MEET THE MANUFACTURER
Australian brewer has been a trend setter for decades Matilda Bay brewery was launched when the Australian beer market was fractured and for all intents and purposes, isolated. Since the early 1980s, the brewery has broken the mould and set new trends for the market. Adam McCleery writes.
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he origin of the Matilda Bay brewery in South Australia can be traced back to the early 1980s when the beer market in Australia was a world apart from what we are used to seeing today. Phil Sexton, Matilda Bay CEO and founder, was working for a prominent brewer in Western Australia during those early 1980s and described how different the landscape was at the time. “Back in those days’ breweries controlled the territories they were in, so within Western Australia you could only buy that one beer and any pub within the state was either loaned
or leased off to an operator by the brewery. The same thing was going on in Queensland and Victoria,” he said. “For a long time, there was an unofficial agreement not to cross interstate borders with a different beer brand. Of course, that meant that anyone in WA only had certain types of beers and that was it. Similarly, it was the same in other states, which always struck me as strange.” Sexton had studies to be a brewer and took his post graduate learning to the European market where he saw first-hand the stark difference between that market and Australia’s, which only highlighted his confusion
20 Food&Beverage Industry News | April 2022 | www.foodmag.com.au
as to the makeup of the Australian system. “I worked in the European breweries to get a better understanding of how things worked over there and to try and understand why Australia was so different at the time,” he said. “It seemed so impossible to ever head towards the way Europe had always been.” Shortly after Sexton returned to Western Australia, Australian investor Alan Bond bought the brewery, which quickly became the ‘cash cow’ for his operations. “I was watching all this happening
and realised I didn’t want to be a part of it so I started formulating a plan to start my own brewery,” he said. “Me and some ex-university friends planned on making a small brewery where we could make the types of beers I fell in love with in Europe, we could also experiment with beer.” The team of brewers had to learn some hard lessons about business when they first launched their brewery, Sexton said, but through trial and error the company found success. A massive hurdle that the team had to overcome early on was getting its beer stocked anywhere, bottle
