DEAN O’CALLAGHAN – GOOD BREW COMPANY

He wears an emerald green suit, he drives an environmentally-aware tricycle and he wants to save the world “one good brew at a time”.

Meet Dean O’Callaghan, the one-man Good Brew Company based in Melbourne, who is carving out a niche business consulting on sustainable practices to the micro-brewing industry, coupled with a catering sideline involving his clients’ beers.

“I wanted to marry my passion for people, the environment and good beer,” he says. “It worries me that we are running out of finite resources and yet we keep using as much energy as possible. I genuinely love micro-brewed beers but you can’t ignore the economies of scale involved in making such small batches of beer.”

Six years spent living and working in Germany gave O’Callaghan a taste for good beer but it was his father’s sudden career change which brought him home to Melbourne and the local craft beer scene.

“A couple of years ago Mum emailed me: ‘Your father’s just bought a micro-brewery and I think you should come back and help him’ – so I did.”

John O’Callaghan had been one of four partners in Buckley’s Brewery, based at Healesville in the Yarra Valley, but during the course of 2007 he became the sole owner, as each of his partners either moved overseas or got out of the micro-brewing game.

Dean O’Callaghan started working casually at Buckley’s during the summer of 2007 and soon convinced his father to install a direct solar water heating system on the brewery’s roof. “Before that they used a giant electric kettle to heat 1700 litres of water to 80◦C, which took up to seven hours,” he says.

Using the sun’s energy rather than electricity represents a saving around 144kg in coal-fired carbon emissions for each brew, according to O’Callaghan. He applied for various rebates after the solar installation, but he’s so far been unsuccessful.

While Buckley’s spent grain has always been recycled as cattle food, more recently they have started growing mushrooms in it to reduce the methane produced after the cows eat it. Other sustainable measures he’s introduced at Buckleys include experimenting with locally-grown grain, using recovered hot water for cleaning, and packaging predominantly in kegs rather than stubbies.

“When I started here we were doing about 80 per cent stubbies and 20 per cent kegs by volume,” he says. “Now it’s around 60 per cent kegs, 40 per cent stubbies.”

He points out that kegs are fully recyclable, while one-way glass bottles produce a lot more in the way of carbon emissions. In his catering business, O’Callaghan’s Danish-made tricycle is both a delivery vehicle and mobile bar, dispensing beer from mini-kegs through taps installed on an ice-cooled chiller system which requires no electricity. He also favours glass or polycarbonate cups which can be washed and re-used, rather than dispensable plastic containers.

The Good Beer Company caters for private parties, corporate functions, weddings and various festivals and only carries beer from Buckleys and other Victorian breweries committed to sustainable practices – including Coldstream Brewery, Otway Estate and Arctic Fox, all of whom happen to be among O’Callaghan’s consultancy clients.

It appears that beer is the currency for much of his work. “I wouldn’t be able to charge microbreweries because they are all sailing close to the wind due to the competition from big breweries and an unfriendly tax regime,” he says. 

“I was inspired by Mountain Goat,” he says, referring to the long-running Melbourne craft brewery which was among the first to address environmental issues by using solar energy to pre-heat brewing water and collecting rainwater for all their “grey water” requirements. “Obviously, they don’t need my help because they embraced sustainable practices years ago.”

It might be a somewhat precarious existence but Dean O’Callaghan seems to have struck a chord with both craft beer producers and their younger, environmentally-aware consumers.

The Good Brew Co: Dean O’Callaghan on 0430 290952.