How Sailors Grave Tells the Story of East Gippsland - Interview by The Place Brand Observer

Our founders Gab and Chris were invited for an interview by The Place Brand Observer to share their stories. You can read the article on their website here.

Gab, Chris – many great place stories begin with a journey. How did you both end up in Marlo, and what was it about this place that made you feel it could become home and the home of a brewery?

We met studying Landscape Architecture at RMIT University and spent several years working in both Melbourne and Sydney.

Food has always been central to our lives. We were throwing dinner parties like it was a competitive sport and at some point, we figured, why not open a restaurant? Totally ridiculous, given we had zero experience, but when the chance came up to run a pop-up bar and restaurant for Pure Blonde, we jumped in anyway.

That three-month pop-up somehow didn’t collapse, and we kept going as The Commons Local Eating House and the Downtown Bar for a few more years. It was chaotic, exhausting, and often terrifying but we learned a ton. During that time, we were also watching the rise of craft beer in Sydney and Melbourne, and it became clear we wanted to be part of that movement creating something small, independent, and connected to people and place.

Eventually, after years of city life, we sold the business to one of our employees and moved back to our family farm in Marlo. It was exactly what we needed. Simpler, slower, and the perfect place to start thinking about Sailors Grave, a brewery rooted in its landscape, its community, and the freedom that comes with making your own path.

East Gippsland has a powerful sense of landscape, with ocean, river, forest, and a feeling of remoteness. How has the surrounding environment influenced the way you think about brewing and about Sailors Grave as a brand?

The unique, rich and inimitable nature of our local landscape has influenced us greatly – it was our starting point and is our constant inspiration. We want to be seen in the same light. We want our brand to stand out as something true to place with uniqueness and integrity. I think mostly we want people to see that we are marching to the beat of our own drum. We want people to discover us with the same excitement as they would discover our coastline.

“Sailors Grave” is an evocative name that already feels like a piece of local folklore. What is the story behind the name, and how does it connect to the coastal history and mythology of the region?

Sailors Grave is a real place, a small cove at Cape Conran with a deep sense of history and nostalgia for us. From the 1920s through to the 1980s, it was home to a shanty town of simple beach houses on long-term government leases, mostly owned by local families who’d spend their summers there.

My grandfather had a place in the cove, and we grew up spending long, formative summers there until the houses were eventually removed when the area became a coastal park. It was a pretty magical, free-spirited time very DIY, very communal, and deeply connected to the landscape.

There was even a makeshift pub tucked into the dunes not much more than a lean-to where I’d pass my dad ‘holding up the bar’ as I went back and forth from the beach.

When it came time to name the brewery, I kept coming back to that place and that feeling. ‘Sailors Grave’ carries a bit of mystery and coastal mythology, but for us it’s really about memory, community, and a kind of wild freedom that defined that part of our lives.

You have worked with native ingredients, local ecosystems, and collaborations that reflect the region around you. What does it mean in practical terms to brew beer that truly reflects a place?

Place encompasses many things, including the people, history, landscape and ingredients of our area. We come at beer from all these angles.

Importantly when creating something new, we don’t first come up with a beer we want to make and then try to fit local character into that. Beers emerge from relationships with locals and first peoples; with seasonal ingredients from our farm and nearby landscapes (or in people’s back yards); the ingredients (and the moods!) of the ocean; and also, from the history of our area.

Ideas come from all of these, but the craft for us lies in creating something subtle and layered that tells a story but is ultimately extremely drinkable. We don’t want to hit people over the head with a message or a flavour – it is there to be discovered and teased from the drink.

In smaller towns especially, breweries and pubs often become important social spaces. What role has Sailors Grave come to play in the community around Marlo and Orbost?

Our goal is for our brewery and venue, Dunetown, to be a nest for community and other businesses with common goals for our area. We want to live in a vibrant and prosperous place. We want our children to grow up here, leave to discover the bigger world and then want to return!

In that light we strive to encourage other ventures to set up shop at our place and to offer a welcoming and unique bar and grounds that celebrate what we have to offer. We want the community to feel proud of us and of themselves.

When someone drinks a Sailors Grave beer somewhere far away, say in Melbourne or overseas, what do you hope they understand or feel about East Gippsland and the place your beer comes from?

The pristine, wild character of coastal Far East Gippland is unique. Our brewery sits on a farm in the middle of nowhere and is surrounded by this wild landscape of forest and coast. We first want people to become aware of the place we live – even in Melbourne many people have no idea where this area is, let alone what it is like. We want to paint a picture of here with the stories we tell through our beer. We want people to come here!

Secondly, we want to evoke the feeling that visitors have when they stumble on our venue without knowing who we are. A common response to this is “What the hell is this place doing here in the middle of nowhere!” We want people to feel a sense of discovering something unique and special when they drink our beer and look into our story…and again, we want them to come here.

Many businesses today are rediscovering the power of place. Are there other breweries, companies, teams, or places around the world that inspire you because of how strongly they are connected to their local identity?

Before we opened the brewery, we spent three months travelling around the US. It was a real journey of discovery and ultimately what gave us the confidence to start something back home.

One place that really stuck with us was Hill Farmstead Brewery. It’s incredibly remote, outside a town not much bigger than Orbost. As we were driving out there, we genuinely thought we were lost. Bitumen roads turned to dirt, the weather closed in, and it even started sleeting.

Then suddenly, cars just started lining the road number plates from all over the country. That was a real lightbulb moment. It made us realise that if you create something truly great and authentic, people will go out of their way to find you.

Closer to home, we’re really inspired by places like Brae and O.My Restaurant. We’ve done a couple of collaborations with the O.My boys over the years and have become good friends. They’re a very different kind of business to ours, but the ethos is the same: a deep respect for place, seasonality, and community, and letting that shape everything they do.

For us, it all comes back to that same idea: if you’re honest about where you are and you do something meaningful with it, place becomes your greatest strength. That’s something we’re always trying to build into Sailors Grave.