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Laying Down Firm FOUND.ations ft Steve Finney & Will Irving
On paper, FOUND. is one of the younger brewing companies in Australia – they only opened their brewpub, FOUND.LAB, in Byford in the middle of 2023, after all. Yet, between them, the key players driving the operation have decades of experience in craft beer.
It's not only decades of experience, however. It's decades in which their stories are interwoven with the very fabric of the WA beer industry. Between them, they've risen through the ranks, and held central roles, at the likes of Little Creatures, Feral, Gage Roads, Otherside and others, and have been involved in the creation of a number of the state's most iconic beers.
The story of FOUND. also predates last year's tapping of the first batch of Super by a long time too; as the brewery's originator, Steve Finney, explains in this episode of The Crafty Pint podcast, he was working pretty much daily on the plan for what would become FOUND. for years. Will Irving, who he first met when detouring from his Little Creatures sales calls to the Feral brewpub in the Swan Valley – where Will was brewing – has been part of those discussions for much of that time too.
As such, it's perhaps little wonder that, even though their initial plans to open a vast venue and production brewery on the site of the former East Perth Girls School have been pushed back, they already operate the Byford brewpub south of Perth, a pop-up venue in Maylands, and this week started brewing at the former home of Golden West in Subiaco, which will become their main home – at least for now – when it opens to the public for summer 2024.
They have pretty grand, although also grounded, ambitions, forged by lessons learned and wisdom passed on by a series of mentors over their time in beer. And in this episode they share many of those with us from their work-in-progress Subi venue.
Our conversation – recorded the day after we hosted an event together at their FOUND.FRIENDS Maylands bar – covers their respective backstories, their first meetings at Feral and subsequent time together at the iconic brewery, their vision for FOUND. – including how they're trying to create the ideal beer business and conceptualise what a modern Australian brewery venue should be, their thoughts on the future of beer in WA and further afield, bringing new people into the world of craft beer, a spot of running repairs that brings to mind Trainspotting, and plenty more besides.
You can find the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Please like and subscribe – and if you are enjoying the show, please rate and review too so we can reach more people and get them excited about the delights of Aussie craft beer.
Cheers!
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James Smith launched The Crafty Pint in 2010, two years after moving to Australia from the UK. He was taken to Mountain Goat within weeks of landing in Melbourne, joined their indoor cricket team, and is still navigating the rabbit hole that is craft beer to this day.
The beers that turned you on to good beer:
- Watching pints of McEwan's 80 Shilling settle when visiting family in Edinburgh.
- Pints of flat Bass from the jug at the Cap & Stocking in Kegworth.
- A first Paulaner Hefeweizen when working in Munich in 1998: “This smells of bananas!”
- Castle Rock Harvest Pale – how could a 3.8 percent ABV beer be so good? (It turns out it was an early example of the three Cs – Cascade, Centennial and Columbus – in an English bitter).
- Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA poured through hops at the Sunset Grill in Cambridge, MA, in the company of a man who turned out to be the Beer Nut (while we were both covering a double murder case at the time).
- Ordering a Mountain Goat Hightail on my first day as an Aussie resident as it was local and I’d never heard of it; “A dark Australian beer; well I never…”
- Murray’s Icon 2IPA at Beer DeLuxe Fed Square, recommended by a guy I’d not long known who's now the main man at Fixation, served by Mik Halse, now head of sales at Hawkers. How could an Australian beer smell as good as that?!?
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Any really good, fresh and balanced West Coast style IPA. Punchy hop aromatics are the most obvious way to capture someone's attention and these IPAs, done well, present the key components in beer (if you're sticking to just water, malt, hops and yeast) in harmony yet with the volume turned up.
- Saison Dupont. Arguably a selfish choice here as I bloody love the broad saison style and dearly hope it will finally take hold in Australia one day. Given a choice, I'd probably crack one enlivened with Brettanomyces like Molly Rose Matilde for myself but, when it comes to turning on someone new, you've got to go with the classic.
- Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. Because if you don't enjoy or can't appreciate this beer, I'll never win you over. And because Filip, the fruit and wood specialist at Rodenbach that designed it, is a beautiful human.
The last beer you enjoyed:
Fixation IPA at The Incubator.
Three things that represent you:
- The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Golden Plains
NB All articles written by James in the first eight years of the site appear as By Crafty Pint. Today, that's used for collaborative efforts by the wider team.
