{"id":25201,"date":"2025-03-27T05:10:24","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T16:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/?p=25201"},"modified":"2025-03-31T07:40:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T18:40:32","slug":"collingwood-churn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2025\/03\/27\/collingwood-churn\/","title":{"rendered":"Churn \u2014 on life, death, and rebirth in (and around) Collingwood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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(…of beer venues<\/em>, I mean.) For the six years I lived in Melbourne I worked within a surprisingly-tight area; a two-kilometre circle centered somewhere in Collingwood, in the inner-North-East.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> That part of town saw a few high-profile closures in 2024, further datapoints for the general sense of doom that haunts the industry \u2014 but also some interesting (re-)openings, and given my proximity to it all I wanted to take a moment to sit with what’s happened and try to pin it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The closures I have most in mind are the three in the banner image here. In June, Range (a brewery based in Brisbane) closed their Melbourne outpost \u2014 a small taproom, takeaway and distribution point where I worked for two years. The official reasoning<\/a> was a re-focus on operations in their home state, and to be fair it is<\/em> difficult to maintain a satellite when its orbit is that<\/em> far out,<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> but it did often feel that \u2014 when we simply weren’t out of sight, out of mind \u2014 we were expected to be too much like their other venues, unable to adapt to our vastly different context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Craft & Co shut down their multi-storey multi-purpose spot on Smith Street<\/a> a few weeks later. It’d been there the whole time I worked in the area, but I’d never gone in for a beer. Perhaps the everything-to-everyone lack of focus \u2014 brewery! distillery! deli! events!<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> \u2014 gradually counted against them, and the generic “craft” branding which might’ve once been an asset (safe and unthreatening to, you know, “normal people”) would’ve lost a lot of appeal as the shine was rubbed off that word over the years. They have another site further afield<\/a> which opened in 2023, but it looks like they switched the production \/ hospitality balance there much<\/em> further towards the former than they did in Collingwood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in August, it was announced that Fixation would close. Originally an offshoot of Stone & Wood and so eventually part of Lion \/ Kirin<\/a>, their overbosses said they’d decided not to renew the lease but vowed to continue the brand and recipes (which had long been produced elsewhere, also). Crucial context here is that they had also just closed the venues of two other<\/em> subsidiaries; Two Birds (once an independent Melbourne brewery, bought by a pre-takeover Stone & Wood), and Malt Shovel (Lion’s in-house “craft” brand from the 1990s). So this seemed to be very much of a piece with the general tactical retreat that Big Beer is undertaking worldwide<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n