Tim Thomas has been working in South Coast breweries for almost a decade but says plenty of locals are surprised to find that there are breweries here at all.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Mr Thomas has been running a small brewery, HopDog, in Nowra for just over a year. For eight years before that, he was the brewer with Five Islands in Wollongong.
"We've been open 15 months now and there are still people who don't know that we're here," Mr Thomas said.
"And when I was with Five Islands, there would still be people coming in and saying, 'There's a brewery in Wollongong?' "
But that's only on the South Coast. Mr Thomas said the HopDog name was much better known in other areas.
"A large percentage of our sales is well out of the Shoalhaven," he said.
"We're talking Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In Sydney there are tonnes of people who are all over us and a lot of the people we get through the cellar door are travelling down from Sydney and headed somewhere else and they think, 'Wow, I can actually visit the brewery'."
That popularity is in part because of their bronze-medal winning beers - which were judged in their category to be superior to beers from iconic brewing countries like Germany and Belgium - but also because of the wide variety.
HopDog has already released at least 20 different beers.
"I cut my teeth with brewing to style and brewing exactly the same all the time, whereas stepping out into my own brewery it's like, 'I know the beers I want to make, let's go crazy'," he said.
And people have responded. For instance, the HopDog limited release beers tend to sell out so quickly they can be gone within weeks of being brewed.
"At the moment we're calling ourselves the brewery with no beer because we sell out of all of our beer before it's even had a chance to sit in the brewery for two weeks," he said.
"That's something that we see as successful. The awards are fun but it's getting our beers into bottle shops, into people's hands, and them drinking it and wanting to come back for more - that's the biggest thing."