Melbourne-based craft brewery Fury & Son Brewing Co is growing capacity at its Keilor Park production facility and taproom.

The new brewhouse equipment is made by Guangzhou Superior Stainless Machinery Co and is the first of its kind to be installed here in Australia.

Managing Director Andrew Georgiou said that in effect, Fury & Son has tripled its cellar capacity.

Before the expansion, the brewhouse had four 50hl fermentors and one 50hl bright tank, with a production capacity limited to approximately 190,000 litres per year.With the advent of four 100hl fermentors and one 100hl bright tank, Fury & Son now has a capacity of 650,000 litres per year.

“A byproduct of this increase in cellar space means that we now have efficiency of scale on our side,” Georgiou said.

Fury & Son has also purchased a bottle-rinsing machine and a de-palletising table, which will allow it to double its bottling line rate from one case to two cases per minute. It’s final new equipment acquisition is what the Fury & Son team affectionately refer to as the “hop gun”. A hop dosing vessel, the hop gun will not only remove much of the physicality of dry hopping, but will ensure only the most desirable hop qualities are extracted without adding any plant matter to the beer.

Georgiou said the other process they’re working on at the brewery is their internal research and development (R&D).

“New recipe development is now part of our standard operating procedure,” Georgiou explained.

“Each brewer is encouraged to brew single, once off kegs regularly, to maintain their creative edge and explore new flavours and boundaries.”

Upon visiting the brewery last week, Brews News was privy to a hop trial. The team are developing these hop trials as a systematic way for them to trial different hop additions to the same base wort. The experiment beers are then tapped for patrons to try at the taproom.

“Depending on how the beers are received, most will eventually make their way into a full-size commercial brew,” Georgiou said.

He said that Fury & Son’s focus has always been to create beers of the highest quality.

“As a brand, we’re not interested in being the ‘cool’ brewery, rather we want to be the dependable brewery,” he explained.

At the end of September, Fury and Son will be releasing a brewery first, a IIPA in 500ml cans.