Beer and Brewer Magazine

The best things in life are pint-sized. Take our Kylie and the Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel's ales, for example.

WHAT do Kylie Minogue and the Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel have in common? They both kicked off their careers - in singing and brewing, respectively - 20 years ago. Now, there was a time when some folks whispered that Kylie couldn't sing, while others were expressed doubts on whether a Sydney brew-pub serving Pommy-style ales could survive. Yet each has survived the test of time and today we should claim them as Aussie icons in their fields.

In many ways Kylie and the Lord were ahead of their times, and after two decades of trailblazing they're both highly respected industry veterans. Kylie kicked off with Locomotion, while the Lord Nelson rolled out Trafalgar Pale Ale, Victory Bitter, Old Admiral and Nelson's Blood.

Dubbed ‘the singing budgie' at first, Kylie's warbling has improved greatly over the years, just as the Lord's house brews have evolved from straightforward beers made from malt extract into the complex, flavoursome ales of today. We've all come a long way since 1987.

In fact, 1987 is a true brewing milestone - the year boutique or craft beer really came of age in Australia. While Fremantle's Sail & Anchor brew-pub started things off a couple of years previously, the Lord Nelson, Scharer's Little Brewery (based at the George IV Inn, Picton) and the Port Dock Hotel in Adelaide all began brewing around mid-1987. And while these four pioneering brew-pubs are all still operating, many other local craft breweries have long since disappeared without trace. In New South Wales the list includes the Balmain Brewery, the Pumphouse and Craig's Tavern in Darling Harbour, the Harbour Beer Company, Britten's Brewery (Tamworth), Queen's Wharf Brewery (Newcastle), Beaubelle Brewery (Nowra) and the Hahn Brewery (which later re-emerged as the Malt Shovel Brewery).

How long ago was 1987? Bob Hawke was prime minister, Alan Jones was coach of the Wallabies, and England, led by Mike Gatting, won the Ashes series in Australia. It was also the year Alan Bond tried to get the whole country drinking Swan and John Elliott tried to Fosterise the world. At the time, Bond controlled the Swan, Tooheys and Fourex breweries and later in '87 he bought the Heileman brewing company in the US (for A$1.5billion), making him, for a brief moment, the fourth-largest beer magnate on the planet.

And while these two beer barons tried to conquer the world, Cascade Premium Lager launched in a timely anticipation of our growing thirst for better beer. The attrition rate among the early craft breweries was particularly high, abetted by the Black Monday stockmarket crash on 19 October, 1987. But, through it all, the Lord kept brewing and new beers were introduced: Fleet Wheat, which was re-named Quayle Ale in 1989 after a visit from US vice-president Dan Quayle, and Three Sheets, released in 1991, with the name chosen from a competition run among patrons.

These latter beers were developed by John Clannon, a quietly-spoken Californian who brewed for some seven years at the Lord, in between stints of wine-making back home. Many others who have manned the kettles and fermenters at different times have gone on to craft-brewing fame: Deo Lule (Indian Ocean Brewing), Dean McLeod (Colonial Brewing Company, winner AIBA Best Small Brewery 2006 & 2007), Matt Donelan (St Peters Brewery), Rob Freshwater (Malt Shovel) and Tim Thomas (Five Islands).

The Lord Nelson's current brewer, Damon Nott, started in 2003 after being an accomplished home-brewer, and the Lord's beers have been in fine form on his watch, peaking with four silver medals at the 2006 AIBA. In fact, during the past 20 years the tiny brewery has pumped out more than 3,380 individual batches of ale. Staggeringly, that's around 170 every year!

Of course, there's much more to the Lord Nelson than just its house-brewed beers, and the fine old wood and sandstone building is a pub in the true sense of a ‘public house'. It began life as a grand private house built in 1836 from rock quarried by convicts nearby, and it was in 1841 that it first opened its doors as the Lord Nelson; it claims to be the oldest continuously licensed hotel in Sydney.

Of course, we couldn't talk about the Lord Nelson without acknowledging Blair Hayden, who has been the licensee and part-owner for the past 20 years; it has been under Blair's firm guidance that the Lord has survived and thrived through a mixture of good beer, fine food, attentive service and characterful ambience. And if you have the pleasure of sharing an ale or two with the guv'nor, you're always assured of a lively old time.

I've whiled away many pleasant sessions at the Lord and for two decades have used the bar almost as a second office. A home away from home? I should be so lucky!

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