From BANKER to BREWER How a beer lover turned her passion into money Unlikely beer enthusiast, LEIMIN DUONG, saw an opportunity to create beers to appeal to an audience beyond the traditional beer market. Leaving her job in banking, she jumped in the deep end and taught herself about brewing beer and about business. Now, two years on, her unique Strawberry Blonde beer is selling in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the ACT and will soon be available Australia wide, with more varieties yet to come.
Since she was a young adult, Leimin has had a love of beer and after reading a travel article that mentioned strawberry beer, she made an executive decision to follow her gut and quit her corporate office job. “I was very surprised at the idea of a strawberry beer and thought it would be something a lot of other people would be interested in trying too.” This prompted Leimin to establish her own natural flavoured beer company with the goal of creating flavoured beers suitable for the Australian market. It took Leimin only 12 months from first starting the project and learning how to brew
beer to bottling her first commercial batch of Zeven Lemon Beer. Leimin, with no previous experience in brewing, taught herself to brew and began experimenting by blending fruit into beer. To quickly get up to speed, she bypassed home brewing in favour of studying the technique from textbooks and websites, and observing the commercial brewing process. Working 100+ hours a week for months, Leimin personally developed the base beer and the final recipe by studying ingredients and drawing on her knowledge of food and flavours. She also taught herself about designing, packaging and graphics to further turn her vision into a reality.
10 WORKING WOMEN® n Summer / Autumn 2016 – www.womensnetwork.com.au
To best showcase the crisp and refreshing appeal of beer, Zeven Lemon’s Strawberry Blonde is deliberately limited in both sweetness and in fruit flavour, as Leimin’s aim was to create beers that are lightly flavoured with only juice extracted from 100% fruit. This gives the beer a significantly milder fruit profile compared to flavoured ciders and premix alcoholic beverages. Strawberry Blonde sets itself apart from the competition with its unique but true-to-beer taste and smooth bitterness with a subtle fruit finish. “Beer is art versus science. Beer guidelines, tax rules and laws of chemistry set the limits while the variables gives the brewer creative license.