| The Beer Doctor |
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Beer occupies an important place in Australian society. It also fills an important part of my family history, so it's exciting to see how vibrant the Australian beer scene is at the moment, with rapid growth of craft and specialty brewers. It's exciting for Coopers too; outside of South Australia we have experienced growth of about 25 per cent this year alone. It's not the first ‘beer bubble' that's come along since I've worked for the family brewery. In many ways Coopers' fortunes have mirrored the wider economy. We had similar expansion in the late 80s, until the recession of the early 90s. In desperate times, one of the things that kept us afloat was homebrew - even in a recession Australians need their beer! Maintaining our traditions and our quality in a brewing landscape that has seen much consolidation and fierce competition hasn't been easy. Recently we saw off a hostile take-over attempt by Lion Nathan. This was difficult both for the company and the extended family of shareholders. It was personally challenging as well. As MD of a family company, I don't take my duties any more seriously than my counterpart in a public company would but the family ties add an extra dimension and I think you do feel the challenges a little more innately at times. In some ways I'm an accidental brewer. My father encouraged me to pursue another career during the turbulent 1970s and I started out in medicine. Both with the current success, and during the stormy early 90s and the takeover battle, I've watched my medical contemporaries and reflected upon what life might have been like if I had pursued that career. My wife has been heard to say jokingly (or half-jokingly) that she married a doctor, not a brewer! With our long brewing traditions, it's been interesting to watch as people have joined Coopers from other breweries. They have been staggered by the complexity of brewing naturally conditioned beers. But we have 145 years' experience on our side. We've also gone through changes in the way that we brew, to make the process more reliable.
When I came to the brewery, we were still transferring beer around in rubber hoses and connecting to manual valves. We now operate a closed system that helps maintain hygiene. In the late 90s we also switched from dual strains of yeast to a single, more robust, strain that has provided more reliable results. Then again, if you were to speak to my uncle Maxwell, who was chief brewer before me, he'd say it was more consistent in the late 1980s than when he started, too. It was Maxwell who did away with the use of the old wooden puncheons and introduced the centrifuge in the late 70s, which improved the reliability of the natural conditioning process as well. Staying true to our brewing traditions has been both a challenge and an asset to Coopers. Being regarded as traditional - an ‘old man's drink' - has weighed against us at times. Even when I joined in 1990, there was concern about what would happen when the last generation of ale drinkers died off. In attracting a new generation we were able to rebrand our product without changing the beer's quality or traditional style. The ‘cloudy but fine' series of ads re-established Coopers as interesting and quirky, appealing to a younger drinker. We were also assisted, inadvertently I'm sure, when Lion Nathan purchased South Australian Brewing in 1993 and sold off its portfolio of 120 hotels. Prior to that, Coopers had struggled to get keg beer (which we started in 1983) into South Australia's tied pubs. Suddenly we were in a position to sell beer through these hotels, where they were taken up by a generation looking for something new. We're now reaping the benefits of keeping with tradition as Australian drinkers are seeking beers with more complexity and flavour than mainstream lagers typically provide. There's been a resurgence of interest in our naturally conditioned beers as this generation discovers Coopers ales, and values the fact that they're not mass-produced but brewed in a traditional way, without preservatives and additives. So it's an exciting time for the industry and for Coopers. This financial year we'll have brewed almost 54 million litres of beer! With so much change in the industry, I'm extremely proud that Coopers Sparkling Ale is still brewed largely as it was when Thomas Cooper, my great, great-grandfather, brewed his first batch from four bushels of English malt and eight pounds of Kent hops in 46 gallons of water, on 13 May 1862. |
Great beer takes special ingredients. Like the ability to fight off hostile take-overs and survive recession, as Dr Tim Cooper knows. As told to Matt Kirkegaard.
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