Drayton's is hopping out into beer world with IronBark Hill

The ice smashes on the concrete floor, shattering, and sending chunks sliding off underneath wine barrels and other tanks.

“That happens all the time,” explains IronBark Hill’s head brewer, Lee Wilton.

Just over in the brewery section of this enormous arched-roofed shed, Wilton and his assistant brewer, Phil Lyne, bring down the temperature of the wort from around 100˚C to 20˚C, using a plate heat exchanger, or ‘plate chiller’, and as the ambient temperature in the winery rises the sheets of ice slowly melt and eventually drop dramatically to the floor.

“We have brine lines running above the brew tanks, which operate at around minus two degrees celsius’,” says Wilton. “That allows us to use the ‘plate chiller’ to exchange hot wort, or beer, through one side, and cold brine through the other way, which is part of the brewing process.”

IronBark Hill began its brewing life in 2016. As the story goes, the idea to establish the brewhouse came to Peter Drayton after sinking a few beers with his son-in-law at various functions they’d both attended. Wilton was a friend of Peter’s son-in-law and works as a radio oncologist in Newcastle. Before joining IronBark, he also happened to dabble in a bit of home brewing.

“Peter inadvertently tried a beer that I’d brewed for a few friends’ weddings and parties,” Wilton says.

“Between that and a few home brew awards I’d won, which proved I at least knew something about what I was doing, Peter called me up and asked if I could give him a hand to get started establishing the brewery.”

At present, Wilton can only spare one day a week out at IronBark Hill, so they recruited assistant brewer Phil Lyne to help out and work in the brewery full-time.

“Lee’s the brains of the operation and I’m the brawn,” Lyne says. “Lee will come up with the recipe and works out all the why’s and how’s, then I will put it all together during the week. I do a lot of cleaning too.”

The boys are busy brewing a number of different beer styles, including versions of the popular pale ale and American pale ale, as well as a sweetly citrus Hefeweizen, a stout that smells of black pudding, and a hazelnut brown, which recently received a positive review in the beer pages of Weekender (repeated at the end). 

“We brew about 12 styles of beer and rotate our regular brews pretty often,” Wilton says. “We do some experimental brews, like the Scottish Strong Ale and ‘Brexit’, which is an English bitter style beer.”

You can find IronBark Hill pouring at a few pubs around the Hunter Valley, and they’ve just started increasing their bottle range too. Your best bet, however, is to visit the Brewhouse on Hermitage Road, Pokolbin, pull up a pew and taste the beers, in situ, with a bit of Brewhouse food and a few friends.

Hazelnut Brown: Muddy brown with a foamy tan head and aromas of nutty, caramel fudge squished between layers of malted biscuits drizzled with sticky toffee. Similar flavours on the tongue delivered by quite a creamy mouth feel with a lash of herbaceous hops on the finish to round out the sweetness up front.