When former Murray's head brewer Shawn Sherlock announced he was off to launch his own brewpub (to be called Foghorn, more of which in the weeks to come), the man who lent the brewery its name had two choices. Murray Howe could put the word out to the world that he was in need of a new head brewer or he could approach someone he knew.
The former Murray's head brewers he knew that fell into the latter category numbered precisely one. So, having plumped for the second of those choices, he put a call out to Graeme Mahy (above right), the Kiwi brewer who had launched the brand when it was based at the Pub With No Beer in Taylor's Arms nearly ten years ago. He received a "Yup" and thus it was that Mahy left behind his career in civil engineering – "It wasn't very exciting" – and the 666 Brewing label he'd created around his day job – so named as he was born in June 1966 rather than any Satanic tendencies – and headed back to his former home.
That said, the employer he has returned to is rather different to the one he left after three years at the helm, much of that time spent with Shawn at his side. For years now, Murray's has brewed at Bobs Farm in Port Stephens and recently installed an eight vessel brewhouse setup capable of filling the also recently installed rows of fermenters as well as the fermenters that are planned for a yet-to-be-built new brewing shed.
The brewery's roster of beers has also much expanded since 2008. Many beers that were first released when he was last there – the likes of Wild Thing, Icon 2IPA, Dark Knight Porter and his "baby", the strong Belgian ale Grand Cru – remain, albeit in tweaked forms, while many more have come (and some gone) in the intervening period. Being Murray's, there are plans to revisit the existing range (pretty much all of the beers have already been altered; Punch & Judy, for example, is now a much paler, dryer beer) and a number of new releases have already emerged: the Skully Red IPA and a tiny batch sour among them.
"Murray knows what I'm about so it was probably an easy option for him," says Graeme of the call that enticed him back across the Tasman.
"I was always trying to build a bigger brewery and wanted to do it myself or not at all rather than get investors who would want to control everything. And doing it myself was getting harder and harder.
"This came along at the right time so I thought, 'Let's go back to what I enjoy most', which is making beer."
He says his boss-for-the-second-time was keen to see the beers heading in a hoppier direction as well as the introduction of more bigger Belgian styles and that, already, most of the existing beers have been hopped up, with Icon also in line for an increase in IBUs [international bitterness units] when it next returns. Moon Boy, the relatively recently introduced golden ale remains a work-in-progress as they try to find the desired level of hops and bitterness (the current batch with Nelson Sauvin added has gained a little too much resinous bite), while others could appear as one-off kegs at the brewery or full batch one-time-only releases.
In between stints at Murray's Graeme has kept himself busy in the beer world, despite returning to his non-beer career too. He has judged at the World Beer Cup in the States three times, at a Great American Beer Festival, and at the prestigious European Beer Star in Munich. He has consulted for breweries all over the world as well as releasing hoppy and Belgian beers as gypsy brewery 666.
He has also been making beer since before the contemporary Aussie craft beer world was kickstarted by the Sail & Anchor and Matilda Bay in the early 1980s.
"I've been brewing beer since the age of 16. Kiwi beer back then was just shit," says Graeme. "I had a family friend who introduced me to wine and had hundreds of bottles in his cellar. I found wine had a lot more flavour but then a friend who was a home brewer gave me some of his beer and it actually tasted of something. So I decided to pursue making my own and here I am now!"
He says the new brewhouse – "Much better than the old one" – is designed to push beer through more quickly and efficiently; currently he and fellow brewers Alex (pictured above left) and Sean can double brew in just ten hours start to finish. It is also capable of handling the next stage of expansion.
Presumably it will also be able to handle the beer Graeme has planned for this year's GABS in May: a Belgian quadrupel IPA...
"We're trying to push it to about 16 percent alcohol," he says. "We're just working on the recipe. I tried it in New Zealand and got the beer to around 12 percent. Scaled up it will have 43kg of hops in 1,000 litres of beer [in layman's terms: #$^%loads] and will be triple dry-hopped."
A few months into his second stint, he says he's feeling "right at home" and looking forward to overseeing the next stages in the development of the brewery.
"Both Alex and Sean are great to work," he says. "I just do what all head brewers do: organise the paperwork!"
Which, presumably, is a lot more exciting than a civil engineer's paperwork.
