and restaurant. It will incorporate a pub and will have an annual capacity of 3,000 hl beer. Reportedly, it shall be up and running in December this year.

Mr Sexton told media that the Matilda Bay brand, which is now 36 years old, needs “more than a facelift” and that it faces an uphill battle in a market awash with hundreds of different craft beers. There are currently more than 600 craft breweries operating in Australia.

According to the AFR, Mr Sexton will be making a new range of Matilda Bay products, along with traditional offerings, including the Redback and Dogbolter beers, which were at the forefront of the first craft beer wave in the 1980s.

He said there would be a big focus on sustainability, with solar panels providing power and waste to be recycled.

Matilda Bay has had a bit of a turbulent history. The original brewery was closed down in 2007. Foster’s then bought a brewery called Stockade in the south Melbourne suburb of Braeside from an entrepreneur distiller. It was called the Matilda Bay Garage. The building was leased so when the lease ran out the brewery was moved to a “consumer facing” brewpub in Port Melbourne, in 2012, which was closed in 2014. After SABMiller took over Foster’s brewing arm CUB, the equipment was sold to the craft brewer Colonial Brewing, which was then owned by an IT entrepreneur. Soon after, CUB decided it didn’t want to call its craft brewing arm Matilda Bay and renamed it the Yak company.

Since then the brand has been produced at CUB’s Cascade brewery in Tasmania, but has been increasingly hard to find in the market, reports the website Australian Brews News.