Smell It First: Coopers Brewery 2026

Level of Challenge

★★★★★

Gentle challenge

Five Glasses and a Smell I Knew

Five small glasses sat in front of me in the taproom at Coopers Brewery, and partway through them I caught a smell I knew. I had met it about an hour earlier, holding a jar of malt up to my nose on the brewery floor. Now it was in my glass.

That is not something I would have expected of myself. I enjoy a good beer, but I have never claimed to understand one, and if I am honest the nuance has always passed me by. I was at Coopers, in the Adelaide suburb of Regency Park, because the two friends I was travelling with wanted to go. I went along happily, with no real idea what I would make of it.

The Tour Everyone Gets

With my friends guiding me, I left my white cane behind. Nobody on the staff knew I have sight loss, so nothing was adjusted for me. What I experienced was the Brew Tour exactly as every other visitor gets it.

We were each handed an orange hi-vis vest and a set of headphones, and the guide’s voice came through the headphones for the whole tour. In the loudest parts of the plant, where the machinery would have swallowed anything she said, they made all the difference. They also meant I could hang back and take my time over something I wanted to see properly without losing the thread. On most tours, lingering means missing out. Here it did not.

Coopers is a large working factory and it does not pretend otherwise. There is heavy machinery everywhere, parts of it are loud, and the air is full of smells I could not place. But a brewery has to be spotless, and the lighting that comes with that was excellent throughout. All that heavy machinery also means very few stairs, and there are lifts for anyone who needs them.

From a Norwood Home to a Power Cut

The tour runs from the company’s history right up to the way it brews today, and it held my attention far more than I expected. Thomas Cooper recorded his first brew in the Adelaide suburb of Norwood in 1862, and the brewery has stayed in his family ever since.

It also finally explained something I had never properly understood, which is the difference between an ale and a lager. It comes down to the yeast. Ale yeast works at warmer temperatures and more quickly. Lager yeast works cooler and more slowly. That one difference in fermentation runs right through how each beer tastes.

What stayed with me most was the scale. When you pick up a bottle of beer, you do not think about where it has come from. Walking past the equipment that makes it, and the technology that keeps every batch the same, I found it hard to take in. So were the safety measures, which are everywhere once you start noticing them.

The tour covers the whole operation, from brewing right through to the warehouse where the beer waits before it is shipped. Along the way, our guide explained how the site produces its own power. She told us the brewery is completely self-sufficient, and that during a well-known power cut, the factory still had power.

The Jars

The part of the tour I remember best came at a steel bench with a tray of jars on it. Inside were the ingredients that go into Coopers beers: raw barley, crystal malt, malt extract, darker roasted grain, and hops. We could pick them up, look closely and smell them.

The difference between grain before roasting and after was obvious straight away, even to a nose with no training at all. It was one stop on the tour where I had exactly the same information as everyone else, and I spent longer there than anywhere.

Five Small Glasses

The tour ends back in the taproom. We sat round a table and worked through five small glasses, one after another. Tasting them back to back is the point. On its own, any one of them would simply have been a beer. Side by side, the differences between them were impossible to miss.

And that is where the jars came back. Some of the smells I had met at that bench were there in the glass, the same ones, now part of something I was drinking. Knowing where they had come from gave me a far better grip on why one beer tasted different from the next.

My favourite was the XPA. We also tried a dark lager that has no name and appears on no list, because it is only poured at the brewery and you cannot buy it anywhere else. On our tasting sheet it was simply the Mystery Beer.

Lunch

Afterwards, the three of us went through to the restaurant and all ordered the same thing: fish and chips, the fish battered in Coopers Original Pale Ale. We agreed it was some of the best fish and chips any of us had eaten. I live in London, where good fish and chips are not hard to find, and I would still call this world class. The batter was superb and the chips were great.

We were allowed to carry our leftover tasting beers through to drink with lunch, and the restaurant has a long beer list of its own if you finish yours first.

A Family Business

What stood out across the whole visit was how much the staff clearly love what they do. The pride they take in the place was on show for everybody. They spoke fondly of Dr Tim Cooper, the brewery’s chief brewer, and of the wider Cooper family. It felt like a family business, and it made the three of us want to support it.

Final Reflection

I went to Coopers because my friends wanted to. I came away enjoying beer more than I did before. Understanding what goes into it has made drinking it a more active thing for me. I pay attention now, in a way I never used to.

Back in London, I have already looked up where to buy Coopers in the UK. It is going to be one of my regulars. And for anyone looking for things to do in Adelaide, the Coopers Brewery tour followed by lunch makes a full and memorable half day.

Reader Challenge and Invitation

Next time you open a beer, smell it before you drink it, and see what you can name.

All accessibility details in this article were verified against the organiser’s published information at the time of writing. This reflection is based on my personal experience on the day. Individual experiences may vary, and none of the points raised are intended as a judgement of the event itself, but as an honest account of how I navigated it with my own access needs.