Byron Bay should and should not be considered one of Australia’s better craft beer destinations.
On one hand, the draft selection at Byron’s handful of bars is fairly limited, particularly when it comes to the spectrum of what we might consider good beer. You’ll generally see the same three to five craft breweries on tap at most venues, and very few bars supplement the taplist with bottles or cans (at least that can be consumed onsite). There are only two breweries in Byron Shire, and one of them is just okay. Bottleshops are a little pricey, too, and only a few offer a notably differentiated selection.
On the other—fresh Stone & Wood beer. Everywhere. Spoiling oneself with Pacific Ale, Cloud Catcher, and Green Coast bottled or kegged just weeks or even days ago is a distinctive pleasure that can only be enjoyed in these parts. As we’ve said before, bright and beachy Pacific Ale is like Byron in a bottle and one of our favorite beers in the world. If nothing else, ready access to Australia’s second-largest indie craft brewery (Coopers is a distant first) is enough reason to put Byron on the country’s good beer map.
Further, while Byron lacks in overall good beer diversity, every bar and restaurant around town offers something crafty, even chains like Guzman y Gomez. And though you won’t find many particularly exotic beers on tap anywhere—or any proper craft beer taprooms—such notable Queensland and New South Wales breweries as Balter Brewing, Green Beacon Brewing, Yulli’s Brews, Fixation Brewing, and Young Henrys are mainstays. Local beer is a good thing.
Here’s our roadmap for Byron Bay’s good beer trail. It’s short, but saccharine sweet.
The Sun Bistro
Located about 10 minutes by car from downtown Byron in the quiet North Beach precinct—and just down the road from Stone & Wood, below—Sun Bistro pairs one of Byron’s more varied taplists with the town’s best overall bottleshop.
It’s a fairly nondescript sports bar setting indoors, but in the expansive backyard there are a bunch of tables and a big grassy space for kids to run wild. The Sun taps up to 13 beers, including a few from Coopers and such familiar favorites as Stone & Wood, Pirate Life Brewing, and Yulli’s Brews. Expect a few imports, as well: A recent check showed American craft breweries SweetWater Brewing Co, 7 Mile Brewery, and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co all on tap.
Related: In Ballina, Father and Son Do It All at Seven Mile Brewing Co
The exceptional bottleshop is Byron’s most substantial source for both packaged craft beer and natural wine. Notably, it’s the only place in town to find something from Wildflower Brewing & Blending, the trailblazing New South Wales brewery specializing in mixed fermentation wild ales. We were thrilled to find limited seasonal releases from Mona Vale’s Modus Operandi Brewing Co, too. Along with the (mostly chilled) beer, highlights include upwards of 50 different natural wines and a curated selection of specialty gins.
Consider taking Byron’s solar-powered heritage train to The Sun from the downtown platform on Shirley Street. The roundtrip journey (10 minutes each way) costs AUD$8, or spring for one of four “Ride in Style” packages ($25 – $48) that include lunch and a Stone & Wood schooner. 61 Bayshore Dr. +61 6685 6500. Open Sunday to Thursday 10am – 10pm, Friday and Saturday 10am – 12am.
Stone & Wood
With our marathon 5,000-word feature story on Stone & Wood recently in the books, we’ve said just about all we have to say about Byron’s beloved village brewery—and if you made it to the story’s end, you’ve likely read all you need to read about it for now, too. Still, we’d be amiss to not again briefly highlight one of Australia’s finest craft breweries, and specifically its dazzling $3 million brewery and tasting room that opened in December 2018.
Stone & Wood’s original venue just around the corner had plenty of character, but the brewery’s substantial investment in its fancy new “spiritual home” right on Ewingsdale Road was well worth it. The massive 12,500-square foot space is a mixed-materials masterpiece that makes ample use of, well, stone and wood. Trees and other greenery mark the spacious outdoor area, and there’s a Seussian vibe to the tasting room’s oversized art.
Related: In Byron Shire, a Village Brewery Soaking Up the Thirsts of the Land
Stone & Wood brews and packages most of its beer at its mothership brewery up the road in Murwillumbah. Here, the collection of 30+ brewing vessels includes four brite tanks used as serving vessels for the limited Pilot Batch beers brewed and exclusively available onsite. In addition to the Pilots, Stone & Wood’s five year-round core beers are always available, along with seasonal brews and the current Counter Culture release. Tasting paddles run $11 for three glasses and $16 for five.
Stone & Wood is available at almost every bar and restaurant in and around Byron, but nothing beats drinking its beers fresh from the source. 100 Centennial Circuit. +61 2906 0262. Open Monday to Friday 10am – 5pm, Saturday and Sunday 12pm – 6pm.
Beach Hotel
We try to keep the stereotypic adjective “iconic” out of our lexicon, but in this case the shoe fits snugly. Conceived and built in the early ’90s by Crocodile Dundee collaborators John Cornell and Paul Hogan, Beach Hotel is a sprawling landmark venue adjacent to Main Beach (and across the street from a sizable playground). It’s open all day, every day, and attracts all walks of life—it’s reasonable to call The Beach an approximation of the proverbial local town square. If you haven’t boozed it up here at least once, it’s almost like you haven’t been to Byron at all.
The place is almost comically big. There are huge outdoor seating areas with picnic tables on either side of a wood-fired pizza oven; an elevated stage and dance floor in a cavernous concert hall-like indoor area; two full-service bars; and pool tables in a spacious sports bar wing with several wall-mounted flatscreen televisions.
In other words, there’s a space and something for everyone. Despite its gargantuan girth, The Beach can still feel crowded at times, particularly on weekends and when there’s a band playing, and that’s all good. On a side note, we love the throwback aquariums above the main bar—such a nice touch.
With some exceptions the taplist doesn’t change much, striking a fine balance between everyday commercial lagers and several beers from usual crafty suspects like Stone & Wood, Pirate Life Brewing, and Gold Coast’s wildly successful Balter Brewing Co. This is not the place to find anything particularly esoteric on tap, but sometimes you just don’t need that.
Like The Railway Friendly, below, The Beach Hotel is a good times boozer par excellence. Indeed it can feel as if, as it says on the fabulous mural near the main bar, “when you leave here, you’re going nowhere.” 1 Bay St. +61 6685 8758. Open daily 8am – late.
The Railway Friendly Bar
Known more colloquially as simply The Rails, this rough-and-rambunctious staple of Byron’s renowned music scene is one of our favorite bars on the planet. Really.
It’s tucked somewhat discreetly behind the long-haul bus stop on Jonson Street, next to the train tracks (obviously). Like at most Byron bars there are indoor and outdoor areas, though most everyone heads outside, congregating either in front of the covered performance stage—often on the small dancefloor—or in the sizable smoking section. Aside from the stunning mural behind the stage (by local artist and musician Jimmy Willing), The Rails is the dictionary definition of no-frills, and therein lies a good part of its beauty.
Free live music every night for the past 30 years and running is another lure; playing here is a rite of passage for aspiring and established musicians across Australia’s eastern coast. Importantly, The Rails also features Byron’s best overall taplist, a craft-dominated lineup of 18 beers comprising 12 core selections—including Fixation Brewing’s multi award-winning IPA—and six guest taps reserved for seasonal Stone & Wood and/or Fixation releases, as well as such popular regional breweries as Balter, Young Henrys, and Green Beacon (the latter a recent Asahi acquisition).
This go-to, post-surfing watering hole is particularly ace during Byron’s winter/low tourism season—our preferred time to visit—when the considerable crowds are almost entirely local. What else can we say? When we go out for drinks in Byron, we either start or end the evening at The Rails. Always. 86 Jonson St. +61 6685 7662. Open Monday to Saturday 10am – 12am, Sunday 12pm – 12am.
The Northern Hotel
Just around the corner from The Rails, The Northern Hotel is another good spot to catch live music, including the occasional international act. The taplist compares favorably to its counterpart across the way, and we don’t mind beers on the second-floor balcony one bit. Still, we find the ground-floor bar a bit meh and don’t wind up here all that often. To its credit, The Northern’s attached bottleshop is the best downtown for good beer, offering a nice selection of fancy imports from the US, Belgium, and other parts of Europe alongside beers from many of Australia’s most respected craft breweries. 35-43 Jonson St. +61 6685 6454. Open daily 12pm – late.
Three Blue Ducks
As close to a “destination bar” as it gets in Byron, Three Blue Ducks is one of four locations for the Bronte Beach-based restaurant and lifestyle brand focused on sustainable, ethical, and local foods. You’ll find it out at The Farm, a lovely 80-acre working farm just off the M1 exit for Byron. Popular with families, The Farm is a great spot to slow down and get swept away by views of the rolling hinterland hills. Kids will love running around on a big grassy lawn, taking horse-drawn carriage rides, hunting for fallen nuts in the macadamia and pecan orchard, and wandering through a sunflowers maze.
Adults will love the impressive list of more than 50 Australian craft beers, ciders, and wines on tap at Three Blue Ducks. Wines take most of the taps, and there are always at least a handful of natural, biodynamic, and/or organic options available. The beer list is smaller but no less considered, often including brews not readily available elsewhere around town. Dinner is a worthwhile splurge on weekends; the restaurant otherwise closes on weekdays at 3pm. 11 Ewingsdale Rd. +61 6684 7795. Open Monday to Thursday 7am – 11:30am, 12pm – 3pm; Friday to Sunday 7am – 9pm (closed 11:30am – 12pm).
Byron Bay Brewery
In Byron, it’s safe to say that one brewery is not like the other—at all.
Founded in the mid-00s and snapped up in 2016 by major Australasian food and beverage company Lion, Byron Bay Brewery is located in the same town as Stone & Wood, but in many ways it’s not even on the same planet. Most notably, whereas Stone & Wood beers are a mainstay at bars and restaurants across Byron Shire (and beyond), Byron Bay Brewery is conspicuously absent. Perhaps Lion is still just hashing out its “immediate focus” on “developing [the brand] in the surrounding area.”
You’ll see cans of the brewery’s signature Hazy One pale lager in bottleshops across town, but that’s about it—and if you’re the type that cares about such things, know that the canned beers are not actually brewed in Byron. All beers served at the brewery are brewed onsite, however, and… well, they are indeed beers. In addition to Hazy One, the core range features an India pale lager, red lager, and pale ale, and if you find yourself here drinking one, remember that like sands through an hourglass, these are the days of our lives (and that The Rails is just a 15-minute walk away).
The best thing going for Byron Bay Brewery might actually be its eclectic live music calendar, which often includes international touring acts and leans towards electronic, punk, reggae, hip-hop, and whatever label you want to give “alternative” these days. In fact, while scrolling through the brewery’s past nine months of Facebook posts, only one concerned beer—the rest were music-related. 1 Skinners Shoot Rd. +61 6639 6100. Open Wednesday to Sunday 12pm – late. Closed Monday & Tuesday.
###
“Asia Beer City” is Beer Travelist’s running series spotlighting notable beer bars, brewpubs, and bottle shops in cities across Asia and Asia-Pacific. Each series entry is not necessarily comprehensive, but rather a curated list of those venues we feel travelers (and locals) should prioritize. Thus far the series also includes Bangkok, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong.
This article was written to the sounds of Tool’s Fear Inoculum and Ellen Allien’s Alientronic.
