Air & Sunlight

We take the most important things for granted - until we no longer have them.

Looking back at the past couple of years, we didn't make building a brewery a terribly easy task by denying ourselves some of the most fundamental elements to life: air and sunlight. Strangely, for whatever reason, these weren't at the top of the list when selecting a site - and in retrospect, can now say that had we chosen more wisely, we may have been capable of tolerating more time working on site. Or at least, we'd have left the site at the end of a long day feeling like returning the next day wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

And yet, this environment is a daily reality for far too many Australian workers, who arrive to work before the sun is in the sky and spend all day under fluorescent lights in airless cool rooms, surrounded by the loud whirring of machinery - only to leave with an hour or two of sunshine left in the day. I don't know how they do it.

​This week we returned to the dark, empty, cavernous shell of the old site to finalise clean-up. It was at this final point that we realised the magnitude of our error as the oppression took hold. The reverberation of the room was so thick and uncomfortable we struggled to comprehend one another's speech. We finished scrubbing the remaining life from the floor and sprayed the place down with bleach, vowing to never deprive ourselves so spectacularly ever again.