White Rabbit Brewery was founded in Healesville, about an hour east of Melbourne, in March 2009. It was founded by Little World Beverages, owners of Little Creatures, & marked their first venture on the East Coast of Australia. The brand was somewhat whimsical, which makes sense given the brewery is named after the Lewis Carroll character, and the locals immediately took to it.
The original Little Creatures kit was installed at Healesville, although with a minor addition – two open topped fermenters. The plan was always for White Rabbit to be the more creative arm, in line with their motto “fermentation through imagination”. That didn’t mean the beers weren’t up to scratch Dark Ale, took out a Gold Medal at the AIBAs in 2010, barely a year after they’d been opened!
Brewery Type
Physical
Region
Geelong & the Bellarine
Tasting Room
221 Swanston St, Geelong
If you’ve been following Year of the Local closesly, you will have heard the following before. In August 2012, Little World Beverages announced they’d sold to Lion (Kirin) in a deal that valued the company at ~$380m. By November 2014, Lion had decided to close the original Healesville brewery and move production to the new Little Creatures site in Geelong. A dedicated White Rabbit Barrel Room at the sprawling site opened in December 2015, allowing the White Rabbit brand to expand their “fermentation through imagination” approach to brewing.
That Barrel Room is quite something! Visiting it for the first time, I was surprised at how much of an educational approach they’d taken. It’s quite in contrast to the Little Creatures & Furphy venues at the same site. They’ve very nicely restored an old red brick wool shed, stacked it high with barrels, given it a paint job & trained their staff to help convert mainstream drinkers to their refined sour & barrel aged beverages.
It really is a lovely space to have a beer. The bar is really nice, as is the shop that sells a wide array of local products alongside their own beers. It’s almost like White Rabbit was able to flourish by being taken over by Lion, which is quite the opposite the impression most craft drinkers have of these takeovers. White Rabbit was able to lean more into the unique and interesting by having an owner such as Lion who allowed them to do their thing, with less financial pressure than they may otherwise have had.
Now; despite all of that love for the barrel program I really can’t go passed Dark Ale. This was quite a formative beer for me as I tried to seek out similar things to the Dark Lagers in Europe that really hooked me into craft beer. It’s a more nuanced beer than I remember; with notes of coffee roast accompanying chocolate, cola, some hop fruitiness & an almost tobacco note that I don’t recall ever finding before. It’s a wonderful beer in that it offers new experiences when you go analysing it, but also in that it’s the same easy drinking beer that I used to drink by the pint a decade or more ago.
Remember it’s always Beer O’Clock somewhere in the world!
