Professionals Tamborine Mountain 
There’s nothing better than relaxing with a cold drink after a long day and soaking in some beautiful scenery, and on Tamborine Mountain, there’s no shortage of beautiful scenery. When it comes to the drinks, though, there’s one name that comes to mind: Fortitude Brewing Co. This local brewery, well known for its diverse and delicious range of craft beers, has been making major waves on the mountain with its community involvement. To find out more, we talked to Alex Sey, General Manager of Operations, to learn just how you bottle the taste of Tamborine.
by Kyle Hitchmough
How long has Fortitude Brewing Co. been here?
We’ve been up here for about two years now. We purchased it from the original owners as part of a wider strategy for our business. We started with Catchment Brewing Co. and decided to grow that business by buying other venues. The first one was a place in Paddington, and because of the number of taps we had there, Catchment Brewing at West End wasn’t able to supply the amount of product that we needed. So this was part of the strategy to increase our brewing capacity.
For those who might not be familiar with exactly how you operate, can you explain how things work here?
It’s very much craft beer. We offer beers from not only Fortitude Brewing, but from our other breweries like Catchment Brewing and Ballistic Brewing. A lot of our production is actually done at Salisbury now, our biggest brewery, but from time to time we’ll do brewing here at Fortitude or at our other sites in Springfield and West End.
What kinds of beers do you offer in your range?
It’s mostly our seasonal releases. We have a core range of products at Fortitude, but then a subsidiary brand called Noisy Minor. It’s set for normally four seasonal releases, and they’re what we term ‘big beers’, big in flavours, higher alcohol content, 7-9% beers. We do a limited release of those with pre-sales. The Noisy Minor brand is actually very well known for those beers like the ‘Admiral Ackbar’ and the ‘Angry Fish’. But we do everything from a 3.5% ginger beer through to the barrel-aged imperial stout.
Do you have a most popular beer?
Fortitude Pacer has been very popular at the 2.8%, it’s very much a session beer for people to sit down and have 4 or 5 because it’s a lower alcohol content. Pacer was what Fortitude built its name on at the beginning. It’s probably tending towards more of our seasonal releases now. The market these days is always looking for new beers, and people come to our venues because they want to try something different. It changes a little bit here because of the tourist market.
Have you noticed any particular trends in your clientele?
Not really! If you have a look at the tourist market we have up here on Tamborine Mountain, it’s wide-ranging. We’ll get everything from hen’s days and buck’s parties who are up here on the weekends to people who are staying for a week or two in holiday accommodation.
Are you a local? What’s your opinion on the Tamborine Mountain area and community?
I’m not, but it seems a very strong community. It’s something that we were very careful of when we came up here. We wanted to fit in with the community, not try and change it to the way things are done in the city. It’s about blending with the locals. We do a members’ night once a month on a Friday night and the place is full. We get 100-120 people coming along. We’ve also started Hops and Harmony up here, which we do once a month as well. It’s about the local community coming together and rehearsing and singing a song together, like a pub choir. We’ll generally get about 200 people coming along to that, which is a great Thursday night. Everybody just loves it, the community comes together. We’ve also started up music trivia once a month as well, which is a slower build but again it’s about doing something for the locals at night. When we first came up here and stayed overnight ourselves nothing seems to be happening at night so one of the first things I did was open on Friday and Saturday nights to cater to the local community.
What do you think Fortitude Brewing Co. really provides to the area?
I think it’s a destination venue. A lot of the people I talk to in Brisbane know of or have visited it, so it’s one of those things that is quite different. There’s Boxer Brewing going in at Witches Falls, which is good because it’s another brewery up here. People now have a couple of different places to go to try different types of beer. We don’t see them as being in competition with us, we see it as complimentary to what we’re doing.
What do you enjoy most about doing this?
We’re in hospitality, we’re here to have fun! We always say “beer is fun, and hospitality is fun”. The satisfaction you get from a Hops and Harmony night with 200 people singing their hearts out, seeing the enjoyment in their faces, that’s what makes hospitality for me.
What’s been your most memorable moment in your time here so far?
The Hops and Harmony is a really good story. It came from somebody posting on the Tamborine Mountain community Facebook page asking if anybody was doing a pub choir. I saw it within five minutes of the post going up and replied saying “No, but I will!” A local resident, Jamie Lee Wilson, contacted me and said it was something that she’d like to be involved in as well, so we got together and discussed what it could look like. She has a background as an international EDM performer and happened to be married to someone from the mountain originally, so she brought this whole thing together. To see the community getting behind it every month is fantastic.
Fortitude Brewing Co.
165 Long Rd, Tamborine QLD 4270
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