We love how… brewing is such an elemental craft. Heating stones up in a wood fire before adding them to a kettle full of “juice” from the grain certainly helps remind us how grounded the essence of brewing actually is.

We love how… Stone Beer provides the opportunity to bring people together. This happens on the brew day and then with the Festival of the Stone when the beer is released. Remember one of the reasons people stopped roaming around alone was because they had to stay in one place to grow grain for brewing beer. Beer had a huge role in humans developing communities and at Stone & Wood we believe our main reason for existing is to help bring people together.

We love how… it tastes! The 2013 Stone Beer is another evolution of the beer. This year we added some chocolate wheat to what was already an eclectic grain bill. Another tweak was marrying a relatively new hop called Enigma to some German nobles – this added a small boost of fruitiness to the powerful malt character across the middle palate. The chocolate wheat kicks in by balancing the finish, which is firm and long. The beer is still very much in that big dark Germanic ale mould. Imagine what the love child of a beautiful bock and handsome stout might drink like and you’re close.

Stone Beer is available on tap and in 500ml bottles throughout good beer bars and bottle shops around the country from early May. We’re also offering our ‘vintage pack’ which has the highly collectable ceramic bottle in it exclusively through our online store here.

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The Festival of the Stone has the very first kegs of Stone Beer, two live bands, lucky door prizes and matching food. It kicks off at 5pm. The Brewery Open Day will also have live tunes, along with food stalls, face painting for the kids and brewery tours and beer tastings for the bigger kids. It starts at 11am, here at the brewery, and we’ll be welcoming the participants of the ‘One Million Metre Ride’ around 1pm and helping them raise some funds to battle this terrible illness.

Entry is free to both events.

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A few years ago Ross used his kid’s paint set to create a huge hand painted banner which we hung at Archive in West End, Brisbane. Despite us giving him heaps about his “naive” style, it was a great piece of work (and all we could afford back then). Up until recently it was hanging in pride of place in the bar at Archive, but has now gone missing. (not happy)

Please help us find our banner!

If you know anything about its disappearance, or if you know of its whereabouts, or if you know these people, please contact us.

We now know that it was taken on Monday 18th of February, just before 1 am.

We don’t want to bring shame to anyone … we just want our banner to come home.

We are offering a reward of five cartons of our finest to anyone who brings to home.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers

The Stone & Wood Team

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Our journey has been about quitting the crap involved in working for big corporations and getting back to something more personal, stripping it all back to something simple and enjoying what we do. Over the last four and half years our little brewery has grown, we now have a team of people working alongside us. Being part of a team and working together is what builds and maintains a human element to a brewery, it allows us all to do more whilst still having a hands-on approach to things.

As we brew more and more beer, fill more and more kegs, and fill and pack more and more bottles, we need to be sharper at what we do, we need to contain the complexity that comes with scaling up. We have to retain that artisanal bent but also be more conscious of the process and precision required to produce larger quantities of kegs and bottles. After all, we don’t just brew and sell beer, we have to put it into containers that can get it to where people are able to drink it. When the production output starts hitting bigger numbers (and hey we aren’t huge) you have to start to balance the art of brewing with a manufacturing mindset.

Before people start running around horrified that we just dropped the “M Bomb”, we see no problem with having our head around the fact that we need to be thinking like a manufacturer. If people want good beer to grow in this country, then there needs to be some brewers who grow much bigger than they are today. To do that successfully, we think it’s going to take time and it’s going to require the smaller brewers like us to develop a balance between an artisan’s approach and a manufacturer’s approach. As we know, there are bigger guys out there who are happy to soak up the good beer growth if the small guys aren’t prepared to step up to the plate.

This balance is an important thing to get our heads around, and we need to do it without accepting an extremist point of view. There are some that see our simple push button brewhouse as being too automated, however we see no problem with being able to push a button that turns on a pump … that pump has a job to do … it has to move more than a tonne and a half of wet mash from one vessel to another. Maybe they would prefer us to get in there and shovel it across? The art of brewing isn’t in how much sweat you lose in getting the brew from one vessel to another, it’s in knowing when to transfer it … in when to push the button.

A lot of people ask us “how big are you going to be in the future?” or “are you going to keep growing?”. The truth is, we can’t really answer those questions. All we know is that we will keep making more beer until we meet the natural demand for our beer. We know we can’t meet the current demand for our beer at the moment, and that really frustrates us because we know there are people out there who want to drink our beer and can’t find it.

So we are going to grow, we are going to get bigger, but we will keep our human scale, we will keep that balance and we will stay true to what we do well … brewing beers that are simply good to drink.

Cheers

The Stone & Wood Team

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These are just a few of the highlights we could recall…

• A great start to the year when Pacific Ale was voted number 1 in the Local Taphouse Hottest 100 and we got some extra tanks to help brew more of it.
• Pacific Ale backed up its win here in Australia with a Silver Medal at the World Beer Cup in San Diego.
• The launch of our side project The Mash Project with ”Amasia” a rumwiezen we brewed with molasses and a splash of rum.
• A bigger and darker Stone Beer that a lucky few who jumped online early got in limited edition ceramic bottles. Locally, we took the Festival of the Stone to the nearby village of Federal to roll out the first kegs.
• Shipped a bit of beer to England for the Great British Beer Festival and even made it across to enjoy a few pints of Pacific Ale in a number of pubs across London.
• A couple of big tanks (100 hec) arrived at the brewery, squeezing into the shed by a few centimeters, and giving our old tanks an instant inferiority complex.
• From big things to very small, we started using bottles embossed with our logo. Not many people would notice, but for packaging nerds like ourselves, we love these sorts of details.
• Sponsored the Mullum Music Festival and had a great time rocking around what has to be the best little music festival in the country.
• Rolled out our second limited release for the year just in time for summer. Garden Ale was brewed with juniper berries and a couple of new hop varieties Ella and Summer.
• Also attended all the major (and most of the minor) beer festivals right across the country, which equates to an untold amount of beers shared with friends, both old and new.

All this deserves an enormous thanks and e-hug to everyone who purchased one of our beers last year, because none of this would be possible without you. To all the people who help us get the beer across the country (when we actually have enough to send) and to the customers we work with each week, out there in the pubs, restaurants and bottle shops sharing their love for good beer, we salute you.

Plenty of action-packed plans for 2013, so stay safe and stay tuned.

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Some people would be aware that Little World Beverages Ltd has been a 20% shareholder in Stone & Wood since 2009. Although a public company, Little World was a relatively small and well-respected craft brewer, and also a supportive partner in our business.

Following the recent acquisition of Little World Beverages by Lion (a subsidiary of Kirin) we decided to buy back the Stone & Wood shares that are held by Little World Beverages Ltd / Lion.

While we believe Lion has displayed a thorough understanding of the craft beer market, and are currently better placed to participate in it than any other large brewer in the world, we feel we’ve made the right decision for our business.

We are very proud of the company we have built since establishing it here in Byron Bay in 2008. It would not have been possible without the support of our shareholders, customers, drinkers, suppliers and the strong team of people working beside us each day, who are all contributing to create the Stone & Wood community.

It’s an exciting time at Stone & Wood at the moment, and 2012 has been filled with many milestones:

• Doubled our production capacity to produce upward of one million litres
• Pacific Ale voted No 1 beer in the Local Taphouse Hottest 100 beers
• Pacific Ale awarded a Silver Medal at the World Beer Cup
• Launched our third beer, Jasper Ale, in our permanent line up

• Conducted a successful seasonal release of Pacific Ale in the UK market

We are only four years into our journey and we have a lot of hard work and good times in front of us. We love playing an active role in developing craft beer in Australia and are looking forward to what lies ahead as we continue to write the Stone & Wood Brewing Company story.

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