Saddle up for a longer one folks. I’m here trying to process, and convey at the same time, a mixture of emotions about what is next to come for Wildflower. The short of it is that the brewery stands at a fork in its road, and I am feeling a strong pull one way over another… and we’ve made the decision to start walking down that road.

It’s with a great deal of excitement, trepidation, sadness and thanksgiving that I share we have made the decision to relocate Wildflower towards a rural setting. I hope to, in what follows, explain some of the forces behind this and what it means for our broader community, but I think it’s important to be frank and up-front about the fact that the manifest of this decision means that our Brompton St location will be closed four months from now.

This is not something that has come easily, nor something that has arrived suddenly. It has been a long period of discernment, looping thoughts and revisited conversations. The kind of knowing that only emerges after you’ve tried very hard to convince yourself otherwise.

The road ahead, and what that next step looks like, is not crystal clear… we do not know yet where Wildflower will next be and what parts of our Marrickville-honed process will survive the hibernation period ahead and which parts will not. While that is indeed part of the excitement, getting the chance to reshape what the next edition of this place will be, it is also going to take some time and thought.

At the same time, our beers are not rushed. We started and have maintained a practice of patience which means we have already brewed and/or packaged the next 6 to 12 months worth of beer. We have been planning that far ahead of ourselves for a decade. The process of shutting down Wildflower, therefore, is not a quick one, nor does it warrant a sense of panic. No, we are going to do this our way, in our terms at our pace. The process of powering down Brompton St, will be a slow process of a thousand ‘lasts’, the final brew-day, the last time we empty a barrel, the last sale from Brompton Street… 

These two actions, looking forward to the future and slowly unwinding a decade of work at  a particular site, will be happening, concurrently but methodically. Please, if you can, bear with us as we navigate these decisions and indeed, emotions evoked from them.

Motivation

This move has been bubbling away, in some ways, since before we even started the brewery, which we had initially intended to open rurally. However, the motivation has picked up a significant pace in the last two years and has become, in thought, a much more attractive option than the ‘city-cellar-door’ model we adopted in 2016. The primary and deciding factor for us in this has been driven by our family life.

The people that started Wildflower are not the same ones that run it now. Sure we are the same persons, but our worlds have changed… and so too our goals and measures of success. We signed the lease for our Marrickville home in October 2016 and our eldest child, Florence, was born in within a year of that with Walter and Edward coming in the subsequent four similar for Emily and Chris whose family swelled from two children to four plus a relocation of their own from Sydney to Tasmania.

As for most, perhaps all, becoming a father has changed me. I think it would probably go without saying for anyone reading this who has children, but in my short eight years of being a father, I can without doubt say it has changed me. Beside all the classic tropes of sleep and timelessness that come with small children, their existence has forced me to think of the future in a way I had previously not considered. What the ecology of that world looks like was indeed a pursuing force for us to explore and eventually adopt organic farming of our grain in 2019 onward.

Along these same lines, looking with an eye to the future with them in mind, I have become more interested in what the long-term future of our brewery is, and how that can be sustainable from a people and duration standpoint. That, for us and for Wildflower, is looking something more like a smaller operation that relies on less infrastructure and resource to ensure the nucleus of the process and product. Furthermore, it’s maintaining that future in a space where development and effort fortify the future stability, rather than an interim shop which could be destroyed for a more income-producing type of development. 

Wildflower was born out of experimentation and a desire to explore further natural fermentations… that, gladly, has not changed in the past decade. What has changed, though, is our frame for what success looks like, and what our goals are. 

Wildflower has achieved everything I could have imagined, well even more, in its short time. I will never forget the feelings of accomplishment for each new restaurant listing or the dozens of prestigious events we have taken part in around the world. When we began, I had a fire in my belly to make a product that can be considered in the same echelons as the best in the world. There was a drive to achieve something.

Me, myself, as a person now looks back at that drive grateful for what is produced, but also potentially a little misled in terms of what it is to be proud of my work. I do not think this is unique at all amongst people’s work… I think many of us have begun work with something to prove and along the way found it was the meaning through, or in the work, which was always the more significant part… not the output or external validation. I’m proud of what we’ve made, and I’m proud of what Wildflower has become to so many people here and abroad.

Over time, however, I’ve begun to notice moments where those old goals have come at odds with the evolved ones. Moments where the external rhythm of events, releases, accolades, and logistics felt increasingly out of sync with the internal rhythm of family life, seasons, and presence. Pride and exhaustion sat uncomfortably close together. Old success measures and sustainability began to feel like different conversations entirely.

In terms of how this relates to us now, I feel overwhelmingly grateful that this community’s acceptance and support allowed us to exceed so many of the goals we once held tightly. But we’re ready to begin a new chapter, with new focuses and new goals. 

I have come to believe that the work I want to do now: meaningful, patient, perhaps less externally popular, does not require being in Marrickville to achieve it.

We hope that shiftingWildflower towards a rural setting will allow us to look back at this practice as something closer to a passion project once again, rather than carrying the full weight of the stresses that come with making a small business work in the city, with all its variety of opportunity and cost.

Paddock, the harbinger of Wildflower

A decade ago when I was drafting the business plan for what eventually became Wildflower, I first imagined a brewery named Paddock (and wrote about it on my blog at the time!). We took out domain names and even began working on branding/packaging, there's a draft below. Paddock was a brewery set on a farm, we had a site on the South Coast of NSW picked out and approached the local council. At that time, the zoning uses of rural land specifically did not include the ‘industrial’ application of breweries and it became clear quite quickly that we would have to take the council to Land Court in order to change the LEP’s. That was not an endeavour a completely fledgling business could weather and instead, Chris and I changed tack and opened a city-version of something similar. 

That’s when I reworked the numbers and the plan and started Wildflower. Instead of growing all our own ingredients, we moved to champion those already on-farm doing so. That’s why we held our Waratah days, that’s why we worked with Voyager from the beginning, evolving into a relationship with the Greenwood family for barley. Indeed, looking back, Paddock would have been a backbreaking endeavour and likely led to burnout… attempting to grow all our ingredients and also brew with them. Hindsight has shown me that the way we started was exactly the way it was meant to be. I am so happy with the way it has turned out.

Throughout this past decade, though, that desire to move further into agriculture and deepening that connection between our place and our beers has not gone away. We’ve considered properties outside of Sydney many times, hoping to return to the initial farm to glass concept. Covid really made us focus in and these past few years since have been a time for the distillation and crystallisation of what we want for this brewery and our lives.

What comes next

While we look towards an unknown, here's a rundown of what we do know…

• Our last day of service on Brompton St will be Sunday May 31 2026.
• Up until that time we will continue to release new beers online and at cellar door as we did from the early days, on the first Friday of each month. At this point we have the following releases scheduled for each month.
  • Feb 2026 
    • St Florence 2025: Semillon
    • St Walter 2025: Gamay
    • St Edward 2025: Montepulciano
    • Gold Blend #48
    • Good as Gold Blend #23
  • Mar 2026
    • Flower Shoppe: Wildflower x Garage Project Collab
    • Sour Grapes: Wildflower x Lucy M Collab (potentially April)
  • Apr 2026
    • Foudre Beer #3 (Potentially March)
    • Moral Victory: Wildflower x Deya Collab
  • May 2026
    • Village 2025: Wildflower x MCBC Collab
    • 11-13 Brompton St (Commemorative Blend)
• On top of these releases, we have also packaged the following blends. Each of these blends will commence being sold once the subsequent one has been exhausted of stock. As you can see, for these blends, there is a good supply which we would expect to continue selling for at least 9 months -> one year (potentially longer too).
  • Gold Blend #49
  • Gold Blend #50
  • Amber Blend #46
  • Amber Blend #47
  • Hive Post Brood: Blend #12
  • Hive Post Brood: Blend #13
  • Good as Gold Blend #24
  • Good as Gold Blend #25
  • Organic Table Beer Batch #24
• Any/all beer remaining when we depart Marrickville will be sold online, exported and to domestic retailers only until we run out completely. While this is a moving target, I would estimate that we have no to very little remaining stock of these non-core blends by the end of this year. For Gold/Amber/Good as Gold and Hive, we expect these stocks to last into 2027.
• We have planned a litany of events from now until then that celebrate our time here and the relationships we have made. This can be seen on our website, blog and other places. We have worked with some of Sydney’s finest to curate this and really look forward to these celebrations. Here are a few bigger ones with tickets already available:
  • Sunday 22 Feb: Garage Project Collab Beer release with Pete Gillespie (tickets here for a tasting), with kitchen takeover by Dan Puskas (Sixpenny) and Jean-Paul El Tom (Babas Place) [table bookings here]!
  • 1 Apr- 5 Apr: Closed for Easter wknd
  • Sunday 12 Apr: Harvest Festival with about a dozen wineries we have collaborated with over the years with food by Mat Lindsay (Ester, Poly), Jeff Lusis (ex-poly) and Dougal Muffet (AP Bakery) (Tickets avail here, lim at 150pax)
  • Saturday 25 Apr: Cantillon Zwanze Day [Info to come]
  • Sunday 26 Apr: Collective Membership bottleshare [Cellar Door Closed to Gen Public]
  • Amongst these we'll be hosting a number of small events which will be communicated via these channels so please keep your eyes here for information on those.
• Our Brompton St Cellar Door has tweaked its hours slightly to Thu: 4-9pm, Fri: 4-10pm, Sat: 12-10pm, Sun: 2-6pm. Our kitchen offerings have also altered to a more snack focus for this period with more substantial pizzas available from Poor Toms.
• I've planned to be in each Sunday from this coming one to serve beers at the bar and have a quiet beer on a Sunday arvo with y'all.
• Production ceased last week and we have bottled up a good portion of desirable beer (see above) which we will continue to sell, even after our departure from this physical site.
• We do not currently have a plan for the site, however, are very open to anyone who might wish to breathe new life into it for you the good people of Sydney. Please send us an email if you’re interested. I can honestly say the owners of the site are good, reasonable people, we have not been pushed out for development.
• We will store our brewing equipment and a number of other things during the period in-between closing Brompton St and finding our new home. However, we intend our next iteration to be a smaller operation than the one we currently run and we will be offering a good number of pieces of secondhand equipment to the community. A full pricelist can be obtained by emailing info@wildflowerbeer.com and you’ll likely see things on Facebook Marketplace/the likes.
• Goldstreet, and Colin are presently whey-ing (wink!) up a number of options for them to continue turning milk into cheesy solids.
• All beer that wasn’t bottled (good but young ale), has/will be distilled here on Brompton St and further refined by friends in the industry and it will rest in the interim years hopefully for a future release.
• A volume of beer/spirit may be stored at friends places around the state while we are in this underground-mode and we may choose to bottle this in the interim or potentially it will serve as base stock for when we open again.
• On that point, we are being very specific about this next move/location and do expect the search for the right spot for us to take some time, so this ‘groundhog’ period could be a few years. However, our brand, and sales will remain alive by selling our remaining stock as well as collaborations, etc in the future.
• Our beer at the next site will more than likely change, we are not going to maintain the house culture we’ve built here in Marrickville. That means the current and yet-to-be released beers like Gold, Amber, Good as Gold, Table Beer etc. are likely the end of the lines of these flavours/brands. While the next edition of our beers will draw on the lessons of the past decade learned making these beers, I feel strongly that I’ll be inspired by the next place to make new beers more fitting to that next setting.

A small, meaningful ask

This next part is a little uncomfortable to write...

Any stock left unsold when we depart Marrickville will need to be stored and shipped from an external location, which will incur costs. Funds from beer sales between now and May will be directed toward taking this next step.

It would be my great hope to store and externally sell less beer rather than more.

So, while this is your time to stock up… on new releases, on last year’s bottles and future blends… please bear in mind that we have a good supply of beers to come. This truly helps us, and no doubt helps us reach the next stage quicker.

Thank you.

Extreme Fondness

I am genuinely humbled by what Wildflower has become and what place it holds in so many of your lives. I believe the community which has been built around the beer is truly special and is my driving force to adapt this into a model which can be sustained into the future.

Thank you to everyone who has purchased, shared and loved our beers. Thank you to all those who made our Brompton St cellar door an extension of your home. 

Thank you to the -truly - exceptional people who have spent time working with us here at Wildflower. Each one of you has steered the ship in one way or another towards a more perfect version of itself. We’ve always been a small team at Wildflower, and everyone has manoeuvred their way wearing multiple hats through the process. A specific thanks to specifically Nemesia and Brayden who have led the hospitality and production sides of the business respectively for these last two years (and plus). Thank you both for your understanding of this decision and its impact on y’all. I truly look forward to seeing what lies ahead for you both.

Thank you to every person/business we have worked or collaborated with, who has shared their knowledge, process, meaning and person. I’ve tried to make a list below, and while I hope it is exhaustive, I am sure we are missing some.

Lastly

Those of you who know me, or have discussed this transition with me, will know that this has been an exceptionally trying decision to make. My long period of discernment has seen me travel an arc of emotions.

I would like to acknowledge that this decision to no longer maintain a presence in Sydney  will no doubt be negative news for some, especially those who have made this place a home. To those that this will hurt, in some way or another, I truly apologise.

I hope in time to look back at this juncture in our future and be happy for all that was born from it. I certainly feel that what happens next will be better for our beer, and our little family.  I believe that it is truly natural to change and evolve and I look forward to sharing our process of both over the coming period.

With gratitude and a not insignificant amount of relief, topher

List of Collaborators

Wine
-Bryan Martin (Ravensworth)
-Brash Higgins
-Tim Ward
-M&J Becker
-Tyrrell’s
-Clonakilla
-DeSalis
-Canobolas Smith
-Swinging Bridge
-Johansen Wines
-Lucy M
-Jauma
-Scintilla Wines
-Basket Range Wine
-The Other Right Wine
-JB Wine
-Ruggabellus Wines
-Momento Mori
-Limus
-Gentle Folk

Restaurants & People
-Ester
-Poly
-Firedoor
-Porcine Bistro
-Cornersmith/ Sabine Spindler
-Poor Toms
-Gemma Smith
-AP Bakery
-Michael and Pippa James
-Mike Bennie
-Lucien Alperstein
-Mem Hemmings
-Sally Rainbows
-TINA
-Made of Many Coffee

Breweries
-Jester King
-Floodland
-De Garde
-Ale Apothecary
-Cloudburst
-Fast Fashion
-The Masonry
-Sante Adarius
-Brasserie Thiriez
-Brasserie Au Baron
-Fantôme
-Burning Sky
-Beak
-Verdant Brewing
-DEYA Brewery
-ET Brewery
-Garage Project
-Mountain Culture
-Balter Brewing
-Hop Nation
-The Wheatsheaf Hotel
-Bridge Rd Brewing
-Batch
-Young Henry’s

Producers
-Voyager
-Tim Malfroy
-Ryefield Hops
-NSW DPI
-Woodstock Farm/Flour
-Bruce Maynard
-Thornbrook Orchard
-Block 11 Organics
-Moonacres Farm
-Near River Produce
-River Fossil Farm (Tas)