Success on tap: Little Creatures brew up a global storm

• Yvette Neilson
• 14 May 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Howard Cearns, co-founder of Little Creatures, in the company's Fremantle brewery. Photo credit: Anthony Geernaert

Mmm, beer. It’s a journalist’s dream assignment and competition is stiff in the Nett office over the impending trip to the Little Creatures brewery in Fremantle, WA. As each contender is swiftly eliminated, it’s finally between myself and one of the lads, who’s easily disqualified when past on-location indiscretions are revealed.

As the official beer connoisseur of the team, I promise not to get drunk and disorderly, pack an arsenal of Nurofen and Vitamin B and head west to discover if life really is peaceful there. And to bring back the story behind Little Creatures, the boutique brewing operation started eight years ago by three corporate refugees who, quite simply, wanted to create beer they love drinking.

Fremantle is the perfect town for beer-brewing. Known as ‘Freo’ to the locals, the historical seaport is a 20-minute drive from Perth and boasts the state’s oldest convict gaol. The Little Creatures brewery is situated on the water near the fishing docks. By night, the converted shed is packed to its 500-head capacity with tourists, families and young locals who are tended to by the sort of ultra-hip Gen Y-ers you would expect to find in the inner suburbs of the larger capital cities.

Through glass windows, the punters can see the entire brewing operation in what Howard calls the “ultimate cellar door experience.” With a passing resemblance to actor Billy Bob Thornton, Howard is one of a trio of business partners, all in their late 40s, who between them have more than three decades of experience in the brewing industry.

“We opened about eight years ago,” Howard says from a booth in the bar, the mezzanine level of which doubles as a free art gallery for aspiring local exhibitors.

“My partners Phil Sexton, Nic Trimboli, and I were at the Matilda Bay brewery (launched in 1984, it was the first new brewer in Australia since WWII and was later bought out by Fosters in the early 1980s). In 1997, we started noticing what was going on in the US craft brewing industry. There were some amazing styles of beers being made and we loved the pale ale in particular. We wanted to put our own spin on it, so we built our own brewery. We also wanted to integrate more of a wine mentality. When you go to a winery, you feel like you’re going to the cellar door in the vineyard. When you come and drink here, you should feel as if you’re coming into the brewery; it surrounds you, you can hear noises and smell hops…”

Although Howard claims the three partners had already learned most of their big business lessons in the corporate arena, Little Creatures was not an overnight success story.

“It hasn’t actually grown that fast,” Howard says. “One of the tough lessons we learned in prior lives was that there’s a pace to these things. Little Creatures was about not going too fast or doing too much. It was about doing simple things really well. It was all quite measured.

“We started the business hand-selling cartons of beer and driving a Kombi Ute loaded with kegs of beer to a handful of local pubs,” he continues. “We did launch nationally, but were selling minute amounts to each market – if we sold a pallet (60 cases) of beer in our early days we were happy.

Today it’s different, but then we couldn’t get ahead of ourselves because the market wasn’t ready. We had to give people the beer, explain why it was different, and then bore them to tears with how passionate we were about something as basic as a hop flower. That’s what we did for four years, without any great desire to push too hard. I think a lot of people make the mistake of focusing too much on sales volume.”

“Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.” -- Henry Lawson

Our first night in Fremantle. The photographer, art director and I arrived at the brewery to scope it out for the following day’s photo shoot. During the car ride from Perth, plans were made for a loud night of revelry that would show the locals how it’s done. What actually happened was that everyone was tired from a long day, beginning on Sydney time. After quietly sampling a few fine brews, the art director, having failed to elicit the interest of a charming Irish waitress, announced he was bowing out of the proposed mayhem. I concurred. We left our photographer to retire to his mini-bar in disgust.

The next morning I spy the unused Nurofen and realise the Nett team has failed to organise a piss-up in a brewery. I tell the sorry tale to our bemused host, but he assures me kindly that Little Creatures is not about excess. “Australian beer drinking has its history in standing around at the bar and drinking, and not drinking for flavour, drinking for…”

Excess? “Well, that and perhaps the refreshment factor. What we’re trying to do is create beers that have flavour and complexity, but we also feel there are some traditional things you need to deliver. It’s easy to make something that’s got huge flavour, but is difficult to drink. Finding the balance between flavour and structure is very important to us. We’re trying to make beers that are less about quantity and volume and excess, and more about being great.”

This low-key approach has been key to the beer’s success in penetrating a marketplace already crowded with hundreds of products from over 40 breweries.

Nett asks what emotions they wanted people to feel around their brand – apart from drunk. “We’ve got a particular product, but it’s not like we’ve got a specific target market,” Howard replies. “We find the people who pick up on it are not a trendy crowd: it’s the engineers, the computer geeks, the design crowd who are looking more at what’s in the bottle than how it’s dressed. In our early years we looked at dressing things up to gain attention, but these days it’s almost about dressing things down.

“It’s about getting the beer into people’s hands and saying, ‘Fall in love with this, not with the label – and don’t fall in love with me.’ Although,” he laughs, “I wish that would happen sometimes.”

“A wise man invented beer.” Plato

It’s not just the beer that makes Little Creatures unique. The management structure of the company, Howard says, is very flat. “When we started, we were pretty much all in one room out the back,” he tells. “It used to be a crocodile park and we haven’t altered the structure a lot, even though we gutted the place. Out the front they had tourist ponds and out the back was an abattoir, so we turned the abattoir into an office space. There were Nic and me and the guy who ran the hospitality and the sales people, so you could hear just about every conversation. From that came our attitude of, ‘let’s deal with issues right now. I can hear you’ve got a problem. Let’s solve it’. It was a pretty transparent, sometimes brutally honest environment. There weren’t a lot of meetings, because meetings kind of happened in corridors, or that room.