Celebrating 160 Fabulous Years SPEECH GIVEN BY DR TIM COOPER AM, MANAGING DIRECTOR & CHIEF BREWER, TO MARK THE 160TH ANNIVERSARY OF COOPERS. On this 160th year celebration it is a privilege for me to give you some insight as to the changing fortunes of the brewery over those years. Although Coopers is now the largest Australian-owned brewery and supplies 5% of the national beer volume, it has not been a straightforward progression. The waxing and waning of the business saw five episodes of near-death experience for Coopers. On the 13th May in 1862, ten years after his arrival in Adelaide with his young family, Thomas Cooper brewed his first beer as a restorative tonic for his ailing wife Ann. Ann was the daughter of a publican in Yorkshire, and she gave him the recipe. Two years later he wrote the following to his brother in England: “there are some half-dozen breweries besides ours in and about Adelaide, but they use a good deal of sugar and so on for brewing, but we use only malt and hops, consequently ours being pure the doctors recommend it to all their patients”. Following some early success Thomas fell upon hard times in the late 1860s when he lost his house in George St Norwood and sold his brewing equipment before moving into rented premises in High St Kensington in 1869. Despite losing everything, Thomas was not declared insolvent, and, fortunately for us, he 36 | Hotel SA | W W W . A H A S A . A S N . A U
somehow managed to keep brewing; from this neardeath experience his sales were back to former levels by 1878. Thomas was then able to buy property in Upper Kensington, leading to the establishment of the Leabrook brewery in 1881. Within a few years, Coopers’ beer volume had increased to around 150,000 litres, but remained at this level until well after the death of Thomas in 1897. Thomas left the running of the brewery to four of his sons (John, Christopher, Samuel and Stanley) who had embraced the family trade. As a devout Methodist, Thomas disapproved of selling beer to public houses. He would have followed the precepts of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who believed that beer was good, whereas wine and spirits were not. Wesley thought that beer should be consumed at home. The second generation decided to start selling to hotels in 1905, after which Coopers’ sales volumes increased, such that annual volume grew to more than 1 million litres at the end of the 1st World War. Following a substantial investment in brewing and bottling equipment in 1925, sales accelerated to 4½ million litres by 1928 (representing over 15% of the state volume). However, a second period of difficult Back to Contents
