The Southern Expressway once boasted the dubious honor of being the world’s longest reversible one-way road. It is a broad, sweeping stretch of asphalt that rolls through the suburbs of Adelaide toward the crumbling sandstone cliffs and golden beaches of the Fleurieu Peninsula. At the end of the Expressway lies McLaren Vale, one of the Southern Hemisphere’s premier wine regions, known for prestigious estates and for the dominance of Shiraz.
On a fine spring day in early October, with the first wisps of seasonal haze hanging high over the gulf and the roadside wattle in full bloom, I’m among the many travelers making the pilgrimage south. Most are likely anticipating a day spent teetering between wineries framed by vines in budburst, lips and teeth taking on darker shades of crimson as the day progresses, shirts untucking and hair unraveling. But I’m not going as far as the Vale today.
Instead, I’m stopping short, taking an exit to the unassuming, industrial suburb of Lonsdale. My destination is a utilitarian warehouse that exists in a different register from the manicured lawns, polished slate, and postcard-ready vistas of the cellar doors 20 minutes down the road. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s where Lone Gum Farmhouse—only the second dedicated mixed-fermentation brewery in South Australia, after the Barossa Valley’s Ministry of Beer—calls home.
We’re here to meet Ryan Bickley, Lone Gum’s multi-titular owner, operator, and head brewer. As we step over the threshold he greets us warmly, a green glass bottle in one hand. Exuberant and charismatic, Bickley has a natural propensity for hospitality. Though his formal training is in engineering, his secondary education was born of the countless hours spent in local pubs that have been championing good, interesting beer in Adelaide for decades. A well-timed trip in his early 20s to Brussels and the Senne Valley, and to breweries like Cantillon, cemented his interest in wild fermentation.
At institutions like the Wheatsheaf Hotel and The Earl of Leicester (where Rodenbach Grand Cru had a permanent tapline for many years), he learned from his peers, and was invited to brew days hosted by a backyard homebrew collective across the road from the Earl. “Some of the best brew days we had were when Ryan was there,” says Nathan Carter, the beer buyer at the Earl of Leicester during the early aughts and now in the same role at the Stirling Cellars bottle shop.
When I asked how he sees Bickley’s work in the context of the local beer scene and local tastes, Carter says, “Adelaide has a close craft beer drinking community and there’s a lot of them that just drink Sours. When I get Cantillon in, it’s sold in a couple of hours. [Lone Gum Farmhouse] will blow people’s minds. When it comes to Sours no one is close. Internationally, [in] five years, he will be up there.”
The future tense is necessary because Lone Gum Farmhouse has yet to see an official retail release, despite bottles having been around for nearly a decade now. “My solera project is eight years old,” says Bickley, a wry smile on his face; he’s well aware of the absurdity of having a brewing project turning no profit for this long. “For me, it’s just experiment, taste, refine,” he says, reflecting on his origin story. “I’m a glutton for reading, white papers, books, anecdotes, anything. When I began brewing on my own I bought a 100L brew kit and started triple, quadruple batching to fill single barrels. I was brewing trial batches twice a week, and would go through up to 150 to 200 trials at a time, then was filling the odd barrel when I was happy.”
From there, he began a phase of itinerant brewing, using the facilities of local success story Little Bang Brewing in exchange for working on the canning line. In the meantime, he began to draw up his plans for the future.
Carter recently convinced Bickley to make some bottles available at Stirling Cellars, and they were gone within the day. Otherwise, the only way the beer has made its way into the hands of drinkers is via Bickley himself or through his local pub, the Gilbert Street Hotel in central Adelaide. When I mention the online discourse to Bickley—the local response has been effusive—he is evasive in his humility. “Where have they been finding them?” he laughs.
“Adelaide has a close craft beer drinking community and there’s a lot of them that just drink Sours. When I get Cantillon in, it’s sold in a couple of hours. [Lone Gum Farmhouse] will blow people’s minds. When it comes to Sours no one is close. Internationally, [in] five years, he will be up there.”
For my part, I first became aware of Lone Gum when a panel selected it as the Breakthrough South Australian Brewery of the Year on popular Australian beer podcast Step Brewers. This was despite the fact that the vast majority of listeners—even those for whom the brewery was local—were unlikely to try any of its beers in the near future.
Samuel Mahoney is a local designer and photographer who chaired the panel, and spoke with me about his own initial encounters. “My first encounter with [Lone Gum] was on the Unico Zelo [winery’s] YouTube channel, Wine for the People,” he says. “They brought out an unlabeled bottle from a brewery I had never heard of before.” From there, he corresponded with Bickley, and was able to highlight some of the issues he was facing getting the brewery started up on Graild, the South Australia-focused drinks publication he was running at the time. “By the time it wound up on the site, [it] was one of the most-read articles, so the interest was obviously there,” he says.
The decision to give Lone Gum the award seemed a radical one at the time, but Mahoney stands by it. “Lone Gum just felt like the most exciting development in the South Australia beer scene at the time—it just so happens that some obstacles have meant that [most] are still yet to try Ryan’s stuff.”
In a way, you get the sense that sharing his beers with the world is not necessarily even the first consideration for Bickley. “The [first] Sours that I liked were outside of my uni student budget, and the local ones were not that enjoyable for me, but I had a few from over the ditch [in New Zealand] that changed my mind a bit,” he recalls. “There weren’t many available when I started out, and I enjoyed them. So I set about making them as well as I could.”
Even though Bickley is, by all accounts, closing in on a vision of the beer he wants to produce and the quality he aspires to, the space we enter is hardly what he had in mind when he started his journey.
Originally, Lone Gum Farmhouse was to be just that—a farmhouse brewery, entrenched in an agricultural landscape. Bickley, along with longtime friends and collaborators Brad Cameron and Beau Linn, paints a vivid picture of their intentions for the Bickley family property, situated on the southern border of McLaren Vale: row upon row of fruit trees; bushes laden with berries; root crops; herb gardens; rustling thatches of wheat. These varied crops and projects would all make use of the region’s incomparable terroir to produce beer evocative of its surroundings.
While the orchards and plantings came along easily enough, Lone Gum was quickly enveloped in thick swathes of red tape. The majority of McLaren Vale sits within the Onkaparinga Council region, but by an unfortunate cadastral fluke, part of the Bickley property extended 400 meters into the neighboring Alexandrina District Council, making approval difficult, if not impossible to obtain. Brewing is treated as an industrial practice, and the council had concerns about its waste output, though Bickley is quick to point out that the resultant refuse is similar to that of winemaking, which faces little of the same pushback.
“Lone Gum just felt like the most exciting development in the South Australia Beer scene at the time—it just so happens that some obstacles have meant that [most] are still yet to try Ryan’s stuff.”
Although Bickley received several initial approvals, antiquated council legislation, as well as the property’s proximity to a small cluster of residences, meant that there was no flexibility to establish the kind of venue he wanted. He went as far as drafting proposals for modifications to planning boundaries before deciding to throw in the towel on his dream of a rural taproom. The Onkaparinga Council advised him to look to the more industrial Lonsdale to establish his business.
For many years, the South Australian wine industry has cultivated a perception of exclusivity. This is bolstered by its claim to some of the world’s oldest vine plantings, with stringent quarantine measures insulating them from diseases that have plagued Old World vineyards. However, while 60% of high-end Australian wine exports come from South Australia, the majority of locals looking to relax at the end of a hard day’s labor will likely still reach for a pint rather than a wine glass.
Despite that perceived division, reactions to Lone Gum among local winemakers and industry professionals have been mostly positive. Bickley attributes this to a function of McLaren Vale itself. The region is known for having some of the greatest diversity of terroir of any wine region in the world, and the vintners and viticulturists operating locally have learned to work with what they have; perhaps as a result, he says, they seem to be open-minded about new products and new ideas. He positions this in stark contrast to the tight-laced Barossa Valley north of Adelaide, which he characterizes as more homogenous of character and parochial of attitude.
Still, Bickley’s difficulty in establishing himself locally feels like an indictment of the lack of progressive attitudes in Australian local councils—fellow Wild Ale specialists Dollar Bill Brewing in Ballarat, Victoria underwent similar difficulties—but also a seeming missed opportunity for the McLaren Vale gastro-tourism industry. While there’s a handful of breweries operating out of the region, few are doing what Lone Gum is. As land here goes for a premium, the most cost-effective approach for breweries is to lean into the Instagram-friendly cellar door blueprint, with taplists that do not do much to raise eyebrows or ruffle feathers.
The kind of beer that Bickley is producing—the kind that takes great care, patience, and years of experience to make—is arguably far more akin to wine in process and accessibility, and should be a natural fit here. But paradoxically, this does even more to alienate customers of both stripes, as a product normally taken at face value demands the attention traditionally reserved only for the “boutique.”
The change of scenery has brought some of its own unique challenges in this vein. Bickley is quick to acknowledge that the average local customers, tradespeople, and laborers in Lonsdale are unlikely to seek out challenging wild-fermented beer. To better serve local tastes, he intends to establish an offshoot brand of no-nonsense, easy-drinking Lager as a taproom staple.
He gestures to the front half of the expansive space, where a makeshift bar holds court before a sleek line of tap fittings. “The front is going to be a 100-person-capacity venue, but we’ve got the licensing to expand to 300,” he says. “And this will all have to be storage,” he gestures to the rear, which is crowded with stacks of reclaimed timber, pallets of bottles, and shelves cluttered with equipment. The space formerly operated as a homebrew store and brew-it-yourself facility, and the prior signage still sits at the front of the building. There was little to salvage from the previous operation, and while an 8.5-barrel brewhouse and hand-crafted coolship are expected to arrive in a few weeks, for now the site feels like standing in a bizarrely brewing-oriented estate sale.
I arrive the day before drainage is due to be installed, and a deep concrete trench scores the center of the space. Weatherbeaten, mismatched couches sit alongside handbuilt tables and benches. A tower of speakers fills the room with light mood music, though this is apparently frequently interspersed with heavy drum-and-bass to help with the long brew days. Houseplants form a thicket in front of the barrels, and we spend most of our time speaking in a loft space—endearingly dubbed “the executive lounge”—that’s only accessible via an ancient, rickety ladder.
The vision is to establish a family-friendly taproom with a sense of bringing the outdoors in to make up for what they have had to leave behind. Bickley’s formative years spent working closely with locals in the industry has meant that even though the space is still nascent, the community is already starting to gather. A steady stream of visitors drop in during our conversation: contractors talking business who stay to sample the wares; brewers who are sharing the space (fellow ex-itinerants Beer No Evil); family and friends who evidently feel very much at home. This comfortable camaraderie is part of the equation, the other part being the electric energy with which Bickley speaks about his craft and his relationship with mixed- and wild-fermented beer, a passion he is sharing with all who will pause and listen.
“I’d argue that many of my mixed-ferm beers are more traditional than the modern Lager, Pale, or IPA,” states Bickley, never one to shy away from a hot take. “Every now and then something really excites me—whether it’s an ingredient or a process or an entirely new thing—so I go away, I read about it and I try and produce something to do it justice.”
As we speak, bottle after bottle is opened, generally using whatever piece of industrial paraphernalia happens to be close at hand. Three different iterations of his staple Saison, the closest he plans on ever coming to a core range for Lone Gum, showcase vastly different characters. One is dusty and dry, a rustling jar of potpourri in an antique bookshop. The next, conditioned with a touch of lime juice and ginger, is zingy, sprightly, and fresh, full of lemon meringue pie character with the root spiciness of the ginger providing the biscuit crust backing. The third, bottle-conditioned with local Riverland orange blossom honey, finishes clean and almost obscenely drinkable.
I probe a little about Bickley’s approach to yeasts and culture, but he dismisses the notion of uniformity implicit in the question. He has a deep library of wild captures and cultivated blends from the better part of a decade of unrelenting experimentation. These wild captures are a labor-intensive process without a coolship. “We would literally just use the stainless pots from the trial system, same surface area per unit volume,” he says. “But they were 20-hour brew days with some prayer involved.”
He draws from this archive as needed, letting his intention and the evolution of the beer itself guide his decisions in this space. To augment this, he seems to have a laser-like focus on monitoring each beer as it develops. A vibrantly pink fruited Berliner Weisse opened next hints at his penchant for perfectionism. Everyone present seems unanimous in their approval, but to Bickley the acid character is too pronounced, and overwhelms the subtleties of the fruit. It is relegated to house drinking only.
As much as possible, fruit and ingredients are sourced locally. Ties run deep in Adelaide, and while we’re not technically in McLaren Vale, here you’re never far from its cultural reach. A Golden Sour aged for a year on pressed Viognier skins demonstrates this—the grapes come from Cameron’s family vineyard, a resource that Cameron and Bickley have been leveraging for their enterprise.
“I’m a fifth-generation grape grower, but before me no one ever considered making wine,” Cameron says. He runs his own wine brand, Camwell Wines, a name emblazoned across a number of barrels that currently contain Lone Gum beers. Their plans for the future include further explorations into the gray area between beer and wine. “We haven’t made as many as we would have liked due to the delays in setting up the brewery, but I have access to some awesome vineyards and varieties,” says Cameron. “Basically every single wine I make we will try and use skins or juice [in the] beers.”
It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, where the two exchange not only raw materials, but ideas and expertise. Despite the difference in the day-to-day labors, winemaking and mixed-fermentation brewing can show surprising similarities, but Bickley has been able to bring something unique to the table. “It’s been very helpful coming from the beer background and moving into wine and spirits later, as beer has been very process-driven to make clean and consistent products for so long that looking at a lot of what happens in those fields is weird,” he says. “So much is ‘left to the vintage,’ and not so much to cleanliness and consistency.”
Cameron speaks of how often, when encountering a difficult or unexpected fermentation, it is the wisdom of Bickley, rather than that of seasoned winemakers, that he turns to. “Australian winemakers are terrified of Brett,” Bickley explains. “Wild fermentations with fairly unsanitary practices with the safety of high alcohol and sulfur make it so that they cowboy a lot of things and can get away with it. [Many] don’t understand or care to know what’s happening with their wines. With things like THP, refermentation with Brett will fix it easily. But the minute you mention it, they’ll just turn their back on you.”
For his part, Bickley champions a holistic approach to fermentation. From his perspective, much of modern winemaking is reliant on heavy-handed chemical adjustments to address faults and create a false uniformity. Unsurprisingly, he’s more interested in what’s going on on the wilder side of things. “I’m regularly at wine bars, trying new things—it’s hard to have time to try the same thing twice,” he says. “[I’ll] take some notes, see what I like, find out about it. If I don’t like it, ask myself why, look at the processes and techniques and see what I’d do differently.” Cameron takes Bickley’s lead on this. “We both have a very similar philosophy, and we [Camwell Wines] focus on farming the best possible grapes we can first,” Cameron says.
“It’s been very helpful coming from the beer background and moving into wine and spirits later, as beer has been very process-driven to make clean and consistent products for so long, that looking at a lot of what happens in those fields is weird. So much is ‘left to the vintage,’ and not so much to cleanliness and consistency.”
As well as these collaborative efforts, Lone Gum has a couple of wines in progress under its own label. The Viognier beer is a gorgeously textural affair, brewed nearly five years ago. I assumed it was ready for public consumption, but Bickley asserts that it still needs another couple of months. At this point, I trust his judgment.
While the beers are allowed the grace of resting on their laurels, Bickley is not one to sit idle. Racks of barrels are full of beers and wines of varying ages and styles, as well as experimental ciders and spirits, awaiting judgment as to where they will eventually sit in the Lone Gum pantheon. The office in the back has bookshelves filled with gin trials and homemade bitters. A dram of “whiskey” handed to me is only three months old but already well-hued, thanks to a chunk of No. 3 char American oak. Produced from the second runnings of an Imperial Stout, the nose is fairly solvent, a facet of its immaturity, but the draw is smooth and leaves little burn. “Originally, the spirits were just part of a waste stream process, turning beer trials into something else. From there, I started experimenting a bit more,” Bickley says.
The “Stout Whisky” is followed quickly by the Stout itself, poured directly from a tank where it is currently conditioning on hazelnuts and cacao, separated from a portion that was aged in a bourbon barrel. Well-weighted and as easy-drinking as you will find in a double-digit ABV beer, it’s absolutely dripping with praline, and the nose has Frangelico and nougat in equal measure. While we’re at the taps a Barleywine is also produced, young and rich with notes of golden syrup and some pleasantly earthy esters on the nose.
Bickley is in full flight now, and I have to pull him up short on crafting a decadent half-and-half out of equal measures of the two, as I still have to maintain a semblance of productivity for the afternoon. I smile at his acknowledgement that he can get carried away—this is the perfect setting to do it in, with good company and some of the finest liquids the region can produce.
In its heyday, the Southern Expressway was rife with incidents of people blithely ignoring all signage and driving the wrong direction at the wrong time of day, forcing frequent closures and delays. Some people are simply compelled to go against the flow. It’s clear that Bickley is fiercely devoted to progress in the face of adversity, banking on his beer to speak for itself even in unlikely and less-than-ideal surroundings.
Once his dream of a farmhouse brewery had finally been recognized as an exercise in futility, Bickley and his family decided it was too much of a struggle to maintain their property, and opted to sell it. While that particular plot of land may not be in his future, Bickley is a hard man to dissuade. “I’d like to get back to the farm. Not necessarily there, but somewhere, somehow. In the meantime, I’ll work and save and try and find a place that can support the vision. I’ve got years on the barrels. There isn’t any great urgency.”
Words by Rob HornerPhotos by Jessie McKay
