hamish rosser (for skinny blonde beer) says...

Sydney trio, The Brothers Inc, have been brewing Skinny Blonde since 2006 or so. What started at Potters Brewery, Hunter Valley - at a rate of ten kegs at a time - has grown into a 12 000-case-per-run company. Along the way there have been some explosions, some blind faith (on the part of Beach Road, Bondi, for providing a tap before there was any real company to speak of) and some nudity. It’s certainly a change from hitting the skins for The Vines, but drummer Hamish Rosser (one part of TBI) is no stranger to beer brewing; it’s in his blood. Kluster’s Editor-In-Chief, Kat Hartmann, met with Rosser at The Cricketers in Surry Hills to chat about the Japanese-inspired ale over a schooner of, you guessed it, Skinny Blonde.

Kat Hartmann: So, chemical engineer? This is a side of you I was not aware of. Tell me a little more…

Hamish Rosser: I finished high school and, in my family, it wasn’t, “Are you going to go to university?” it was, “Which course do you think you’ll do when you go to university?” I didn’t really know what wanted to do. I was accepted into electrical engineering initially. Then I switched to chemical [engineering] because I liked chemistry; it was probably my best subject. I got two years into the four-year course and I kind of hated it. Third year sucked but I had a lot of good eggheads around that really liked to lend me their assignments – people I leant on quite heavily – and I got through in four years.

KH: Did you do any work in that field after uni or was that, as they say, that?

HR: I had one job, working for CSR. Not making sugar but making bricks and tiles. Fascinating [laughs].

KH: Brewing beer is by no means a new pursuit for you. Can you tell me a little about your personal history with the creation of ale?

HR: When I was an engineering student I started brewing beer. I thought it would be cheaper than buying beer, which is why a lot of people get into it, but if you try to make it cheap it comes out rubbish. I was always enthusiastic and always wondered why my beers didn’t taste as good as the ones you go buy in the shop. I let it go for a while and then about four or five years ago we [The Brothers Inc] started getting back into it again. We were getting much better results, just by buying a lot of raw ingredients: grain, hops and wheat and making it from scratch. We were able to make some good ones from home.

KH: And your dad did a bit of brewing as well? Home brewing?

HR: Yeah, I have a fermenter, which is his. It’s from before I was born. He is a home brewer as well. He offered me all his brew notes when I got back into it.

KH: And Brothers Inc? Can you tell me a bit about your partners?

HR: Jarrod [Taylor] and Ritchie [Harkham]. They have both been friends for a long time. I met Jarrod at the pub in Bondi – I used to live there – about five or six years ago. He is a bit of a ‘local’ guy; he is everywhere around Bondi. When I met him he was doing scaffolding. He has since become a stone mason. He background is: he went to arts college and, well, studied art. He studied sculpture. He built the biggest sculptures they have ever had at Sculpture by the Sea, a thing called the Structural Wave. It was a big steel wave – that was in about 2005. He did another one the year after called The Tornado. So, obviously, he is pretty handy and if he wants to get something done, he will achieve it. At the moment, in the company, he is handling a lot of the sales. He is a real natural salesman; he has the gift of the gab. He gets on the phone and talks to bottle shops and half of the time they end up stocking it. Ritchie is another mate as well. He comes from the business management side of things. He runs Noah’s Backpackers and also has a winery that he is running at the moment in the Hunter. It’s called Windarra on DeBeyers Road. Not far from the airport. He is the other brother, if you will.

KH: When did you guys get together?

HR: Around 2006 we started developing the beer and then around 2007 is when we actually started it as a business and started having it on tap. We ran it on tap for a long time, just kegs only. It’s easy to do small batches as kegs. Once you start doing it in bottles the smallest run is about 500 cases so you have to be convinced that you are going to have a big market for it otherwise, well, you’ll need to throw a big party [laughs]. We thought at the time, wow, 500 cases, that is a lot of beer. Now our batches are 12 000 and we’re going to get bigger from here.

KH: Where did the concept for Skinny beer come from? Can you tell me a little more about the ‘pilot’ brewery you built in Jarrod’s laundry? And that rather unique label?

HR: Yeah, we’ve still got that. Jarrod lives next to the Beach Road Hotel in Bondi and they have always really supported us. Jarrod basically talked them into giving us a beer tap... before we even had the beer in kegs. We developed this really good recipe. At the time we were drinking a lot of Japanese beers, a lot of Asahi and beers like that. That was our benchmark. We said, “There needs to be a beer in Australia like this.” So that is what we were aiming for. We researched how those Japanese-style beers were made and tried to, as much as possible, copy that style. Around about that same time, Pure Blonde and all the blonde beers started coming out so we decided to call it blonde. Then I came up with the name, Skinny Blonde. I am not sure who had the idea for the disappearing bikini – we all claim that – we probably had a few beers that night. It seemed obvious to at least put a girl on the label; no one else was doing it.

KH: And the pilot brewery?

HR: Ohhhhhh, the pilot brewery [knowingly]. Yeah, I’ve still got that. It is comprised of a giant esky. A keg, with the top cut off. That sits on top a giant gas burner that is run off a gas cylinder. I’ve also got a mill that you power with a power drill. So, you get the grain, you mill it, put it in this esky contraption. Put hot water in there, at exactly 65 degrees. Sit that for about an hour or two. Run that into the kettle [the keg]. Start boiling it away and then while it is boiling you chuck in the hops. Through the choice of grain and hops you get any different type and style of beer. I am still using that. I did a brew the other day.

KH: Where is Skinny Blonde brewed these days?

HR: We’ve got a real brewery now. It’s not brewed in the laundry any more. You probably wouldn’t want to drink something that came from my laundry. It’s made in a brewery call ARB, out in Western Sydney. The do contract brewing; they brew other people’s beers. They don’t have any of their own brands. They do Barons and St Arnou. They have quite a lot of different brands and we are one of them. We don’t have the means to build our own brewery at the moment. We need to get a lot bigger before that’s worthwhile.

KH: Trials and tribulations with the process that you have experienced along the way? Tell me a bit about the bottle explosion incident.

HR: [Laughs remembering] Ah, the bottle explosion incident. I think every home brewer has exploding bottles. It usually happens when you put too much sugar in a beer and put the lid on but what I was doing was – with yeast, you can culture it. Because it is a living thing, it multiplies – I had these two bottles that had yeast in them. I should have left them open but I capped them. They became little grenades essentially. Once again, they were in Jarrod house. I wasn’t around but they exploded into tiny little fragments. There wasn’t a big shard of glass anywhere to be found. All the neighbours came running out into the street, they thought there had been an explosion.

KH: What was the physical result? What did it look like?

HR: It was all over the walls: a yeast-and-beer mess. The largest thing left was the [bottle] cap.

KH: You touched on it earlier but can you tell me a little bit more about why you decided on a Japanese-style beer? Was it just because of the niche in the market or were their other motivating factors?

HR: It’s what we were really enjoying at the time. Our mission was to make what, in brewing terms, they call a session beer. The thing with Guinness or an ale; you are not going to sit down and have more than one or two, whereas a session beer is something that is easy to get down. I didn’t think there was anything in Australia that resembled those Japanese beers, at the time. I don’t really enjoy the major beer brands of Australia, the big selling ones.

KH: There is a reason for that.

HR: Yeah, I find them pretty awful.

KH: You have been getting a bit of attention because of the bottle design, as I just saw it. What inspired this design and the disappearing bikini?

HR: When we had this idea a long time ago and came up with the girl – her name is Daisy – we had her drawn with clothes on and topless as well. The idea was that one day we would have it work like it does [when the bottle warms up Daisy’s bikini top disappears].

KH: Ok, so the thought was there, right from the get go?

HR: Yeah, we had this idea a long time ago. Then we researched how to make it happen, researched the special kind of ink. It’s really expensive [laughs]. It comes from an American company. You can get it in all different colours. [Once we had found it] we had to talk to a printer to find out what process they needed to apply it with. It is pretty tricky.

KH: Did you have to find a specific printer?

HR: The printer we are using could put it on. He did have to put it on pretty thickly. The first run didn’t work so we had to come back again and say, “Let’s try this differently”. We got it to work eventually but it took us months. We would have had it out in September last year, if not for the label, but we had to push it back to December. It took us a few more months to get it right.

KH: And Daisy Blonde? Is she modelled on anyone in particular?

HR: My girlfriend Kristy [laughs]. Someone said that to her actually, “It must be you!” Initially we were looking at all the old, classic pin-up girls, like [the work of] Gil Elvgren and the Vargas girls. There was one image we found in particular and on our first mock-up of the label we just ripped of a famous artist’s image but thought [sounding forced], oh, we can’t really use that, can we.

KH: You don’t want to open up all those copyright and trademark issues…

HR: No, no, no. So we used that as the template and took it to an artist, who is an illustrator, and asked him to create something like the image – so she would be our own. He made it better. He put the frangipani behind her ear and put a pair of thongs on her feet.

KH: So you are currently stocked up and down the east coast of Australia, correct? Originally your point of sale was restricted to NSW, how long did it take to expand to VIC and QLD?

HR: Not that long. Our first bottles were in December, so only six months ago. We went into Queensland first, around about two or three months ago, and Victoria around about the same time. That came from Jarrod, Ritchie and I going to Melbourne and doing all the legwork. These days we do quite a lot of it by phone. Jarrod will talk to them about the product, send them samples and then chase them up until they stock it [laughs], and that’s been working quite well for us. It’s better than having a sales force on the road, which we can’t really afford. We haven’t got any employees. It’s just the three of us running the show.

KH: Any plans to move further a field?

HR: We have been talking about getting into WA as well. We get enquiries from all around Australia. Western Australia and South Aussie we are looking at. We would like to be there by summertime.

KH: And the future for Skinny Blonde beer? Will people be seeing it coming to a tap near you (them) soon?

HR: I hope so, yeah. It is easy to get bottles out there initially. Bottle shops are much easier to sell to than putting stuff on premise. Once the brand is better recognised then bars will stock it and people will buy it. We are also looking at other flavours too. We’ve got a few in the pipeline. A pale ale or golden ale – we are working on that at the moment – and a ginger beer as well.

skinny blonde, hamish rosser