Former Aussie “pirate” Jared Proudfoot is now a Kiwi landlubber.
Proudfoot, known as Red, co-founded the hugely successful Pirate Life in Australia — a brewery that was sold to global giant AB InBev for $10 million in 2017. He’s now settled in Geraldine where he’s about to open a brewpub with his brewer-wife Charlotte Grant, who grew up in the south Canterbury town.
Originally from Perth, Red and Pirate Life co-founder Jack Cameron worked for BrewDog in Scotland. With Jack’s father Michael, they set up Pirate Life in Adelaide in 2015 and sold it just two years later to become part of the Carlton & United family, later bought by Asahi.
Red and Charlotte first met in Perth where Red was working at Margaret River’s Cheeky Monkey and Charlotte — who did work experience at Three Boys when she was studying viticulture at Lincoln University — was at Little Creatures in Fremantle alongside future Pirate Lifer, Jack Cameron.
The pair got together as a couple when Red moved to Adelaide to start Pirate Life and Charlotte was at Little Creatures in Geelong, but planning on heading home.
“She literally had everything packed up ready to go home.” Red says, “and I was doing the brewery in Adelaide, so she had to make the call to either keep going together or go home to New Zealand. And she decided to come to Adelaide.
“So, what she intended to be a year or two in Australia ended up being about 10 years and I think it’s entirely fair that I would move over here at some stage.”
The couple came back to New Zealand in 2022 and lived with Charlotte’s parents for a few months before deciding they’d settle in Geraldine, buying a lifestyle property.
“We lived with Charlotte’s folks for about nine months, and we bought a house, had a baby and got married within about three months of each other.”
Red was still working at Pirate Life, travelling back and forth, but he resigned around a year ago.
When they bought their lifestyle block, locals started telling them “oh, you’re living next door to Fitzy”.
Red wasn’t sure who Fitzy was until he was an Air New Zealand flight, reading a Kia Ora magazine that featured a story on Geraldine, including comments from the local cheesemakers Paul Fitzsimons and Angela Veale, who said they wanted to build a brewery next to their cheese shop in town.
“So, he ends up being the guy we’re living next to and when we met over the fence he said, ‘I’m Fitzy, I’m a cheesemaker’, and we said, ‘we’re Red and Charlotte, we’re brewers and we’re going to be building a brewery one day’.
“And his eyes lit up and our eyes lit up — so that’s where we are. We’re putting a brewery in next to his cheese shop in town there.”
Fitzsimons and Veale started Talbot Forest Cheese and run the Geraldine Cheese Shop in Talbot Street.
“He’s about as passionate about cheese as I am about beer,” says Red.
Red and Charlotte have named their business Bonnie Day.
“When you’re coming up with names, you throw a lot around and some stick.
“Bonnie Day just resonates with us and connects back to my time brewing in Scotland.
“The premise of it is that every day can be a bonnie day. It might be the worst weather in the world, but, you know, you make it what it is. A bit of a sign of positivity, I think.”
Red says the brew space is “tiny” and he’s bought a brewery from Bespoke Brewing Solutions in in China. Twofold, which opened in Auckland last year, used the same supplier for their space, which is a similar size.
“I’ve got a really good canning line coming out of America and a beautiful 1800 litre oak foeder which is going to be quite a bit of a feature when you walk in the door.”
Red describes Bonnie Day as “a packaging brewpub”.
While he’s packaging he won’t be chasing shelf space in supermarkets or retail shops. “It’s more direct to customer and having cans that people can take home.”
It’s the second brewpub to go into a town of just 3000 people — although, it does get plenty of tourists — with House Of Hop just a few minutes out of town.
“They’re excited to have another option in town,” Red says. “We’ll have a different offering compared with House Of Hop.
“We’re tiny; there’ll be just 50 to 80 seats, whereas they’ve got a nice outdoor area and a big restaurant there.”
There’s no plans for restaurant, but they’ll use the connection to their neighbours to offer platters.
“Obviously, we’ll be using Paul’s cheese, featuring that in a pretty big way.”
They will serve wine supplied from a friend of Charlotte’s, Sarah Adamson, who owns Scout wines in Central Otago.
“After we’ve bedded in, I’ll probably put a wood-fired oven in and do pizzas. My folks ran a wood-fired pizza restaurant in Margaret River for 15 years so I’ve got a bit of knowledge to lean on there.”
For Red, starting his own business again eight years after selling Pirate Life is chance to once again be fully in charge of a brewery.
We talk here in New Zealand about the speed at which Panhead were picked up by Lion — after three years — but Pirate Life was sold after just two years in business.
“Yeah, it was a bit of a bizarre time. We were fighting with them from before we signed the contract.
“You know, you fight hard to get a good deal and then you spend the next five or seven years fighting the entire time.
“It was hard all the way through.
“I’m not corporate at all. I like to make beer. I spent a lot of time trying to insulate our staff from the corporate side, but it edged in more and more as the years progressed.
“They say, ‘yeah, we’re going to support you to run your business the way you think you should’ but budgets are controlled, which can take away your autonomy completely.
“So I didn’t enjoy it at all.”
Now, he and Charlotte get to run their own race.
That said, there’s a few of lessons to learn from being in the AB InBev and Asahi stables.
“You do learn from the corporates how to do things and how not to do things.
“One of those is that turning a profit is really difficult, particularly as you grow. What I’ve hopefully learned — I might be wrong, ask me in five years’ time — is that if you can get to a certain size and be happy there: to be small, stay small and not try to go from 200,000 litres [a year] to 4 million litres, you should be all right.
“If you want to get another million litres, you’ve got to employ another four brewers. And then you’ve got another million litres to sell so you’ve got to have another four sales staff. So you’re always chasing, trying to get to profitable.
“Whereas I think for us, if I can be on the tools as much as possible, hopefully we can be marginally profitable early on.”
The plan is to open in the next couple of months but there’s still plenty of work to do. As we spoke, the brewery was still on the water from China.
“And I don’t have drains, I don’t have a wet floor, I don’t have a building consent, I don’t have any licences. But it’ll all come together, I think. It’s a long list, but I think we’ll get there.”
And when they do it’ll be a bonnie day, indeed.