BALMAIN BREWING COMPANY

Hands up anyone who remembers Balmain Bock. The short-lived brand appeared in the late ‘80s, around the same time as other Sydney boutique brewing pioneers like the Lord Nelson, Scharer’s Little Brewery and the original Hahn Brewery first cranked up.

Based at Rozelle, the Balmain Brewery was started by Ian Pike, who is best remembered as one of the more eccentric characters to grace the local brewing scene. Pike once declared he wanted to make “the Dom Perignon of beers” and Balmain Bock was a whopping 6.8 per cent alcohol.

According to Pike it underwent an astonishingly long period of cold conditioning. “We won’t put our name on anything less then 22 weeks,” he once said.

Balmain Bock was quite a revelation to my own relatively under-developed palate, back then, and I can still recall my first taste of this big chewy, malty brute with a faint smokiness in the background. But subsequent tastings were disappointing in the extreme because a weird twang had somehow crept into the beer’s make-up.

Within a year or so of operating, Pike sold the brewery to a bunch of investors who briefly repackaged the flagship bock and launched a low-alcohol Balmain Lager. But both brands soon disappeared from the local beer scene altogether.

Perhaps because it was such a pivotal time with the first wave of small-scale breweries starting up, but people still fondly remember Balmain Bock – particularly around Balmain’s numerous watering holes.

Enter the Balmain Brewing Company which recently launched its beer into the area’s pub market with the tagline: “tradition revived!”

“Balmain has a rich working class heritage and pub culture which has been here since the 1850s or so,” says Martin Lalor, managing director of the Balmain Brewing Company.

 Lalor has lived in Balmain for the past 11 years and says the idea of reviving a local beer brand arose after drinking in pubs like the Royal Oak with his mates.

“We heard a lot of great stories about the late ‘80s when the original Balmain Brewery was operating,” he says, “so we finally decided to do something about it.” Lalor threw in his job in the finance industry six months ago to turn the dream into reality.   

While the original Balmain Bock was a blockbuster style of beer, Lalor says they have developed Balmain Original Pale Ale as a “more accessible” style of local beer.

“We tasted about 40-50 pale ales because we wanted something more flavour and aroma than most of them,” he says. “And it needed some guts to be true to the Balmain spirit.”

At present, Balmain Original Pale Ale is being brewed under contract which Lalor describes as the “first stage” in his business plan.

“The second stage is looking for a suitable site on the [Balmain] peninsula to locate a microbrewery/restaurant by 2011,” he says.

Their marketing plan was pretty straightforward: Lalor and general manager Ian Boland took a mini keg of their beer around to various pubs and gave publicans a taste.

“Everyone seems to love the beer,” Lalor says.” So far we’ve got six Balmain pubs ansd another seven off the peninsula ready to put our beer on.”

For details of Balmain Brewing outlets: www.balmainbrewingcompany.com.au