Page 27 - Food & Drink Magazine April 2019

BEVERAGES
✷ BREW PIONEER
A LIFETIME OF BEER
Chuck Hahn, brewmaster at Lion, has spent almost 50 years in the industry, and is often described as the ‘godfather’ of Australia’s brewing industry.
He says he developed a love for fine beers and skiing from his early years in Colorado and started brewing beer in the US for Coors in 1971 after he completed his doctorate in chemical engineering.
While there, he helped create the Coors Light recipe, now the second largest selling beer in the US.
Hahn was lured over to Australia in 1981 to become general manager of brewing at Tooth’s and Resch’s.
“I came out here as a 35-year- old and was amazed and impressed by this country, so I ended up staying on,” he says.
Between 1987 and 1988, he founded the Hahn Brewery in Camperdown with three partners, creating one of Australia’s first microbreweries.
The Hahn Brewery was purchased by Lion Nathan in 1993, and Hahn became chief brewer for the entire group.
He convinced Lion to let him return to the original Hahn Brewery in 1998 and he started up the James Squires range of ales. The Hahn Brewery was renamed the Malt Shovel Brewery in honour of Squire’s first brewery in the early 1800s.
home with them in 2011, we extended our brewing and bottling to the Malt Shovel Brewery in Camperdown, which is on the site of the original Hahn brewery.”
According to Lion, owner of the Kosciuszko Brewing Company, overall demand for the pale ale grew by more than 20 per cent in 2018, with 84 per cent pack growth in NSW.
To meet this growing appetite, Hahn says keg and bottle production originally at the Malt Shovel Brewery has been upscaled once more to the Tooheys Brewery
in Sydney.
Total sales are now over 300,000 litres of Kosciuszko Pale Ale per month.
CONVENIENCE IN A CAN
According to Hahn, although craft beers were once only sold in bottles, this is changing.
“It is now a much simpler process for a craft brewer to put in a small canning line, or even rent a mobile canning line, which can be delivered to their site on the back of a trailer,” he says.
Beer can stay fresher in the bottle because less oxygen is introduced in the filling process, which can slightly reduce its aroma, according to Hahn.
“Nevertheless, cans are growing in popularity because they are convenient and don’t smash. Some also consider them a more environmentally friendly
option because it is so easy to crush the can, and recycle it,” he says.
While brewing and bottling operations remain at the Tooheys Brewery, the canning takes place at Lion’s Little Creatures brewery in Geelong.
Here, the first production run was around one million cans. Hahn says he is
now preparing for the second run, which will incorporate temperature-sensitive ink into the pack design.
“The can will display something along the lines of: ‘when the mountain turns blue, its time to drink this’,” says Hahn.
He says the launch of the cans in October last year followed a
www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au | April 2019 | Food&Drink business | 27