Scott Brandon

Victoria’s Bright Brewery is celebrating its 10th birthday with the announcement it has secured a site to open a second production brewery on the outskirts of its hometown.

Today, Friday June 10, marks the 10th anniversary of Bright Brewery opening its doors on Great Alpine Road in the town centre in 2006.

“We’ve been finding that the set-up that we’ve got in place at the moment is barely keeping up with our own demand for our bar,” founder Scott Brandon told Australian Brews News this week.

“By going for a slightly larger system we can get to better economies of scale in our brewing process as well, and increase our volumes.

“We’ve had a lot of demand for our product in the capital cities and around the place, but we’re not really well set up where we are, to cater for that at all. So this is really primarily to support that objective,” said Brandon.

He said Bright is currently producing about 100,000 litres of beer a year, of which 85 per cent is sold over the bar at its bustling brewpub.

“Our initial aim would be to push that up to around about 250 to 300 thousand litres, but we’d want it to be able to do 500,000-plus readily,” he said.

“We’d really just like to take it step-by-step and plan for things we know we can manage. I’m fairly conservative that way I guess.”

Brandon said he had considered, but decided against, supplementing production by contract brewing.

“It’s important to me that we’re being authentic about where the product’s made. We felt that it’s better to bite the bullet and to focus on getting our own expansions up and running,” he said.

Brandon said Bright’s existing brewery will continue to be operational predominately for its smaller batch and seasonal brews.

“Our higher volume beers will be done at the new site,” he said.

“I’m also pretty keen to use the extra space to revisit some of the barrel-aged and sour beers that we had going over the past years.

“Some of those have been dropped off recently just because we don’t have the capacity to be able to get them through the system,” said Brandon.

New brewing team
Bright Brewery also announced the arrival of brewer Richard Chamberlin, most recently of Mildura Brewery, to head up its beer production.

Chamberlin began his brewing career at Brewsters Brewing Co in Lincolnshire, UK, where he worked for over eight years and was head brewer from 2010 until 2012, when he relocated to Australia and took up the role at Mildura.

“From the conversations that we’ve had so far, I’m really enthusiastic about him joining us,” Brandon said.

“I think he has the right approach we’re looking for, which is a very analytic approach to making beer, but he’s also really keen to get into some of these more interesting, artistic styles like the sours and barrel-aged beers.”

Chamberlin steps into the role following Ryan Tyack’s move to Pirate Life in Adelaide.

He will bejoined at Bright by new brewing assistant Tom Wood, who is taking uphis first brewing job following study with the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and TAFE SA. He alsoobtained a Bachelor of Science at University of Adelaide last year.