The female-led Sparkke Change Beverage Company has bought the historic Whitmore Hotel in Adelaide.
It will undergo a $1.8million renovation before reopening in December with a rooftop bar, restaurant, upstairs function area and a beer garden … but no poker machines.
Sparkke revealed it’s just the first of a series of pubs it plans to buy around the country, with the help of investors and supporters.
The centrepiece of the pub will be a custom nano-brewery that will produce limited-edition craft brews by Sparkke’s head brewer Agi Gajic (below).
“The real theatre of the pub is the brewhouse,” said Gajic. “We’ll be making small batch, weird and wonderful brews; most will never be repeated again. It’s a real laboratory for experimentation and pushing the boundaries around craft brewing.”
In an eco-friendly move, the pub will offer the small-batch brews in one-litre glass growlers at its bottle shop.
“They’re a refillable vessel. You bring them back, they get cleaned on site, and you take a fresh one home with you,” Gajic said.
Sparkke was founded by a group of women from Adelaide two years ago, and markets its products with socially aware labels, such as ‘Consent Can’t Come After You Do’ (apple cider); ‘What’s Planet B?’ (a New England Pale Ale in support of action on climate change); ‘Say I Do’ (a sparkling wine in support of marriage equality); Change The Date (a pilsner pushing for a new national day of celebration); Nipples Are Nipples (a hard lemonade supporting gender equality); and ‘Boundless Plains To Share’ (a ginger beer in favour of humane asylum seeking policies and practices).
Sparkke donates 10% of direct sales of its products towards charities associated with the causes each product promotes..
