Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:
Wyatt Street, Adelaide CBD
The former Adelaide Brewery buildings at 50-62 Wyatt Street, Adelaide city, state heritage listed in 1986, were linked to brewing in the South Australian colony from the 1840s.
The Pirie Street Brewery, on the Wyatt Street corner, was operated from 1847 by James Walsh on land originally granted in 1837 to William Wyatt by the colony’s resident commissioner James Hurtle Fisher. The brewery, a “brick building, brewery and malting house with large sunk beer cellars and store with wood cottage”, wasn’t popular with nearby residents and, in 1852, Walsh sold the brewery business to William Knox Simms and John Hayter.
Samuel Humble joined the business in 1853 and it traded as Simms & Humble until 1854, when the partnership (then including pastoralist James Cambers) was dissolved. Simms, having began his brewing career here, went on to consolidate West End Brewery in Hindley Street that he sold in 1888 to the new South Australian Brewing Co. Ltd.. Simms also was connected with the Waverley breweries of West Terrace and Mitcham, and the Halifax Street Brewery (now site of the former city destructor).
W.H. Clark, who built the West End Brewery, also occupied the Wyatt Street brewery briefly in 1858. That year, South Australian Register, advertised the Pirie Street Brewery “to be let with right of purchase” by James Walsh, who now owned the property and became a large shareholder in the Kadina and Wallaroo Railway Company. The buildings were occupied in 1860-61 by E.J.F. Crawford of the Hindmarsh and Halifax Street breweries.
In 1862, Walsh leased the Pirie Street Brewery to James Syme and Frederick Sison, who were "brewers at the adjacent brewery". In 1871, Syme, a Scotsman who’d worked for John Primrose’s Union Brewery, and Sison bought a small section of the buildings, continuing to lease the rest of the premises until buying it all in 1873.
This is when the business became known as the Adelaide Brewery. Syme and Sison revived and expanded it to a well-equipped brewing operation in the 1870s and the business successfully supplied city hotels including the Queen's Arms in Wright Street, the Somerset at the corner of Pulteney and Flinders streets, and the White Conduit House Hotel in North Street.
The brewery was virtually rebuilt in this era, with stables and offices constructed by Thomas Martin at a cost of £300 to Daniel Garlick's design. In 1872, Charles Farr erected a malthouse and cellar to Garlick's design and, in 1876, again to Garlick's design, a cellarage, stores, malting floor, malt kiln and bottling rooms were constructed by Brown and Thompson.
Syme and Sison carried on the business until they retired in 1882 when they sold to Andrew McIntyre, William Wicksteed and Henry Anthony, none of them having any brewing experience and continuing to trade as Syme & Sison. Wicksteed and Anthony were found insolvent in 1886. The Adelaide Brewery was bought “on very advantageous terms” by the South Australian Brewing Company in 1902 and it was closed around this time.
The buildings became commercial warehouses, with an extension and new frontage on Pirie Street around 1910. The printers Hunkin, Ellis & King occupied the Pirie Street premises from 1924 to 1974. In 1982, Kenneth Milne Architects refurbished the building, with Samuel Hill Smith buying it for an art gallery from 1983 to 2019.
The new engineering consultancy partnership of Wallbridge and Gilbert moved into the historic Wyatt Street brewery buildings in 1982 and bought them in 1991.
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