Today is the birthday of Nicholas Fitzgerald (August 7, 1829-August 17, 1908). He “was an Australian politician, a member of the Victorian Legislative Council from 1864 until 1908,” and co-founded the Castlemaine Brewery, along with his brother Edward Fitzgerald.

Here’s his short biography from his Wikipedia page:

Born in Galway, Ireland to Francis Fitzgerald and Eleanor Joyes, Fitzgerald attended Trinity College, Dublin from 1845 until he entered King’s Inns in 1848 and Queen’s College, Galway in 1849. After travelling in Ceylon and India he moved to Victoria in 1859 and established a family brewery at Castlemaine with his brother Edward. The business had soon expanded and Fitzgerald owned property in New South Wales and Queensland. He was a member of the Victorian Legislative Council for North Western Province from 1864 to 1882 and for North Central Province 1882 to 1904, Southern Province June 1904. until his death on 17 August 1908. He also represented Victoria at the Federal Convention in Sydney in 1891 and the Colonial Conference of 1894 in Ottawa where he represented both Victoria and Tasmania. In 1863 he had married Marianne O’Shanassy, with whom he had seven sons. Fitzgerald died at St Kilda on 17 August 1908.

His brother Edward started the brewery, and Nicholas emigrated to Australia in 1859 and joined him in the brewery business. By 1871 the name Castlemaine Brewery had been adopted, in 1875 the brothers opened a brewery in South Melbourne, and in 1885 the enterprise was turned into a public company. Breweries were opened right across the country and the brothers were involved in the establishment of the Castlemaine Perkins brewery in Brisbane which is home of the XXXX brand and is still brewing to this day.”

And this short history is from the Castlemaine Perkins Wikipedia page:

In 1877, brothers Nicholas Fitzgerald and Edward Fitzgerald bought the site of a failing distillery and created a brewery, which they named after an existing brewery that they owned in Castlemaine, Victoria in the Victorian goldfields. They began to brew beer there in the following year and the brewery continues production to this day. The first beverage was called XXX Sparkling Ale.

In 1866, Patrick Perkins started the Perkins Brewery in Toowoomba. In 1872, he later extended his operations to Brisbane with the purchase of the City Brewery in 1872.

The company restricted its operations entirely to brewing by 1916. XXXX was introduced with new advertising campaign in 1924 after the brewery employed German brewer, Alhois William Leitner. The advertising included a depiction of a little man wearing a suit with a smile, a wink and a boater hat. The so-called ‘Fourex Man’ soon became one of the most recognised symbols in Queensland.

In 1928 (long after the death of Patrick Perkins in 1901), the Perkins brewing company was bought by the Castlemaine Brewery with new company being known as Castlemaine Perkins Limited.

Castlemaine Perkins was acquired in 1992 by drinks conglomerate Lion Nathan.

The Castlemaine or Milton Brewery was established at Milton, Brisbane, in 1878 by Fitzgerald Quinlan & Co. The brothers Nicholas and Edward Fitzgerald had established brewing interests at Castlemaine in Victoria, and then in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Newcastle. In Brisbane, Quinlan Gray & Co. had taken over the interests of the Milton Distillery that was established on the site at Milton in 1870. The first brew by the new Milton Brewery was called Castlemaine XXX Sparkling Ale and was made to the same formula as the beer brewed by Castlemaine Brewery in Victoria. (Information taken from: Public Affairs Department, Castlemaine Perkins Limited, comp., History of the Castlemaine Perkins Brewery, 1877 – 1993, 1993).
This drawing of the brewery depicts some laden wagons in the street in front of the three-storey building. A worker stands alongside. The signage reads: Castlemaine Brewery, Fitzgerald, Quinlan & Co.

The Castlemaine Brewery at Milton, Brisbane, 1879, from the State Library of Queensland.

Today is the birthday of Peter Grant Hay (July 9, 1879–August 29, 1961). He “was an Australian brewer, landowner, pastoralist and thoroughbred racehorse breeder. He founded the Richmond N.S. Brewing Co. Ltd. in Melbourne Australia,” which upon his death was sold to Carlton & United Breweries. “He is responsible for both the introduction of pasteurization to Australia’s dairy industry and the introduction of the Swiss Nathan System of brewing to Australia.”

Here’s his biography from his Wikipedia page:

Grant Hay was born in Bright, Victoria, the son of James Grant Hay, partner of Melbourne shipping firm, Coulson Hay & Co. and Catherine Margaret (née Cox), daughter of Irish distillery founder, Charles Cox. The Grant Hay’s owned hop farm estates in Bright, Victoria and the Derwent Valley in Tasmania and were the main supplier of hops to Carlton & United Breweries in Victoria.

Upon the death of his father in 1914, Grant Hay traveled to America by steamship to San Francisco on board the USS American, meeting Tooheys Brewery manager Arnold Resch. The two agreed to inspect the major American breweries of Milwaukee, including the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company, Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, and the Miller Brewing Company and Anheuser-Busch brewing company in St Louis. Grant Hay then sailed to London to inspect the Courage Brewery plant and its hotels.

He then flew to Zurich and met with Dr Leopold Nathan, a Swiss chemist, who had invented a new brewing system. Grant Hay drove to Munich and attended Oktoberfest in the company of the Reinheitsgebot before the outbreak of war and returned to Australia.

In 1918 he married Margaret Glover, cousin of Australian landscape artist John Glover. Grant Hay was forty. They had four children, Patricia, Kathleen, Alison and Peter. The Grant Hay’s settled at Sackville Street, Kew and later moved to ‘Egoline’ at Albany Road in Toorak, Victoria. The family also owned ‘Kilby Park,’a one hundred acre dairy farm and thoroughbred racehorse stud at Kew, Victoria.

By age fifty Grant Hay was already one of Victoria’s wealthiest hop merchants when the Victorian beer wars began in 1925. Carlton & United Breweries had grown into Australia’s largest brewer and began to use monopolistic practices of lowering the cost of supply to hop growers, including Grant Hay’s ‘Kentdale’ hops from the Derwent Valley.

And this is a history of his brewery, the Richmond N.S. Brewing Co.:

The Kentdale Hop Estate was one of the finest properties in Tasmania. It was located fifty kilometres from Hobart and harvested thirty hectares of finest-quality hops. In 1927 a business disagreement took place between Grant Hay and Carlton & United Breweries over the price and quantity of hops, causing Carlton to cancel its contract with Kentdale.

Resentful of Carlton’s unfair business practices, Grant Hay proceeded to off-load his hops successfully to Carlton’s interstate rival, Tooheys. He then summoned a meeting of his hop estate managers from Bright in Victoria and the Derwent Valley in Tasmania for a meeting at Coulson Hay & Co. headquarters in Melbourne to establish his own brewery.

On 4 April 1927, Grant Hay wired a cable to Dr Nathan Leopold in Zurich, Switzerland for the order of the first Swiss Nathan Brewing System to be shipped to Melbourne and to be accompanied by Master Swiss Brewer, Heinrich Walter Haenggi of Zurich. Over the course of three months, Grant Hay proceeded to buy up five industrial sites adjoning his Church Street property. He then ordered a consignment of three thousand units of purified gin to be shipped from British Army headquarters in Lahore and resold the rebottled gin to American bootleggers in prohibition controlled Chicago, netting Coulson Hay & Co. a million pounds. The deal set Grant Hay up for life, and bankrolled the construction of the brewery.

On 13 August 1927, Grant Hay’s application for permit to build a brewery on the site at Church Street Richmond was approved by the Richmond City Council. Grant Hay then hired contractors to excavate the site in preparation of the brewery’s construction, when the excavation was delayed, Grant Hay proceeded to dynamite the site himself using three tonnes of dynamite.

On the morning of 23 August 1927, the sound of percussion could be heard as far away as Brighton, and was said to have woken the Mayor of Melbourne from his sleep. When nearby Richmond residents objected, Grant Hay sued the residents and offered to buy their homes. Eventually, council sided with the residents and sought an injunction against Grant Hay to the detonation, but Grant Hay won on appeal and continued unabated.

Mr Grant Hay retained Brigadier Sir Eugene Gorman KBE, MC, QC as his full time barrister and confidant. Litigous by nature, Grant Hay later sued the Camberwell City Council on its liquor licensing trading laws on appeal before the Privy Council, UK. Mr Gorman’s rooms in the Equity Chambers building on Melbourne’s Bourke Street are named Gorman Chambers in his honour.

On 24 October 1927, Heinrich Walter Haenggi and his wife arrived at Port Melbourne aboard the SS Modolva bringing with them the single largest steel works consignment for disembarkation. Three transports were used to unload and deliver the Swiss brewing plant machinery and equipment to Church Street. Mr Grant Hay drove the Haenggi’s to their hotel in his new 1927 Packard Roadster and held a dinner in honour of their arrival at his home.

By Easter of 1928, the construction of the Richmond Brewery was completed and a toast was held on the assembly line by Mrs Grant Hay and included two hundred guests, from growers, hoteliers and workers. The brewery began its first run of Richmond Lager and Bitter Beer on 24 April 1928 with 88 dozen bottles of output per week which continued to grow to 200 dozen bottles of output per week by 1929. The quality of the beer, and the fact that it had been produced free of any combine commended the beverage to the public’s taste. With his own hop supplies, Grant Hay had lowered his costs of production and unit costs considerably. He then followed Courage Brewery’s example by purchasing his own pubs and hotel outlets across Australia, exclusively serving Richmond beer.

The Richmond Brewery was a remarkable success. By 1940 shipments of Richmond Lager were eagerly consumed in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide. By 1950 annual tunrover revenues in the Richmond Brewery had grown to almost three million pounds. Exports to India and Brazil soon followed, with the bottle labels Richmond Pilsener, Lager Bitter and Stout all sporting the illustrated Tiger’s head logo, designed by Mrs Grant Hay.

During World War II, Grant Hay negotiated the supply of Richmond Beer to Australian troops in North Africa and American troops stationed at Sandown Racecourse, which he owned. He also purchased land on Flinders Island in Tasmania where he stood Fourth Hand, winner of the 1927 Irish 2,000 Guineas and bred champion Australian racehorse Counsel, winner of the 1944 Caulfield Cup and champion American racehorse, Warra Nymph at Del Mar. Grant Hay also owned the seventy-two foot ketch, “Jane Moorhead” which was used by General Douglas MacArthur for the Allied troop landings in the Pacific.

By 1960 the brewery continued to prosper controlling sixteen per cent of Victorian beer sales and eight per cent of Australian beer sales nationally. Mr Grant Hay’s health was however deteriorating and no succession plan was put in place, despite his only surviving son. A charismatic autocrat and fierce business competitor, Mr Grant Hay would not allow the company to be controlled by anyone but himself. He refused to publicly list the company and repeatedly rejected merger offers from Courage Brewery and Carlton & United Breweries.

Upon his death in 1961, Mrs Grant Hay negotiated the sale of the Richmond Brewery between bidders Courage Brewery, Asahi Breweries and Carlton & United Breweries, accepting a final offer to purchase the brewery from Carlton & United Breweries on January 26, 1962.

Here’s another history of Hay’s brewery from the Nathan Institute:

This must have been interesting….