Page 14 - Food&Drink Magazine Aug-Sep 2021

BLUE SKY
A whole lotta fizz
For Moon Dog Brewing, entering the hard seltzer market began as an experiment. Varun Bodhi talks to founder Josh Ulijans about what happened next.
MOON Dog Brewery began in a small warehouse in the backstreets of Abbotsford, Melbourne, 11 years ago. Brothers Josh and Jake Ulijans and their friend Karl Van Buuren founded the business on a mutual love of craft beer and a desire to make beers with flavour profiles not seen before.
“We built the original brew house out of old dairy tanks we bought on eBay and installed them into a little warehouse in Abbotsford. Karl and I also lived there for the first fourteen months,” Josh Ulijans recalls.
Fast forward to 2021, Moon Dog now operates out of a 12,000 square metre site, produces more than 10 million litres of beer a year and has a team of 200 operating multiple hospitality venues.
While it is well known for its traditional beers and ambitious, seasonal flavoured brews such as Cake Hole, a black forest stout, or Splice of Heaven, a pine-lime ice cream IPA, it is the brewery’s move into alcoholic seltzers that has created a whole new business opportunity – developing the world’s first patent pending post-mix machine solution for venues to dispense hard seltzers.
FIZZY TAKE-OFF
The Moon Dog team saw the trend for lower alcohol-based drinks growing, particularly the alcoholic – or hard – seltzer category, that was offering lighter, fruitier, and more seasonal flavours.
They used their decade of knowledge from brewing adventurous beers combined with learnings from trips to the US and Scandinavia to develop a Moon Dog version of a hard seltzer. The result is Fizzer.
Ulijans says they set themselves the goal to be in market in time for summer 2020-21, expecting the seltzer market to take-off, but also seeing it as a chance to “dip their toe in the water”.
Moon Dog did an initial production run of 20,000 cases. By the end of FY21, it had sold ten times that.
“It absolutely exceeded our expectations, and was really well received, but consumers made it abundantly clear to us
14 | Food&Drink business | August/September 2021 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au
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