Lion has sold the brewhouse equipment in its closed-down West End brewery in Adelaide to Victoria’s Ostra Distillers.
The brewhouse can produce 120 million litres per annum allowing great control over the flavour profiles that distilleries produce at this capacity.
“Distillers are becoming brewers because they want to control the flavour they are producing,” said Dawid Ostrowski, founder and CEO of Ostra Distillers told Brews News.
“We’ll have to change some of the equipment around, the vessel will have to make minor changes, but now we’ll be able to play with different recipes and flavour profiles on-site.”
According to Lion, Australia’s beer market had declined by about 20 per cent in the past decade with consumers preferring to drink other beverages.
With the Australian whiskey market slowly expanding, Ostrowski wants to produce at least 10 million litres of pure alcohol a year.
“Eighteen years ago there was no craft scene. It was hard to sell stock into bars, everyone laughed at us, they asked, ‘where did you make this, in the bathtub?’ If you said that now, you could charge $300 a bottle,” said Ostrowski.
The family-run distillery is located at its current location in Robinvale, Victoria.
“Lion was very receptive to us, and happy that the brewhouse was sold to us, because they’re not selling to a competitor or anything like that,” he said.
