IS it a brewery or a scene out of a Clint Eastwood movie?
The Western Ridge Brewing Collective is the passion project of five beer-loving mates who use small-batch brews in their western-themed cellar door to unleash their creativity.
What once was a common love of brewing and a backyard operation has since become home to a melting pot of individual ideas using hyperlocal ingredients, served cold.
Co-owner Olexij Straschko said the abundance of fresh ingredients within the Barossa region was a muse for their unique brewery creations.
“We really love the Barossa, and proud of the different availability of ingredients in our area,” he said.
“It’s just such a wonderful talking point to say that some of our beers… the majority of the ingredients come from a few kilometres away.”
This includes home-grown hops, which take centre stage in the collective’s creations.
Mr Straschko’s two hop plants he purchased from a grower in the Adelaide Hills soon turned into 14 different plant varieties growing in his small block in Gawler.
He said a familial passion for gardening turned into a natural progression toward growing the hops for beer.
“For myself, my family being from Ukraine, we’ve always spent time in the garden, and my parents and grandparents have always been passionate about trying to grow different things,” he said.
“When I got into brewing, as people do with any other hobby, they start off at a very basic level, so I learnt more about the process.
It basically comes down to ‘how can we have more security behind our production and ingredients?’”
He’s since downsized, but co-owner Alex Marschall’s mum’s property in Tanunda is still brimming with hops.
However, the secret behind the collective’s range of brews lies in neighbours’ backyards and paddocks down the road.
“It’s just such a wonderful talking point to say that some of our beers… the majority of the ingredients come from a few kilometres away,” Mr Straschko said.
“People are able to come in with bags of fruit and they might say ‘Hey, have you got a use for all of these prickly pears?’, and we’re like ‘Yeah, absolutely we do, come here in a couple of weeks and we’ll make a beer together’.
So there’s this beautiful continuance, whether it’s from commercial suppliers to right out of someone’s backyard, and we can create a really unique small batch of beer that we’re really proud to put our names on.”
Unusual ingredients that grow in abundance in people’s backyards such as prickly pears and lilly pilly berries, inspire new brewing recipes.
Even beers on regular rotation, like their strawberry session ale, feature eucalyptus leaves native to northern New South Wales, which are sourced from a nursery in Allendale North.
“You can look at the board any day of the week and see something that makes you think ‘I didn’t know that could go in a beer’. So I guess we’re always trying to push a boundary and try something new,” Mr Straschko said.
“We really have the ability to play around and if something doesn’t turn out well, it’s not a huge loss – or we can age it in a barrel for a couple of years and it turns into some other beautiful thing.”
Although a collective, each of the five architects behind the brewery steer their own ideas and brewing styles.
On the menu board, you’ll see the mastermind behind each beer.
“You’ll see little caricatures from a local artist of all of our faces, so you can look at a beer on the list and go ‘oh that was made by that brewer,’ or ‘that was a collective approach to the beer’,” Mr Straschko said.
“The cool thing about that is people start to recognise us, so they might say ‘I really love David Work’s American pale ales’, ‘I really like David Henderson’s IPAs’, ‘Alex makes really great stouts’.
“When people see these faces on the board… it feels like you’re celebrating the individuality.”
Western Ridge Brewing Collective’s Nuriootpa cellar door is open to the public from Thursday to Sunday.
