They say fortune favours the brave; well, steering a fledgling business through the gales of COVID-19 should certainly fit that description.
If it is not how Wild Life Brewing Company got its name, it probably reflects its essence.
The Shepparton craft brewery involves three partners, brothers-in-law Rhys Porter and James Thomson and James’s younger brother Jack Thomson.
“We were just talking in the shed and yeah, that’s where it went from,” James said.
“That’s pretty much how it started for us and the ball got rolling. We just kept brewing and we just got better and better and better, and yes, hadn’t brewed a drop before this idea was really conceived.”
As the brewery’s momentum grew though, it faced a challenge familiar to many, and like other businesses COVID-19 encouraged a consolidation, which has been unveiled in the form of its suitably grungy tap house in Williams Rd, an industrial part of town near the showgrounds.
“Through COVID, we had our tap house in Maude St, which everyone knew us by, but we had off-site storage and we were contracting in Melbourne using Hawkers (brewery) as well, so we’ve now brought everything into one and everything’s made on site. Everything’s made here now,” James said.
For the partners, the adventure is only partly in the business side — it is mostly in the brewing.
“Every beer behaves differently. Every season is different,” James said.
“Sessionable, yes, (our beers are) sessionable. We selfishly brew them for ourselves and we want to have more than one and be able to drive, so they are often lower ABV with higher flavour and bitterness, and that’s what we’re all about, just approachable beers you can take to a barbecue.”
The three brewers are now hoping to attract locals to check out their “shed” and beer garden, which are apt settings for an independent brewer.
“The distribution is our our bread and butter, we deal with Dan Murphy’s and BWS, we’re very lucky to have that deal and we’ve got 100 stockists Australia-wide sort of thing, but mostly focusing on Victoria, the ACT and NSW, so it's funny when people go, ‘Oh, are you in that shed? Have you opened back up? I thought you had closed down’, when we’ve got people in-boxing us from Sydney saying they want to come down and have a beer, so it’s an interesting challenge to get the word out,” James said.
The Wild Life Brewing Company is open three times a week, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, opening for the “knock-off crowd” in the afternoons and going through to the evenings.
It occasionally hosts live music events, as it will on Friday, May 26, with a food truck on site to keep the crowd fed.