bike to brew

REUB GOLDBERG BREWING MACHINE CYCLES IT WAY INTO THE WOLLONGONG BEER SCENE

Interview Kate O’Mealley Images Rich Perin @oo7fff, Lachy Starling @lachystarling, Grant Reynolds @grant_f_reynolds, Georgia Matts @_coastalco, Rooland 81 Meadow Street, Tarrawanna

Who cycles 9000km and visits 150 breweries all in the name of business research? We chatted with Anna Suthers and Billy Barnetson, founders of Reub Goldberg Brewing Machine in Tarrawanna, who did just that.

Why did you decide to start Reub Goldberg Brewing Machine? Anna: We both wanted to leave our jobs to do something on our own. I was a physiotherapist, but I knew I didn't want to run my own physio practice. Billy had an overwhelming passion and has been brewing since he was 18, so I think that longevity was good for coming into the business. Billy: I have quite the range of adult vocational experience, I guess you could say! Military, super yachts, carpentry, commercial diving, commercial brewer, and now business owner. And it was easier to teach Anna to brew than it was teaching me to physio. My best mate and I started home brewing in our first year of uni, and I've been refining the skills ever since.

Tell us about the bike trip that started it all… Billy: Before we even got together, we'd organised to go on a year-long bike trip from Alaska to South America and left in June 2014. It was 100 per cent market research and we called the trip Bike To Brewery. We are not mad keen cyclists – we literally had to do a course before we left on how to change a tyre, fix a chain and tighten your brakes! Anna: We knew going into it that off the back of this market research bicycle trip, we were opening a brewery at the end of it. Billy: We got as far as Costa Rica but everything was against us. It was getting increasingly hot and increasingly hilly and breweries were getting thinner and thinner on the ground. We hit up 150 breweries exactly and cycled just over 9000km. It was a baptism of fire, and a great way to learn a load about someone. If you can live in a tent on the side of the road for 12 months with someone… Anna:… you can run a small business! [laughs]

What’s the significance of naming the brewery after Reub Goldberg? Anna: Reub Goldberg machines were known for overengineering a simple task and using a lot of forced transition. That's the inspiration behind our brew system. Billy: As a stereotypical homebrewer, I got into it for cheaper beer but it ended up being way more expensive buying and building all the equipment. As your experience and expertise grows, you bypass buying equipment and you just make stuff from what you've got lying around. Every serious homebrewer tends to over-engineer their brew system because complicated is cool. It's a fairly common term in US home brewing, that if you “Reub Goldberg” something, you've essentially made it yourself but it's unnecessarily complicated.

How is your process different? Billy: We custom designed every aspect of the brew system. It is 100 per cent unique, we pioneered a few different concepts that were very confusing to our manufacturers. We bypass a lot of the issues that other breweries have because of these little modifications that we designed into our system. Big commercial breweries are more like a beer factory rather than a brewery, there's high levels of automation and you're just waiting for things to happen in monitoring. We wanted to feel more engaged with the product and have a more enjoyable and physical brewing experience. Each of our vessels is single purpose. It's all manual, there's no automation at all. We employ gravity at every step that we can.

How have your beers changed over time? Billy: We started off with six beers because that's how many vessels and taps we had and used a small reservoir of recipes that we'd designed for homebrew. When we started brewing, we used it as a market research project because we could essentially have any beer we wanted on tap. We've tried hard to avoid overlapping styles – too much of the same style just becomes uninteresting. One of the joys of being such a small capacity, or brew length as we call it, the beer gets turned over quite fast. We now release one to two beers a week and have a pool of 50 to 60 different recipes, so we can mix up the tap lists relatively easily and frequently. It’s always super fresh. Anna: We pay very close attention to what people are liking and how fast things are moving. We can get a good indication of a style's popularity by how long it lasts – and if we ever do take it off tap, how many complaints there are until it comes back on! Every beer, when done well, is delicious and has its own audience. Since Nick, our head brewer, has become more involved in our beer making we’ve delved deep into the New World Lager styles, showcasing new and emerging ingredients and techniques, so much so that this has become our Reub's Gold Range.

How has the Tarrawanna community embraced you? Anna: One of the major reasons we set up somewhere suburban was because on our big cycling trip we found those places that have the community fostered a different vibe, a sort of village pub gathering place. And it's surpassed our expectations, it's been wonderful. Our locals all catch up with their neigbours. There's a regular Thursday night group that door knock on the way down and they all meet at a table at the brewery. Billy: Some of the locals asked to borrow our logo as they had a great idea for a T-shirt. Now they each have their own merch – there are the Tarrawanna AllStars, the Tarrawannabes and the Wallace Road Gang. It's pretty cool. Anna: I think the locals have enjoyed watching us come from nothing. Sometimes they come down and they help with the tiling, and all the succulents are from people's gardens. There's no shortage of volunteers. There’s a sense of belonging and doing something good together for the community. What’s next for RGBM? Anna: We’re excited to release our Reub’s Gold cans this summer – our first canned beer release.We’re also planning a few events this summer, some specialty beer tap takeovers and plenty of live music. Plus, we’re pretty pumped to trial a new delivery style – we’ve ordered an e-bike and are planning on doing growler delivery on demand for people’s outdoor picnics. A solar-powered local brewery delivering fresh beer in insulated, reusable canisters on an electric bike… you can’t get more local or sustainable than that!