The business of brewing is an interesting one, more craft breweries are popping up every year and raising the bar with new and exciting suds.  

The Pact Beer Co. story humbly originates from Kevin’s kitchen bench, fast forward a few years and the business is now an iconic Canberra brewing company practising the method of ‘gypsy brewing’ to slowly, but surely, build a hopsy empire.

We sat down with Kevin to chat about the company’s small beginnings, what the future holds for the three gents behind the brand and how wannabe-brewers should go about getting into the game.

 

What got you into brewing? 

I have been home brewing for a number of years as a hobby to have a bit of fun. I experimented a lot at home and decided to get into the competitions. In 2012, I got a taste of winning and in 2013 I took out ACT Champion Brewer. The year after that, things amped up a little further when I took out State and National Champion for 2014 – it was then that I knew I was on to something that people liked.

 

How did Pact Beer Co. come about? 

Off the back of winning these awards, I had a meeting with one of my current partners, Marc, who owned Transit Bar at the time and spoke to him to see what we might do with the product. From there, Tim, our third partner, came into the mix.

From November 2014 until we launched in June 2015, we started to do a lot of the planning and because I won that national award I was asked to brew a beer for GABS (Great Australasian Beer Spectacular), an annual beer festival that we have brewed for in the years since, so it timed well for us to launch our brand.

We launched with our Pale Ale but also our GABS brew. We decided to start straight away but didn’t want to mortgage our houses, so we needed a low cost of admission model to get the ball rolling. This is what’s called ‘gypsy brewing’ –  hiring out space in other people’s breweries to do the work.

We were initially brewing down at the Prickly Moses in Victoria but after about six to eight weeks we realised that we needed to go into packaging.

Almost all of our beers are prototyped at home and tweaked from there before we commercialise them.

 

 

What is ‘gyspy brewing’ for those that are unfamiliar with the term?

Gypsy brewing is an interesting one. We don’t have the same cultural exposure of the ‘Roma’ people in Australia to really think of it as a racist term, but it is.

I did a panel at a home brewing conference last year and the MC raised the point that, as an industry, we may need to think of a different term and suggested that ‘itinerant brewer’ or ‘hobo brewer’ may be a better term. It’s hard for us because we won the Gypsy Brewer Award at the Australian International Beer Awards this year.

It was incredibly unexpected but now we have this award that is a marketable asset, but personally, I don’t like using that term – in Europe, it would be considered racist. ‘Itinerant brewer’ doesn’t have the same ring as gypsy brewer so it’s a tough one from a marketing point of view.

We still operate as gypsy brewers at the moment but have had our eye on getting our own space. Getting a brew pub for our model is definitely on the cards as the next step for Pact.

When looking at the industry, it’s apparent that the successful ones have their own space because they are able to cut out the middle man, produce the beer on site and sell it for a full retail profit.

For our model, we brew it and then the guys who sell it need to make a profit, so we lose a margin. That turn and churn of product in the brewpub model is what is going to help us get to the next level.

 

 

...as an industry, we may need to think of a different term and suggested that ‘itinerant brewer’ or ‘hobo brewer’ may be a better term

 

 

 

What is the meaning behind the name Pact?

We had a long list of names before we landed on Pact – we wanted something short and sharp and joked that it was the only beer that we could form a pact on because we had such a long list of names.

Long after we had decided on the name, Tim thought that the brand could also stand for product of the ACT, which has a nice ring to it!

The branding itself was an interesting process, we struggled with a bunch of designers bidding off against each other, but none of the designs really nailed our brief. My wife, who is a designer, bowed out of the process early on, but in the end mocked up the current logo in 15 minutes for us to pass onto the designers, and it all went on from there.

 

 

What's the Pact signature style and which do you think is best? 

We got a gold medal for our Brickworks Brown Ale which we launched in our first year and brought into package last year. That’s always been a special beer for us. It’s a dense, warmer winter beer.

Just last week we kegged a very limited batch of the Brickworks that we have been ageing in a bourbon barrel for over a year, so that will be hitting a few local venues in the coming weeks.

Our signature and flagship beer is our Mount Tennant Pale Ale, it’s the beer that we launched with. Pale ale is very popular in the space and is a great gateway beer to more experiment craft