Fox Hat Brewing

Fox Hat Brewing

Fox Hat Brewing is the wild second label of South Australian Vale Brewing and was brought to life in 2015 as a counterpart to the more approachable Vale beers. At that time the Australian craft beer scene was really gathering pace, and more and more drinkers were looking for «off the chain» beers that did not quite fit Vale's more mainstream orientation. Fox Hat was therefore designed as an experimental, «unleashed» place where head brewer Jeff Wright and his team could brew bigger, bolder beers and could also dig out old homebrew recipes, rework them and scale them up. As Wright said at the launch, the range was meant to reflect the brewers' personality and be a way of keeping interest alive in new hops and new beer styles. The brewery's name is chosen with a wink, and the beer is brewed in Willunga in the McLaren Vale wine region south of Adelaide.

Its roots thus lead back to Vale Brewing, which was founded in 2008 as the McLaren Vale Beer Company and today belongs to Bickford's, the South Australian beverage manufacturer from Adelaide. The Fox Hat range shows how seriously the brewers take their experimenting: the Metric IPA at 7% ABV, which has become the brand's best-seller, relies on resinous pine and fruit aromas and a pronounced hop kick, the Red Pelt is a powerful India Red Ale at 7.8% ABV, and the Phat Mongrel is a dark stout at 6.5% ABV. At the top are the Mongrel stouts: the Full Mongrel, a Russian Imperial Stout at 10% ABV, as well as the barrel-aged variants Bearded Mongrel with bourbon barrel and Rusty Mongrel with rum barrel, which take the style further towards barrel ageing.

International recognition has not been lacking either: Fox Hat was among the Australian breweries awarded «World's Best» titles at the World Beer Awards 2024. The beers are produced at the Vale Brewing brewery in Willunga and filled into 375 ml cans, and tastings are possible via the associated tasting room in McLaren Flat. With its motto of keeping things simple and bold, Fox Hat stands for the counter-model to Australian mass-market beer: big hop aromas, deeply roasted malt and full bodies, brewed by a team that, with plenty of humour and artisanal curiosity, keeps testing the limits of its range anew.