Young Henrys: The Australian beer company that’s saving the planet

Some things feel so embedded in our society that it’s difficult to remember a time when they weren’t so ubiquitous. 

I’m talking about things like Opal Cards on the train, $30 schnitties at the RSL and a craft brewery in every warehouse district.

And that craft beer scene has exploded in Australia (and across the world) to become as common as your local Leagues Club or chicken shop. Indeed, craft breweries are to the 2010’s & 2020’s what wine bars were to the late 90’s.

But one such brewery has been around longer than most, their name synonymous with this shift: Young Henrys.

For over 10 years, Young Henrys has been producing award-winning beers and spirits, paving the way for the Australian craft beer industry to enter the mainstream on a level that just wasn’t there before them.

I sat down with Director & Co-founder, Oscar McMahon, to talk about their journey.

Big ideas in the back of a pub

Oscar: “Richard (Adamson) and I were running this beer appreciation club. This is going back about 12 years now. The most important thing that made us take it seriously, when Rich said, ‘how cool would it be to start a beer company that was in touch with the people drinking the beer like beer club is?’”

And that founding value is still ringing true today. A mainstay of Young Henrys marketing message is “serve the people”, found everywhere from their merch, to their bar mats to the murals on the walls, it permeates the entire operation.

But it wasn’t as simple as having an idea and putting it to practise. It seldom is.

Oscar: “It took us 2 years. It was a really difficult process of trying to find people to invest, put money in and believe in the idea. Looking back, we would’ve looked like the weirdest odd couple, walking around town asking people for money. We managed to get around 4 or 5 people and everyone was just all in. There were remortgages, there were loans from parents, someone’s inheritance went in. If Young Henrys went t*ts up, I had no concept of how I was going to pay back the money I had borrowed.”

Growing from their mistakes

Oscar: “Part of a company’s story is how you recover from mistakes. If everything just goes right, you don’t need to bring in extra expertise and bring in new people. You don’t need to be collaborative and to listen to other people. I think that you learn more from your mistakes.”

This is a side that is often not covered with a business as successful as Young Henrys. A lot of the time, egos come to the fore and a story of a single person’s journey alone is favoured over the much more common (and truthful) tale of genuine teamwork and good circumstance.

Not so here.

Oscar: “People who are owners or founders in a business, they feel very connected to it, sometimes in not such a positive way, you can have a bit of ego around it. Being in business for 10 years, really knocks that out of you, (makes you realise) you’re not bulletproof, you’re not a genius, you’re an idiot who has managed to luck it most of the way, and you’ve got some good people around you and you should be thankful for that.”

It’s this acknowledgement that collaboration often bears the sweeter fruit that has helped guide Young Henrys down a path that they continue to trod and it’s not exclusive to those within their own ranks.

Collaboration throughout

Oscar: “Collaboration is a really interesting tool when used well. We’re a creative business, and doing a collaborative project with anyone, be it a band or another brand, you’re actually forcing yourself to be creative not just to your own standards, but to someone else’s, and that little bit of creative friction can be really, really good for learning and progressing your brand.”

But there is one dominant area in which Young Henrys continues to seek collaboration with: music. It’s inescapable. Even as you approach the Young Henrys brewery, you’re greeted with an enormous mural of their Ramones-inspired logo, towering above the terraced houses surrounding it.

But again, this is a move that is thought out. That it aligns with their sentimentalities is merely the cherry on top, leading them to work with smaller, local bands like Dune Rats, all the way to global superstars like Foo Fighters.

Oscar: “We collaborate with musicians because we’ve always found that to be an interesting thing. We’re not a beer company that wants to talk about beer all of the time, we’re a beer company that wants to talk about good, fun occasions where you go, and yeah, you might drink beer there.”

Sustainable success

Oscar: “Young Henrys is a brand that reflects the values of the people that make it up. For a bunch of died-in-the-wool Inner Westies, sustainability’s pretty up there. It doesn’t necessarily make someone start drinking your beer, but it might make someone who already drinks your beer feel better about supporting your company on an ongoing basis.”

This isn’t a hollow statement either. Young Henrys goes much deeper into sustainable practices than most people would ever imagine, at levels rarely talked about. And it’s all with an angle to better their community, whether that be in the more literal sense, or the greater brewing community.

Oscar: “We buy solar power back from local investors at a fixed rate of return. Really good deal for us, we didn’t have to spend the money that we didn’t have on putting in the solar. And a bunch of local investors get to invest in a local business going greener. Instead of waiting for legislation, you’re putting some change into the hands of the community which is really cool.”

The Algae Project

Then there’s the Algae Project: an experiment that could change the emissions of breweries across the globe, even affecting other industries for the better.

Oscar: “Basically, brewer’s yeast eats sugar, creates CO2 and alcohol. Microalgae ingests CO2, uses that to make more algae and releases oxygen. So you’ve got these 2 micro organisms that live in a liquid environment that, basically, are doing these completely opposite jobs. That microalgae then gets sold as a food additive for cattle to reduce the methane emissions of cows. 

In the brewing industry, if everyone adopts (this), you have all of these urban businesses that stop releasing CO2, they become oxygen creators, they create another sellable product, which then goes to reduce the emissions of a whole different industry.”

Like I said earlier, no hollow statements.

And this is what makes Young Henrys such an easy beer company to get behind. They show genuine care for their community and their industry, to the point that they rarely hesitate to take the lead on things that have the potential to make everybody’s lives better.

That they also brew some of the best beer you can fill a schooner with is a fortunate consequence of a talented team working together to serve the people, and long may they serve us.