Phoebe Veldhuizen is the kind of person who will look after your kids while you enjoy a drink.
In fact, that’s how she first met Tom Delmont, co-founder of Fixation Brewing Company. She was working in a cafe in the early 2010s and Tom’s wife, Kate, would stop in with three kids in tow. Phoebe would hold the baby while Kate sipped her coffee. That above-and-beyond approach has followed her throughout her hospitality career, and to her current job behind the bar at Fixation’s brewpub.
“If you look up most of our reviews they’re like, ‘Bar staff charged my phone and didn’t make me pay for anything,’” she tells me via Zoom call.
As we chat, she sips on cheap table wine from a black, plastic wine glass. The sun is shining and she’s in her garden. She’s spending her lockdown days gardening and “playing with light.” When not behind the bar, Phoebe is a photographer who shoots exclusively on film. She’s taken a double-hit with the shutdowns: she was about to sign a full-time contract at the brewpub, then was going to fly to Berlin for a month-long artist residency. Now, neither are happening.
“It was a bit shitty,” she says. “You put all of your energy into this one trip that you’d been planning for a year. And it’s not just me; I was giving people paid [modeling] work in Berlin as well.”
Fixation Brewing’s tagline is “Dedicated to India Pale Ales,” and the business is a partnership between Delmont and Stone & Wood Brewing Co. The brewpub, called The Incubator, is in inner-city Melbourne, while production happens in Murwillumbah in New South Wales. At the brewpub there are 10 taps, and each is a different riff on the IPA.
“I honestly didn’t like IPAs when I got the job,” Phoebe confesses. “I was in New York for a month right before Fixation opened and I was running around trying all these IPAs trying to like it. I do like it now because I’ve learned so much about it and how different it can be.”
When the shutdowns began, the brewpub created a delivery service and drive-up bottle shop, and Phoebe enjoyed heading out and still seeing the regulars. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough work for the whole team.
“Now I’ve been unemployed, as of this Sunday, for a month,” she says. However, Fixation has begun packaging a handful of beers from the brewpub for the first time, and the Australian government has rolled out a program called “JobKeeper,” which started in early May and is a $1,500, biweekly subsidy for employees of eligible businesses. It’s keeping a lot of people like Phoebe in food and housing.
For now, she’s optimistic that the artist residency will still go ahead—but for now, as the Melbourne days get shorter, she’s just making the most of the changing light.
Words by Luke Robertson