Everyones doing it tough.
Stop it, if you carry on, we might even start talking economy and budget for the elections, what a far right fascist concept
Tapped out: Fox Friday Brewing goes into administration
A popular brewery has entered voluntary administration after its major financial backer collapsed, triggering challenges at venues in Hobart, Melbourne and Perth.
One of Australia’s fastest-growing craft beer businesses has appointed administrators after its primary lender collapsed, placing pressure on operations across three states.
Tasmania’s Fox Friday Craft Brewery, which began as a humble nano-brewery in Hobart’s northern suburb of Moonah, confirmed the move on Wednesday, described by founders Sarah and Benn Hooper as one made with “heavy hearts.”
“Unfortunately, we’ve faced significant financial challenges that have brought us to this point,” they said in a statement.
“While we understand that there will be some uncertainty as a result of this decision, we very much intend to come through the other side of this and we hope that Fox Friday and its subsidiaries will continue to operate well into the future.”
Fox Friday Brewery has appointed administrators after its primary lender collapsed. Picture: Fox Friday
Its subsidiaries, including Moonah Hotel and Cellars and Carwyn Cellars, will also enter administration.
McGrathNicol has been appointed to oversee the process.
Fox Friday’s troubles are tied to the collapse of Falcon Capital, which is now under investigation by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
According to The Australian, Falcon is alleged to have misused investor funds and continued to make risky, illiquid investments even after suspending operations of its First Guardian Master Fund, leaving some 6000 investors locked out of their money since May.
Fox Friday was reportedly among several businesses Falcon supported with substantial funding.
The Hoopers said delays in promised funding from Falcon forced them to dip into operational funds to cover major capital projects.
They said they attempted to secure new lenders and equity partners, however, time and the complexity of the situation proved insurmountable.
The administration affects not only Fox Friday’s Hobart brewery and taproom but also its interstate operations, including a Melbourne brewpub, Perth venue, and associated businesses like Moonah Hotel & Cellars and the iconic Carwyn Cellars, which was acquired in 2023.
Fox Friday Brewery operations are expected to continue while a sale or recapitalisation plan is pursued. Picture: Fox Friday
Despite the turmoil, operations are expected to continue while a sale or recapitalisation plan is pursued, although some may operate under reduced hours.
“Our focus is on working with Fox Friday Group employees, customers and key suppliers to stabilise operations and maximise outcomes,” McGrathNicol said in a statement.
Fox Friday has been a key player in the Australian craft beer scene since its rise in 2019. Known for its hazy beer styles and bold expansion plans, the brewery quickly transformed from its small Hobart operation into a nationally recognised brand with a cult following.
In 2021, Fox Friday Craft Brewery announced plans for national expansion, aiming to build production breweries in Hobart and Melbourne with the backing of new investor David Anderson.
Their growth continued in 2023 with the acquisition of the original Blasta Brewing site for a new Perth brewpub and the purchase of Melbourne’s Carwyn Cellars.
Nicole and Ben Carwyn, former operators of Carwyn Cellars, expressed their sadness over the situation on social media, reflecting on their time with the venue.
“My heart is breaking today. Ben Carwyn and I successfully ran Carwyn Cellars for 17 years,” Ms Carwyn wrote on Facebook.
The brewery’s involvement in upcoming beer festivals like Pint of Origin is expected to go ahead, with the Crafty Pint reporting that Carwyn Cellars remains committed to participating.
“To our incredible team, words can’t express how sorry we are. You’ve poured your hearts into these businesses, and we’re so grateful for your talent, passion, and dedication,” the Hoopers said.
“To our customers and community, thank you for believing in us, for sharing a beer with us, and for being part of this journey.
Certainly a sad, sorry story, but hopefully the resolve and get up go remains strong enough to beat the downturn.
@JohnDe Looks very serene and peaceful with nice grounds in the foreground.
+ 1
region.com.au
@JohnDe Perhaps the croc has a different point of view in regard to your father-in-law leaving the Territory!!!!
A second-rate elite is torching our nation’s prosperity
Welcome to country during the AFL Gather Round welcome dinner at in Adelaide last month. Picture: Mark Brake/ Getty Images
After four years away, it first hit me how much Australia had changed when I landed in Sydney and had to sit through Qantas’s routine acknowledgment of country upon landing.
As seven of my great grandparents were born in Australia, and the other one in New Zealand, it grated on me. I can’t obtain a passport from any other country through lineage; as far as I’m concerned, I’m indigenous to Australia.
Leaving the airport a little later I saw a new sign, Welcome to Gamay, confirming that virtue-signalling had truly ramped up in my absence. Flicking on the ABC a little later I noticed the local news bulletin was for Dharug Country.
Australia’s embrace of woke ideology was even starker for me coming from the US, where for all the Democratic Party’s new-found zeal for extreme racial and sexual politics, a few things remained off limits in the interests of national unity. Joe Biden would never have addressed the nation in front of multiple flags and I never heard one welcome to country anywhere during the Biden administration, a practice that could also be applied in the US, with its numerous Native American nations.
Indeed, in the US, veteran comedian Bill Maher, a long-time Democrat, regularly lampoons a practice seemingly unique to Australia, Canada and New Zealand. “Where they say, I’m standing on land that was stolen from the proud Indigenous people of the Chumash tribe,” Mr Maher joked in one of his monologues last year, “I say give it back or shut the f. k up.”
The same criticism could be levelled here, but it rarely is. The furore over the Anzac Day booing should’ve been an opportunity for the Coalition to decry the divisive ritual, which Australians have already indicated they overwhelmingly reject considering the voice referendum.
If only Marcia Langton’s warning in this newspaper that welcomes to country would cease following a resounding no vote had actually come to pass!
Last week I happened on a trans rights protest in Melbourne, where maybe a few hundred masked, furious far-left agitators screamed abuse at police, who had even shut off Bourke St for their dummy spit. I can’t recall anything so feral in my time in Washington, which consistently votes 93 per cent Democrat.
Australia has changed dramatically in the few years I was away, certainly more than any time in my lifetime. The hubris of the political, media and academic classes has become so manifest.
Australians have endured the biggest decline in living standards since World War II, as consumer prices soared, exceeded only by the explosion in the cost of housing. Living standards have crashed for the typical family more than in any other OECD nation since 2022.
Bunurong elder Mark Brown was heckled as he delivered a welcome to country at an Anzac Day ceremony in Melbourne. Picture: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images
Over the past few years the currency has steadily crashed against the US dollar, the pound and the euro, as the China-powered resource boom that’s greased government coffers for 20 years has begun its decline.
The old economic models would have heralded a boom for exports, but we don’t make anything anymore.
Victoria, once a manufacturing and cultural powerhouse, has become the epicentre of dysfunction. The state’s fiscal position is far worse now than in the Kirner years of the early 1990s, practically necessitating federal intervention at some point.
With barely any scrutiny, the Victorian parliament has recently made “severely ridiculing” sexual or racial groups a criminal offence, a law contrary to even the most de minimis notions of free speech and one guaranteed to become an arbitrary cudgel to destroy the lives of politically disfavoured individuals.
Yet despite all these signs of economic and cultural decline, voters have just endured the most uninspiring election campaign in memory. The only options are more of the same: more regulation, bigger government and a bipartisan dedication to net zero, which even Tony Blair has realised is economic madness.
The Coalition, supposedly the party of small government, didn’t have the courage to commit to indexing the income tax scales, something most other mature nations do; it also appears ashamed of reductions in spending proposed a decade ago that are far more necessary today.
Labor, unsatisfied with the extra billions bracket creep brings every year, is even trying to legislate a world-first tax on unrealised capital gains in superannuation that will ultimately see more money ploughed into housing. No wonder the number of bright young Australians leaving has been increasing, adding to the pool of a million-plus who live and work overseas and who are less and less likely to return, except perhaps at retirement.
Australia is on the road to becoming a pleasant place for rich people to retire on the beach.
Wrenching the country away from this path won’t be easy, but tearing apart an already fraying social fabric with hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year is not the way to go.
It’s common to exaggerate Canberra’s influence but in two areas it wields huge power: taxation and immigration. Both have become excessive, and without a major reduction in each the nation’s steady decline will continue.
The second-rate people Donald Horne said run Australia are rapidly running out of luck.
In the 1980s Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, once said Australia was in danger of becoming the poor white trash of Asia. For decades we proved him wrong, rocketing up the global league tables for incomes and quality of life.
Unless our political system throws up some charismatic reforming leaders soon, capable of making tough decision, he’ll ultimately be proved right.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
@JohnDe This post of yours John beings to mind something that John Kennedy POTUS once said and had so much resounding truth about it.
@frugal.rock Well for ask don't have to ask. Lunch will be soup, a poppy seed bun with the necessary fillings fruit and perhaps a piece of fresh carrot cake to top it all off.
Batten down the hatches, gents, gxnts gentesses and gxntesses
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