EXCLUSIVE: Ostra Distillers, based in Robinvale in Victoria’s north west, have announced their purchase of the former West End brewhouse previously owned by Lion.
The purchase will see the 500hl brewery, part of a $70 million refurbishment completed in 2015, transferred from Adelaide’s iconic West End site, which Lion closed last year, to Ostra’s Robinvale facility.
Ostra is already one of Australia’s largest grain, malt and grape spirit producers. With the West End brewhouse, acquired for an undisclosed sum, Ostra will significantly increase their whisky output. The site will have the capacity to produce 350 barrels of grain and malt spirit a day, well over 20 million litres of spirit per annum.
West End brewhouse – McMahon Services
Until this recent announcement, scant information on the Ostra facility had been made available to industry or the public.
The Robinvale site was originally a large grape spirit and sherry production facility built by McWilliam’s Wines in the early 1960s. But in the mid-2000s, McWilliam’s were looking to offload the site as the downturn in sherry consumption sharpened. That’s where Dawid Ostrowski came in.
Dawid Ostrowski – Supplied
Ostrowski, an engineer and entrepreneur, had started a small distilling business in Melbourne inspired by his Polish vodka-making grandfather. He first visited the McWilliam’s site in 2007 and was hoping to purchase a still McWilliam’s were selling for his own fledgling operation. But when inspecting the site, the owners unexpectedly asked Ostrowski if he was interested in buying the entire facility for a bargain price.
Ostrowski didn’t have the capital at the time, but he eventually struck a vendor financing agreement to pay McWilliam’s for the site via contract work through the distillery. Three years later, Ostrowski had fulfilled the terms of the agreement and taken full ownership.
‘Once we got the site paid off, we knew there was no money in grape spirit,’ Ostrowski says, speaking exclusively to Oz Whisky Review. ‘I knew I had to convert the distillery over to grain distillation, and I literally built my own little brewery on site to get whisky production started.’
Ostra Distillers site – Supplied
By that stage, Ostrowski was completing a Masters of Brewing and Distilling at Scotland’s Herriot-Watt University. He was well aware of Scotch whisky’s famed relationship with sherry, so converting the site to grain and malt spirit production to take advantage of the local fortified wine industry was the logical next step.
‘Our grain spirit changed everything. From there, we kept producing contract work for various businesses because we didn’t have a lot of money for marketing and branding at that stage.
‘Whisky’s the end game, and that’s always been the vision. It’s just taken us 18 years to get here. But we’ve been able to help the industry a lot behind the scenes and it’s given us capital to keep converting the site from a sherry facility to a grain distillery.’
Ostra’s 15,000 litre pot column still – Supplied
In recent years, Ostra have supplied a range of distilled spirits and beverages to customers throughout Australia and abroad. Their product range is diverse, and includes everything from brandy to neutral grain and grape spirit, gin, liqueurs and fully matured blended and single malt whisky.
Distilleries across Australia make use of a variety of Ostra products – Ned Whisky is one of their most prominent whisky customers, as we learned from the Ned team back in 2020. But the business also delivers product to companies in China, Japan and Europe, and Ostra has big plans to bring Australian whisky to a much larger global audience, which is one of the main reasons for the acquisition of the new brewhouse.
Ostra column still
‘We’ve had this plan for a long time and we’ve communicated that to all of our customers,’ says Ostrowski.
‘From our end, we’ve managed to score a really good deal and purchase this high-end Steinecker 500hl brewhouse. It’s state of the art, it’s fully automated, it’s a true gem, and it’s got such wonderful history coming from West End.’
The brewhouse will predominately be used to increase Ostra’s single malt output, and when it becomes fully operational over the next 12 months, the scale of the facility will mirror similar operations in Scotland, Ireland, the U.S. and Japan.
‘I know we’re big, but we see ourselves as a small craft place,’ he says. ‘We’re a small family business, it’s just me and my wife Rachel, there’s no other investors, and we’ve come across this gem of a site which is absolutely massive.
‘We’re just here to do exactly what other Australian distillers are doing, which is to create high-end product. The only difference is, we’re creating scalability so that we can sell Australian brands globally, whether it’s ours or someone else’s.’
Ostrowski is also laying down spirit for his own whisky, an estimated 20,000 casks this year alone, which he will likely release under a separate brand in future. He says further innovations at the Robinvale site will be announced later this year.