A brewing company expanding into Goulburn will have engineers onsite in the next few months.
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Stockade Brewco CEO Anton Szpitalak said he remained committed to building the brewery in the old Coles Myer Distribution Centre on the corner of Hume Street and Ducks Lane.
Stockade Brewco’s parent company, Brewpack, won council approval in July, 2014 for the $15 million project. It included the manufacture of craft beer and mainline soft drinks in the first phase, a 150 square metre cellar door, tasting and small restaurant space, a function area and provision for brewery tours.
The council also granted the company a special industrial water use rate for an estimated 100 megalitre annual usage. It helped sway the decision to expand operations from Smeaton Grange into Goulburn.
Despite expectations that work could start by the end of 2014, little has happened since.
Mr Szpitalak said things had taken longer than expected to “get all the ducks in a row.”
“It’s a big project and it’s not easy to convert a 20,000 square metre space but that’s what we’ll be embarking on in a more vigorous way,” he told The Post.
Site preparation and engineering will begin in the next four to six weeks. The CEO said there was a great deal of work to do and construction might not start until the second or third quarter of 2018 but he would have a better idea by about September. He could not say how long construction would take.
Mr Szpitalak said part of the delay was the fact that Stockade Brewco had “done a really good job” expanding at its existing Smeaton Grange facility. The company had doubled its business in the past 12 months thanks to huge growth in the craft beer market.
“(Now) we need to think about moving as soon as possible,” he said.
“...A bigger facility will give us opportunity to grow but you have to keep your feet on the ground. When fully utilised it (the Goulburn brewery) could be three times larger than our current facility.”
Three years ago Mr Szpitalak estimated the project could employ 150 people across three shifts in the longer term. This week he said employee numbers would depend on growth. Mr Szpitalak could not confirm the project’s $15m value but said the development, as approved had not changed. He flagged possible minor modifications.
The 2014 development application forecast manufacture of 30 million litres of beer, cider and other ‘mainline’ drinks at full capacity. In the first five years 20Ml of beer for kegs and glass bottles would be produced, followed by canning, PET bottling and distilling capabilities in years two to ten.
The company floated but subsequently abandoned plans for a 30 metre high beer bottle at the complex, rivaling the nearby Big Merino.
Mr Szpitalak said while brewers of beers such as James Squires and Fat Yak had grown significantly, “the little guys” like Stockade Brewco were growing even faster.
“There’s a lot of demand for (our product) and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing anytime soon. If it was we wouldn’t be moving to a larger facility,” he said.
The brewery will occupy about half the former Distribution Centre building which it purchased in 2013/14.
The company has leased out a section to a supermarket paper goods supplier for the past year. It is also talking to another party about leasing another portion.
Mr Szpitalik said he’d been offered a “huge amount of money” for the site but was not tempted because his company was wholly committed to Goulburn.
“The site had been empty for more than six years. It will take us a few years to get in there but it is probably the most ambitious brewery project to be built in Australia in about 15 years,” he said.
“It’s a big development and we have to make sure we’re doing everything right...We saw a great opportunity in Goulburn because of its transport links and infrastructure. That opportunity hasn’t come up anywhere else since.”