With a home brewing culture estimated to be 3500-strong, Peter is about to be living a dream which many in Ballarat share.  He will be joined by a full-time brewer and will look to focus on limited edition, small batch beers.  “We can brew one keg at a time, so we’ll be looking to do one-off batches.”

The space to be filled by Athletic Club on Mair Street is the same site previously used by the ever-expanding Rebellion Brewery, which, due to surging demand, was forced to look for a larger premises.  Now located in a 1500 square metre warehouse in Wendouree, the popularity of the company’s O’Brien range of gluten free beer is leading them to brew 2000 crates of beer a week.  

“We got into it through necessity,” said Rebellion Brewery director Andrew Lavery.  Mr Lavery began the business alongside managing director John O’Brien in 2004.  Both men suffer from coeliac disease, meaning they are unable to consume regular beer.  “We took it from doing for ourselves to doing it for others.”  Instead of using typical grains associated with beer, the team at Rebellion focus on using sorghum and millet, which don’t contain gluten.  Through trial and error, the team has developed recipes which aim to replicate regular beer, with outstanding results.

In May 2013 O’Brien’s Belgian Ale became the first gluten-free beer to win a gold medal at the Australian International Beer awards.  

Mr Lavery said professional tasters had been unable to notice the beer was gluten-free. “That’s when you know you’re on the right track,” Mr Lavery said with a grin.

The business now has eight full-time staff, including a recently hired Melbourne-based sales manager.  “We’ll probably do close to 3000 crates (a week) around Christmas” Mr Lavery said.  “We can’t keep up.”

Completing the trio of breweries in Ballarat is Red Duck Brewery at Alfredton.  Another stalwart of the local craft beer game, Red Duck has been brewing for 10 years, with a special focus on micro-brew beers. At any given time Red Duck can have up to 40 different beers in stock. 

“We were probably pushing the envelope long before other brewers in Australia,” said Vanessa Wilson-Browne, who co-owns the brewery with the husband Scott.  Many of the brewery’s beers are barrel aged, imparting the flavour of the previous liquid on the beer. Bottle’s more reminiscent of wine than beer boast flavour profiles of caramel, butterscotch and pear, a far cry from the bygone era of massed produced cans of bitter.  Mrs Wilson-Browne was confident the addition of another brewery would be a positive for everyone involved in the industry in Ballarat.  “People won’t come out for one (brewery), but they will come out for three.”

The obsession with the brew extends beyond the city’s three breweries, however.  Since it’s inception in 2012, the Ballarat Beer Festival has continued to grow at a steady rate, with the 2016 event in January set to attract 5000 punters and 40 brewers from Australia and the USA.  Festival director Richard Dexter said the event’s popularity reflected the public's changing taste.  “Overall, beer consumption is dropping in Australia and it has done for 10 years, but essentially people are becoming more discerning.”  

As an acknowledgement of the city’s growing obsession, this year the festival will hold it’s inaugural home brew challenge, where home brewers from across Ballarat are encouraged to enter their best brew across six different categories.  As brewers such as Mr Lavery will attest, the recipes developed during home brewing can often go on to be a hit in the commercial sphere.

The drive in popularity of craft beer, however, has not been limited to the cities thriving breweries.  More and more, bars and bottle shops are removing themselves from the old mentality of stocking purely massed produced, major label beer to stocking an expanding range.  One such location is the Coach House Ale bottle shop, located in a small, unassuming building next to Ballarat Railway Station. The store exclusively stocks craft beer and specialises in micro brews from around the world not found in chain bottle shops.  

The store has been open for almost a year now and owner Anthoy Perovic said he was not suprised by the explosion in interest in craft brewing.  “No longer do we need to be just resticted to food and wine (as) beer is being embraced as part of that slow food movement.”  Since opening, Mr Perovic said a number of the thousands of home brewers in Ballarat had come forward with their own brews, which amazed him.  “There are some outstanding (home) brewers out there, and that’s really shocking.”  

But perhaps the unsung hero of Ballarat’s thriving beer culture is in Mount Helen.  Since 1971, Federation University’s brewing course has been the country’s premier beer brewing course, and recognised as the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.  Up to 40 students complete the Diploma of Brewing at the university each year, which course co-ordinator Dr Peter Aldred describes as extremely competitive.  Since 2002, Dr Aldred has been running the course, which he said had grown dramatically.  “In the initial stages we only had around 20 people, and now we have over 100 applications a year.”  The course, which focuses on the science of brewing, attracts applicants from around the country, drawing some of the most passionate home brewers to Ballarat.  

Dr Aldred, who also sits on the Australian International Beer Awards Technical Advisory Committee, said the craft beer culture was initially slow to catch on in Ballarat, but said a number of bars and brewers around Ballarat had encouraged local drinkers to take notice.  “Red Duck and Rebellion were ahead of their time for Ballarat,” Dr Aldred said.  “Now we’ve got places like The Mallow (hotel) and the Hop Temple which are specialising in craft brewing where they’re not tied to one major brewer.”  While the brewing courses will not be running in 2016, Dr Aldred said they would return in 2017, meaning more qualified brewers will soon be flooding out of Federation University.

The city’s passion for all things beer now seems to be unstoppable.  As well as Athletic Club joining the fold in early January, another micro brewery, Cubby Haus Brewing, is also set to start brewing in the new year. For stockists like Mr Perovic, however, the true driver of the scene is customer demand. “If you offer the right experience people will embrace it,” Mr Perovic said.  “It gives me real faith in the beer scene, and how important it is to Ballarat.”