We Started With Two Dogs and a Big Bloody Idea.

9 years in. 500+ unique beers. Four soon to be five venues. And we still haven’t figured out how to make the taste-testing take up more of the day. Here’s the full story.

It Started Simply Enough.

Rocky Ridge started on a cattle farm in Jindong. Population: not many. Postcode: barely recognised. Nearest traffic light: a solid twenty minutes away.

Since the first pint in a paddock back in 2017 we’ve opened venues in Burswood, Duncraig, Busselton, and Brunswick.

We’ve won some trophies.

We’ve built a solar system that would make Elon envious.

We’ve become the first brewery in Australia to hold both Carbon Neutral and Certified Sustainable certifications at the same time.

Rocky Ridge was founded with a simple vision: support local, be the best at what we do, and make some genuinely great beer.

Simple, right?

Turns out there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that. It’d be nice if someone explained the playbook before we jumped off the deep end, but hey, there you go.

Mel and I started this thing on my family’s 100 year old cattle farm in April 2017. Our founding team was the two of us and our two dogs, Ace and Indi. In our first year we brewed 50,000 litres – It felt enormous. We had absolutely no idea what was coming, or what we were doing.

Maybe we still don’t.

The Middle of Nowhere Was the Point.

Building a brewery on a farm, off-grid, in Jindong wasn’t a marketing strategy. It was a statement of intent.

We love this slice of paradise. We’re in the heart of the South West and we want to see the South West succeed for generations to come.

C.Y O’Connor skipped Jindong when building his pipeline so we harvest our water from rainfall and pull it from the Jindong groundwater aquifer. Powerlines? Forget it. We generate our own electricity, running one of the largest private off-grid solar and battery installations in Western Australia. Every watt we use, we make ourselves, right here on the farm. In the last financial year alone, we generated over 350,000kWh of power. That’s the equivalent of keeping more than 35 Aussie homes running for a year, and saving around 260 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

Waste doesn’t disappear down a sewer either. We manage all of it on site, including a bespoke wastewater treatment system. Our wastewater gets treated and redirected back into the farm as irrigation. Over 3.5 million litres of it last year. Nothing wasted. Everything returned.

The off-grid constraints that look like disadvantages from the outside are our biggest drivers of innovation. When you can’t be wasteful, you get creative.

We Grew.

We hear the same thing every day. Slow down. Maybe we should. Maybe we shouldn’t, who really knows? We could have grown faster. We chose not to.

There’s a rhyme and a reason to the pace we’ve set. Growing fast is easy. Growing well is not. Building the infrastructure, the team, the certifications and the sustainability credentials to back it all up takes time and discipline. We’ve pulled the handbrake plenty of times when the smart play was to slow down and build properly.

Today, our Jindong brewery is capable of producing over 3.5 million litres of beer every year. We have a team of nearly 100 people, across multiple areas: production, operations, hospitality, marketing, sales, logistics. You name it, we do it. We’ve brewed over 500 unique beers. This year we’re on track to deliver just over 2 million litres and 100 unique beers into Western Australia, plus another 400,000 litres brewed in Victoria, for Victoria. Not bad for a little brewery in the middle of nowhere.

From the Farm to Five Venues.

What started as a cellar door in Busselton has turned into something we genuinely couldn’t have scripted. In 2024, we acquired Thunder Road Brewing in Brunswick, Victoria. That gave us a proper East Coast home, and solved something that had never quite sat right with us: shipping beer across the Nullarbor. If low-impact brewing is at the core of everything you do, sending pallets of cans three-and-a-half thousand kilometres isn’t a great look. Now we brew east coast beer on the east coast.

In February 2025 we opened our first Perth venue in Duncraig, an old house with a big tree out front that felt immediately like home. In October 2025 we opened Rocky Ridge Burswood. And in 2026, we’ll be taking on the lease at the iconic Bootleg Brewery in the Margaret River region. Five venues. Each one with the same ethos: make this feel like you’re going around to a mate’s place for a drink.

Moving this quickly into hospitality is the riskiest thing we’ve done but it’s also the most logical. It lets us build deeper roots in communities we care about, and reduces our dependence on wholesale. Both things matter to us.

The Team.

Our team is the driving force behind our beers and our brand. Without them working tirelessly day in and day out, we wouldn’t be here to celebrate this milestone.

From the brewhouse to the taprooms, the warehouse floor to the road — this thing runs because a hundred-odd people show up and give a shit. Some have been here since the paddock days. Others joined a month ago. Doesn’t matter. Same standard, same pride in the work, same refusal to do things by halves.

I could wax on about everyone, but I need them all to know — it’s you that drives this business forward. We trust in your abilities. We trust in your judgement. Mel and I don’t take that lightly.

Fuck, I can’t wait to see where the next 10 years goes.

The Sustainability Bit. And No, We’re Not Greenwashing.

We’re Australia’s first, and still the only brewery to hold both Certified Sustainable status and Carbon Neutral credentials. That’s not a self-declared badge. It’s independently verified, across Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Every ingredient, every litre of water, every kilometre of freight, every can that leaves the brewery.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice:

Since 2017, we’ve grown production by 4900%. That’s an annual CAGR of 54.5%. In that same period, we’ve reduced our emissions per litre by 38%, down to just 103g of CO₂e per litre of beer produced.

We’ve completely eliminated our Scope 2 emissions. Zero. We generate all our power on site.

Our water efficiency is 3.5 litres per litre of beer, less than half the industry average of 9.1L. That saved 4.4 million litres of water in the last financial year alone. To put that into perspective, that’s over 2 Olympic swimming pools filled every year. Jindong Olympics 2030 here we come! 

We partnered with Tolga Farms in Kulin to source over 320,000kg of certified sustainable, regeneratively grown, single-origin malt annually. It’s the first project of this scale ever undertaken in Australia, and it saved 160 tonnes of GHG emissions in a single year.

We diverted 360,000kg of spent grain away from landfill last year. All of it goes back to the farm as cattle feed. The cattle love it and they’ve developed quite the palette. (Spent grain has water content hence the weight discrepancy between grain in and out!)

We’ve planted over 50,000 trees since 2017. This is on top of our Carbon Neutral offset programs. It’s not greenwashing, it’s part of how we run this farm.

100% of our packaging is either recycled-content, biodegradable, or fully recyclable. We switched from plastic pallet wrap to BearHugs and biodegradable stretch film, saving over 1,500kg of plastic in the last year.

We won back-to-back Beer & Brewer Sustainability Awards in 2024 and 2025.

Sharing this might seem self congratulatory but it’s not. We share it because we think transparency matters, and because someone has to demonstrate that making genuinely great beer and caring about the planet are not mutually exclusive. They never were.

The Things We’re Most Proud Of.

A few things that happened along the way that we couldn’t have scripted:

Champion WA Large Brewery three years running: 2022, 2023, 2024.

Australia’s Best Fruit Beer for Rock Candy at the Australian International Beer Awards.

Back-to-back Beer & Brewer Sustainability Awards.

Telstra WA Promoting Sustainability Award winner.

First craft brewery in Australia to install CO₂ reclaim technology.

First brewery in Australia (and still the only one) to hold Certified Sustainable and Carbon Neutral certification simultaneously.

The farm itself turned 100 in the ’23/’24 financial year. Not bad for a place we now brew 2.5 million litres of beer on.

Why We Do It.

Honestly? Because we give a shit.

We give a shit about the South West. About the farmers we work with directly to source the best local ingredients. About the water we use and the land we sit on. About the 50,000 trees we’ve planted and the native habitat corridors slowly coming back to life on this farm.

We give a shit about our team, the 100 people who show up every day and make this thing run. About the communities we’re building venues in, from Duncraig to Brunswick to Burswood. About the local sporting clubs, charities and causes we put money and beer behind every year.

And we give a shit about you, the person cracking a beer at the end of a long week, and what goes into making sure that beer was made properly. Properly meaning: great flavour, clean ingredients, honest provenance, and the smallest footprint we can manage.

The vision for Rocky Ridge has always been measured in generations, not quarters. We’re building something that lasts. A legacy of quality beer, real environmental stewardship, and community connection that will still matter in another 100 years.

Thanks for being part of it. 

Thanks for sharing these moments with us, you’re all legends.

Cheers and beers

Hamish, Mel, Jack and the Rocky Ridge Team.