Dove Bailey, Head Brewer at Melbourne’s Urban Alley Brewery, spoke with Beer & Brewer about his drive for creativity, his experience brewing in America, and creating sessionable beer.
Initially studying a Bachelor of Jazz at university, Bailey was first inspired to start brewing while working at a Melbourne bar.
“I was working at Atticus Finch in East Brunswick serving good beer. I then caught the bug and began homebrewing because a guy in the backyard at a party told me you could make anything. He had just made a red rye saison. I then got a job in the bar at Interboro Spirits & Ales in Brooklyn, New York and slowly became more involved with production over time,” he said.
At Interboro, Bailey was given the opportunity to take on his first solo brew in a commercial setting. While still in New York, he took on the role of Head Brewer at Keg & Lantern Greenpoint, where he relished the opportunity to design his own recipes and brew in a variety of styles.
Developing new recipes and products continues to be a key focus for Bailey, and has expanded his awareness of different elements of production.
“I spend a lot of time taking readings on beers and smelling or tasting them at every step of the way, this leads to thinking a lot about what’s working, what isn’t and trying to implement those as we move forward,” he said.
“As for recipe development, the more different recipes I design and different things I try makes me realise more and more how important ingredient selection is. Hops have brand names but the grower, region, crop year and many other factors can contribute to if they’re amazing or a total dud.”
Back to Oz
Moving back home, Bailey took on the Head Brewer role at Urban Alley Brewery in 2021. It was at this point that he began to consider the awards circuit.
“I was never super enamoured with awards until I started at Urban Alley and there was more of an emphasis on entering competitions. Getting awards becomes a bit addictive. The big flashy ones were very exciting, like Bronze in Aussie Pale (Slapshot) at the World Beer Cup and Best Golden Ale (Urban Draught) at the World Beer Awards. But also, some smaller, more personal ones were really meaningful, like having my first ever commercially available mixed ferm sour (Glimmer) be nominated for best in category at the Indies, and having our name on the screen next to Dollar Bill’s,” he said.
At Urban Alley, Bailey prides himself on brewing “pintable”, easy drinking beers.
“Because our focus is on our own brew pubs, our beers that do best are the ones that you can drink more of. I actually had a friend mention to me that she finds our beer easy to drink and she thinks it’s to do with the low gluten content of the core range, which I hadn’t thought about as a factor for people who aren’t particularly gluten intolerant,” he said.
Interestingly Urban Alley is one of the few kosher-certified craft breweries in Australia. Maintaining this certification limits some of the ingredients that Bailey can use in his recipes.
“We can’t use lactose as a result, which is fine by me because I don’t particularly like it anyway. The most challenging part is just making sure any new ingredients are kosher certified. Keeping animal products out of the brewery is not very hard and has the added bonus of making the beers vegan,” he said.
At Urban Alley, Bailey hopes to continue to improve the beer he produces and expand production of more experimental styles.
“It’s always improving but there’s also never going to be a point when all of it is always perfect. Also, we just upgraded our tiny barrel program from two barrels to four barrels. While barrel aged sour beer is not exactly a booming market, we really like it and find we can move it on tap at an okay rate.”