It’s the winter solstice in Tasmania. Back in its capital, Hobart, the small city is bustling due to the annual art fair, Dark Mofo. But I’ve escaped the crowds, and I’m driving along the Derwent Valley—the traditional home of the Leenowwenne people—where towering eucalyptus trees lining the road hang with icy moisture in the air.

I turn up a dirt road, noting some grazing cows, passing a colonial-era stone cottage, and eventually stopping outside a pair of sheds. One has a wooden bar behind which I can see a row of taps; clearly a tasting room. Another entrance, marked by a few rows of ornamental hops, their foliage ready to drop and become mulch, appears to be the entrance at Two Metre Tall brewery. I’ve arrived at the place where some of Australia’s most interesting beers are made.

Co-owner Jane Huntington puts down her clipboard and walks me past some wine barrels, which she explains that Australian natural winemaker Tom Shobbrook has dropped off. “It’s their second time collaborating, they call it Two Metre Tom,” she explains; the barrels have wine lees in them. These spent grape skins and leftover yeasts will become part of one of her husband Ashley Huntington’s beers.

Illustrastions by Tida Bradshaw — Illustrations by Tida Bradshaw

I’m unsurprised to find such experiments here. Two Metre Tall doesn’t make canned beer—its brews come in 375ml bottles or, occasionally, in keg form at a particular kind of gastropub. It doesn’t sell an IPA, or a “session” ale. It works entirely outside of the realm of beer styles. Ashley Huntington is a (literally) towering presence at natural wine events in Australia. He has been embraced by our community here in a way that hasn’t occurred in the brewing world. It’s easy to see why—Ashley starts by telling me he offended some brewers recently on social media.

“But I’m not a brewer,” he insists, his big eyes like saucers full of tea. He’s wearing a beanie but I know his untamed, curly brown hair is tucked inside. With Two Metre Tall, Ashley and Jane are railing against the homogeneity that defines much of Australian beer. But it all happened through accident, and an insatiable curiosity about fermentation.

***

After years in Southern France, where Ashley was the winemaker at Domaine de la Baume, in 2004 he and Jane decided to return to Australia and settle in Tasmania, where they planned to plant a vineyard. They were just settling on their new land when Ashley became infatuated with a plant growing across the road, and asked his neighbour what it was.

“Hops. Huh? Hops. Really, that’s beer isn’t it?” Ashley knew nothing at all about beer. In Australia, at the time—around 2010—from his perspective there was one kind of beer, and it was a pale ale. You drank it at the pub, in a pint or a schooner, no questions, no fuss.

But Ashley was keen to learn more.

“Hops have grown here since the 1830s,” he says, leaning against the wall of his shed. “They’re the oldest continuously farmed enterprise in whitefulla Australia.”

““Hops have grown here since the 1830s. They’re the oldest continuously farmed enterprise in whitefulla Australia.””

— Ashley Huntingdon, Two Metre Tall

Gradually, Ashley became obsessed with the idea that hops had grown all around Tasmania in its fertile soils, but nowhere was there a brewery. He learned why—Ashley leans against the old 1980s-era mash tun, and recounts some Australian history:

“Miners, Europeans, and piss-heads, they couldn’t transport beer, so they started making it,” he says. There was an explosion of small breweries—according to Ashley’s research, at one point in the Nineteenth century, there were “153 breweries in Ballarat alone,” he says, mentioning a large town in the state of Victoria.

The newly formed Australian federal government wasn’t having it—in 1902, they passed the Excise Act, “the most destructive taxation act you could possibly conceive of,” imposing regulations and tariffs on beer products in response to what they saw as an alarming proliferation of breweries. In a short time, most of the breweries had shut down. “They couldn’t handle it, they all went tits up,” Ashley tells me.

Jane chimes in to point out that, to this day, in Australia, beer is in the same taxation category as fuel or cigarettes, which requires producers to bear the brunt of goods taxation—whereas wine is considered a luxury item, meaning its consumers pay that tax. That’s changing, this year, fortunately—but it was a rough start for Jane and Ashley when they began brewing, with little idea what they were doing.

They started out using the very same mash tun beside us now—back then, it was installed in a pub in Hobart.

“At first, we were using bland commercial yeasts, and we made pale ale,” Ashley says. “The idea was simply to use the hops.”

But they weren’t filtering; they weren’t making “sterile beer.”

“The bloody thing kept changing,” recalls Ashley, referring to those initial brews. “It was lovely when I brewed it, then it started getting acidic. And I had no idea what was going on. And we were trying to sell it—quickly—before it changed.

When they poured a taste for customers, the response was, “that’s infected.”

Jane and Ashley plodded on, despite this negative feedback, for seven years. They had never heard of sour beers. They experimented with adding cherries, with a vague notion that fruit was used to brew in Europe.

“I was intellectually obsessed with the faults,” says Ashley. “I could find nothing in books. I knew something was going on. There was no such thing as natural wine yet, here. No such thing as natural fermentation.”

Distraught by the lack of appreciation for their beers as well as the financial strain of being a small brewer—exacerbated by the aforementioned taxation situation—Ashley was on the brink of going back to winemaking consulting, and Jane was ready to renew her career as a teacher. It was in 2012 that Ashley earned the prestigious “Churchill Fellowshi p,” a significant travel stipend for Australian professionals who can only learn something specific by going abroad. This allowed him and Jane to spend time overseas learning about the use of fruit in brewing beer. In classic Australian style—you hear versions of this story with breadmaking, natural wine, and cheese—the tradition and knowledge that they sought had to be found elsewhere.

This changed everything, starting in Belgium.

“We’ve rocked up to Cantillon first thing,” Ashley tells me, “because we’d heard something.”

“There were barrels everywhere, a funky smell,” Jane says. As Jean Pierre Van Roy, the current owner’s father showed them around, Jane and Ashley looked at each other and said, “His beer’s got the same problems ours has.” They were suddenly not alone. After Belgium, Ashley went alone to the US— which he was initially sceptical about—but he was “impressed by the craft beer movement.”

“I dreaded [going to the US], as I'd found the American wine industry so pretentious,” Ashley says. He expected something similar in beer but was pleasantly surprised by what he found. The trip made him realise “how straight-laced, narrow… and vanilla the Australian brewing scene was by comparison.”

They returned to Tasmania with an expanded brewing vocabulary as well as ideas, and two important newfound realisations. One: that they did not have to be ashamed of their beers. And two: that ageing beers was absolutely crucial to their success.

As soon as they’d made it back to the shed on the farm where they’d intended to plant vines, Ashley began opening up the seven-year-old bottles of their very first brew and decanting them all into a barrel, where they aged for over a year. That became their first special release of Cleansing Ale in 2014. Now, a solera system (where a portion of beer is taken for a particular year's blend, but some remains in the barrel for future years) is employed to blend multiple brews to produce this beer.

““Ashley’s beers are incredibly complex, mind bending creatures that demand attention.””

— Tess Bryant, Giorgio di Maria

Jane and Ashley were already on a path to making non-standardised beers, but the visit to Cantillon and other lambic brewers was insightful. “[After] being in those cellars in Belgium, I came back and stood here at our cellar door, and thought of all the times I’d been apologetic, a bit timid to people tasting,” says Jane. “And since then I’ve just been like, well, this is what it is. Unapologetic.”

They continued experimenting, and planted a field of hops, mostly out of necessity, due to their local hop grower phasing out “moderate hops” and replacing them with what Ashley describes as “test tube-baby varieties approaching 20% alpha [acids] for the international IPA markets,” who thinks of hops as “just another fruit,” anyway.

Then, the Huntingtons proceeded to develop a new obsession: making purely Tasmanian beers.

***

The word “terroir” isn’t on any Two Metre Tall labels, and neither Ashley nor Jane mentioned it when we spoke—they didn’t have to. By offering a range of four beers, which are made exclusively with grains and hops or fruit all sourced around four Tasmanian rivers, it feels obvious what they are setting out to do. There’s Derwent, soured using the bacteria present on raw spelt, complemented by the aroma of whole hop flowers (the Derwent is the river surrounding the Huntington’s farm and brewery).

Huon integrates dark roasted malts—the only ingredient not sourced from Tasmania—with apple juice from the Huon Valley; is it a beer or a cider? Who cares—it’s refreshing and delicious. Forth is probably my favourite—it features various grains from a local grower as well as quinoa, which Ashley points out is a seed, not a grain, and is a “bitch to brew,” being quite sticky and gelatinous—but adds a nice bitter note to the beer. There’s also the Forrester, described as a “wild amber.”

All of these beers proudly display the wild character of Brettanomyces. To me, it makes them lively and elevates their flavours.

Two Metre Tall has found its home among natural wine drinkers (like myself) who are accustomed to lively drinks that might be a little rough around the edges. In Australia, its distributor Giorgio de Maria is the importer of cult natural wines from Europe such as Le Coste, Alain Castex, and Cantina Giardino. Recently, Two Metre Tall joined the portfolio of US importer Tess Bryant, who brings a host of Australian natural wines such as Jauma, Borachio, and Commune of Buttons, to the States.

“[Ashley’s] beers aren’t thoughtless, easy-drinking thirst-quenchers—honestly what I normally look for in a beer,” Tess tells me over email. “They are incredibly complex, mind-bending creatures that demand attention and stand strong on the table alongside a plethora of delicious natural wines.”

She and Ashley began working together when he was on a sales trip to the US and found Two Metre Tall being poured alongside a collection of IPAs in bars that felt random. Ashley wanted his beers to be enjoyed by people who appreciated natural fermentation. For Tess, it’s exciting to work with someone who’s so analytical and curious about fermentation, and whose products (ciders and meads, alongside the beers) vary immensely from batch to batch in an exciting way.

“The [Two Metre Tall beers, ciders, and meads] are such an easy fit for those looking for flavours both adventuresome and familiar at the same time,” says Tess, adding that she anticipates natural wine drinkers will love them.

In a plain, unmarked bottle back at their farmhouse brewery, sits the efforts of the past eighteen months, a 100% spontaneously fermented beer. Previous beers still received a pitch of commercial yeast. This is the first true “natural” beer, if you will, that they have made. It tastes great—a bit unpredictable and wild, definitely fun, somewhat savoury.

Surely, after they’ve made this, Ashley and Jane will come up with some other fermentation goal. But they won’t do it because it’s trendy—they no longer stand out as the village fools in a country that now boasts a growing handful of experimental breweries who wild ferment, inoculate with fruit, or make stout with oyster shells. They’ll do it because they have an uncanny obsession with fermentation; a respect for the process so deep they are wary to impose too heavily upon it.