“Last Pour” is our running series that highlights interviewee quotes of interest that didn’t make the final cut of her or his main story on Beer Travelist. It is our last call, if you will, on a shared moment in time. Pair these quotes from Gab and Chris Moore, co-founders of Sailors Grave Brewing in Orbost, Victoria, Australia, with our feature story on the brewery here.
On Orbost and the local community:
“It’s a beautiful, remote place. It’s taken awhile for us to be accepted, even though Gab is from the area. Her parents live here. I grew up in Melbourne, we lived in Sydney for awhile. There is that kind of reluctance to accept the outsider, but after four years we finally are, I think…” (Chris)
“No, I am… you won’t be for another 15 years!” (Gab)
“Well, the brewery is accepted, and there is a sense of community. Breweries are powerful builders of communities.” (Chris)
On visiting Sailors Grave Brewing:
“We’re not a taproom, just a wholesale brewery. But if anybody drives from that many hours away I will always show them around, give them a personal tour, and send them away with some beer. We’re lonely out here! Haha!” (Chris)
On Sailors Grave Brewing’s growth potential:
“We want to keep growing to a point, but we’re not trying to be a volume brewery. We want to keep playing. We make niche beers. A lot of them are highly intensive beers, or beers with very hard-to-get ingredients that we couldn’t do tank after tank after tank of. There is a limit to how much we grow.” (Chris)
On the approach to goses at Sailors Grave Brewing:
“When I first tried a gose in the States, to me it just screamed ‘the sea.’ We’ve never done a fruit gose; ours are all kind of sea-based in the way that our core range gose has seaweed in it. We do a lot of coastal botanicals, and that’s where we feel gose sits for us—in that briny section of beers. We’re happy with that. Other people can play in the fruit gose space, but that’s where we see goses sitting.” (Gab)
On an upcoming barrel-aged version of Spring Farmhouse:
“The interesting thing about that one is that we just used nettles to inoculate the wort as the only yeast source. We had to grow it up, and in the first few stages of the wort’s growth, of course the first stage tasted weedy, and then we took the yeast from that and grew it up again, and it still had this weedy smell and taste—in a really nice way—even into the third generation of that yeast. Now it’s kind of mellowed out, but it’s amazing how the plant you got the yeast from can impart a sort of relic of flavor through the beer for a few generations.” (Chris)
On fennel pollen:
“I call it ‘angel dust’ because we’ll pick it up, hang it upside down to dry, let it all settle down, and then it’s this gold dust that we add to the beer. The smell is so amazing.” (Gab)
On meeting brewers in the US:
“I had this idea in my head, coming from a homebrewing background, that there were certain unbreakable rules. The thing I learned the most from that trip is that, yes, there are fundamentals that you need to work with, but all the brewers I met did so many things differently—Jolly Pumpkin, Hill Farmstead, Allagash, it goes on—so that was really freeing for me and gave us the permission to follow our own path.” (Chris)
On American craft beer:
“I’m a massive fan of a lot of European styles of beer, but the attitude to brewing in America that really appealed to me was that freedom to explore. There is often a ‘bigger is better’ to a lot of the beers; I’m not necessarily always a fan of that, but I’m such a fan of their freedom of expression that it doesn’t really matter to me in the end.” (Chris)
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All photos taken by Kim Choong, founder of ThirstMag.com, and cannot be reused.
