This week on the podcast we go back and visit Matt King and Glenn Wignall, who with their friend, Trent Evans, have been quietly building The Grifter Brewing in Sydney’s inner west.
We visited the guys back in January 2018 and we’d invite you to go back and listen to that chat first if you haven’t already to learn the background to the brewery, which we don’t cover too much in this episode.
One of the things that struck me during that earlier conversation was just how quietly The Grifter team got on with what they did and not making much of a noise about it. In the intervening years they have continued not making waves on social media or troubling our email inbox with endless media releases or attention-seeking novelties.
So it was that when I wandered into the brewery back in March this year to have a beer and chanced to bump into Matt and Glenn and had a brief catch up, I was surprised that they said they were expanding again and had passed through the million litre production mark. That’s one of those production figures touted as being close to the other side of the ‘valley of death’ as Black Hops has described in its blog post on the topic.
The amazing thing about that is that The Grifter has gone about it so quietly, compared to a brewery such as a Black Hops, that has driven its businesses very successfully harnessing the power of hype and novelty. And I say that in admiration for Black Hops prowess here, not in scorn.
But to me, it made The Grifter something of a Unicorn, growing to the scale of some much more notable breweries in such an unassuming way, and in a market that many describe as crowded.
I was very keen to go back and revisit the teams and see if I could learn more about their secret sauce, or at least where they learned to make, their secret sauce.
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