A 45 minute chat with Mazen Hajjar before he co-hosted the launch of the Middle East's first ever craft beers at Melbourne's Rumi restaurant during the 2013 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival left little doubt that this was a guy with drive. As we wrote in the subsequent article on Mazen and 961 Beer, he had a CV that included award-winning war photographer, CFO of a major bank, and founder of two airlines by his mid-30s, at which point he discovered craft beer, taught himself to brew, built a brewery in Beirut and subsequently exported it to more than 20 countries.
His co-host on the night was the restaurant's owner, Joe Abboud, a highly respected chef who we'd met weeks earlier and whose first experience of craft beer had come, unexpectedly, on a previous trip to Lebanon to hunt down new flavours and inspirations for his cuisine. While there, he'd been introduced to Mazen and soon found himself – someone who didn't drink beer because he'd only been exposed to commercial lagers – importing containers of 961 Beer, named after the Beirut phone code, into Australia.
In itself, it was an unlikely and colourful story. Yet, while the pair didn't yet know it, this was merely the very start.
Two years on, this weekend will see the first public outing, at the Great Australian Beer Festival in Geelong, of a hoppy American Pale Ale from a new brewery called Hawkers Beer. Based in the unlikely Melbourne suburb of Reservoir, it looks set to stand out from the crowd, even amid all the new breweries launching month by month across Australia. Costing more than $3 million, it is the most highly specced microbrewery Canadian manufacturer DME has installed in the Southern Hemisphere and is of a size that dwarfs all but a handful of homegrown, independent microbreweries, the likes of Stone & Wood, Feral, Burleigh Brewing, Gage Roads and 4 Pines.
At the helm are Mazen (below right), who is moving his young family from Beirut to Melbourne, and Joe (below left), who has enjoyed one of the most spectacular transformations from beer dismisser to passionate aficionado you could imagine.
"If anyone had suggested I'd be doing this three years ago, who would have believed them?" says Joe, who has spent most of the past few months (often with his dad in tow) helping build the brewery and learning about brewing rather than cooking in his restaurants.
"It really has been a journey," says Mazen. "It started off in Sydney [on his first visit in early 2013] with us hawking beer door to door and then grew with the crazy realisation that it would be interesting to do something in Australia."
That first trip ended up lending its name to the brewery, as well as giving it the image of a man pushing a barrow of bottles like the Lebanese hawkers of old. And the journey has developed to the point where the Hawkers story promises to be one worth watching, not least because there can have been few recent entries into the local beer world that have been as well resourced and planned.
As head brewer, they have brought in Jon Seltin, the one-time home brewer and brewing boffin who took the brewer's job at Bright Brewery and soon set about winning the respect of knowledgeable beer lovers across the country. And their sales team, which will focus solely on Melbourne initially, is made up of two of the best known reps in the city: former Trumer guy Mik Halse and ex-Stone & Wood girl Fi Lane.
With some capacity being filled by brewing for others, among them Edge Brewing Project and Quiet Deeds, as they build their own brand, it seems like little, if anything, has been left to chance. The filling line brewer Jon initially questioned as potentially being too big for requirements when ordered, for example, has since been declared "the most beautiful filling line I've ever seen" once he appreciated the scale of the operation.
"Joe was saying the brewery was way too big for this market, that we need to start small and grow," says Mazen. "But my previous experience at 961 taught me it's better to start with bigger tanks and only use half if you have to rather than having to buy new ones later. In retrospect, I wish we had bought even bigger tanks [than the 70 and 140 hectolitre tanks currently installed]."
While he may wonder whether big is big enough, there has been little left to chance on the tech side, from the aforementioned filling line to customised fittings on the tanks that allow "hop slurry" to be "fired" into the tanks for dry-hopping to so many wires and control panels that Siemens were required to send a couple of technicians to bunker down at the brewery for an extended period to get everything up and running.
"Behind the artistry and the craftsmanship and the poetry of brewing, it is a volume game," says Mazen. "The bigger the volume you are able to make, the lower the costs per unit and the better control over the beer you can get.
"You consistently hear 'handcrafted' but unless you are home brewing, there's nothing handcrafted in the process and if making it can be improved by some piece of equipment [why not use it?].
"We want to make the best beer we can and tweak the recipes of our beers with a firm understanding of what we are doing rather than being driven by the equipment we have. That's what I learnt at 961: there's no limits to what we can do with this equipment. My previous brewhouse also taught me a lot about things we got wrong or could improve on so we sat down with the suppliers to say what we wanted, which included a lot of things DME hadn't done before.
"[Now] it's set up in a way that there's no guesswork."
While attendees at Geelong will be the first to see what their investment means in beer terms when they pour their Pale Ale, other beers will follow in keg and bottle soon. Already in tank are a hoppy US-inspired IPA and a relatively high IBU (a measurement of bitterness) Pilsner. Down the line, a saison is set to complete the initial core range.
It was the last of these styles that brought Jon Seltin to their attention. On a trip to the High Country to meet a potential investor, Mazen and Joe called in to the region's breweries, knowing little about them beforehand.
"I remember the moment clearly," says Joe. "[Mazen] had one sip of the saison at Bright and he looked at me and it was like, '$^%*! He actually likes this beer!' And that was it.
"There was a meeting of the minds. Both had these respect for each other. Jon knew so much about the Middle East too."
With Jon taking control of the brewhouse, Mazen is looking forward to pushing things further with Hawkers than he could at 961. The latter introduced completely new flavours to a market that knew nothing but Heineken and local imitators, so for the most part the 961 beers played within the safer realms of their respective style categories. In Australia, he says, "there is a level of maturity compared to Lebanon. There's a market here that's ready and wanting more.
"With Hawkers we have a pipeline of 'We want to brew' beers, some which will become core beers and some which will be limited releases. From that perspective I'm really excited."
"It's a long list," adds Joe. "Including 'Mazen's Marzen'!"
Says Mazen: "There's an interesting play here because with Joe's involvement there's an understanding of flavour from a different angle so our conversations are often quite interesting as they don't just originate from a brewer's perspective.
"It's a lot of fun," he says of having a chef as part of the team. "It keeps the creative juices flowing."
Who knows, all being well, Joe might even be able to step away from brewing soon and take his creative juices back to the kitchen.
