It started with a premium artisanal cold brew coffee and has grown to include small batch soft drinks and very tasty collaborations. This is Mischief Brew.
After seven years of managing bars in Melbourne, Dan Cox ended up in Adelaide due to matters of the heart. While the relationship didn’t last, Cox was soon ensconced in the community, pub, and brewery that is Adelaide’s The Wheatsheaf Hotel – the Wheaty.
“I have always been interested in natural wines and quality produce. It has been great to watch the progressiveness of food and beverage here, there are a lot of young wine makers and others doing creative things. It will be so interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years,” Cox says.
Apart from his love of hospitality, Cox had a driving goal – to be self-employed and financially secure.
“I started my own business across the road from the Wheaty at George Street Studios. It was more a hobby project of building a cargo cart with a beer tap on the front. It just ran on gas and ice, and could have any beverage on it – beer, kombucha, or coffee.
“I was taking it to markets and catering functions, and then started playing around with brewing back at the Wheaty,” he says.
Dan Cox and Scott Giles.
It was around then that Cox met his business partner Scott Giles. The pair were dating sisters, who happen to be identical twins.
Giles had developed Mischief Brew Coffee – a cold press coffee with a cult following.
The pair joined forces and were selling at Adelaide’s festivals, markets, and universities. But it was not without its challenges. The coffee was an expensive offering; a small batch product, unique sized bottle (330ml), required cold storage, and had a short shelf life.
“That said, the branding was amazing,” says Cox.
And then, as with so many, Covid forced the pair’s hand.
“We lost everything, all our catering gigs, it put us back to square one. But that is what brought us to what we’re doing now. Covid gave us time to think about what we wanted to be and the brand we wanted to create,” Cox says.
It just so happened that Cox had been experimenting with making soft drinks, kombucha, and tonics “just for fun”.
The pair set themselves the parameters of producing four classic mixers: cola, lemonade, tonic, and soda.
Cox says making the cola was a case of starting from scratch.
“I had no idea what went into it let alone how to make it shelf stable. So, I started reading about the origins of cola and looking at old recipes. Then it was just a case of trial and error, creating batch after batch.
“It took about a year and now I’ve got that knowledge it is really exciting to think about what we can do next,” he says.
Cox had also formed a relationship with Greg Grigoriou and Delinquente Wines – a vineyard focused on small batch, minimal intervention wines from Southern Italian grape varieties grown in the Riverland, South Australia.
“I had been working on tonic recipes, making hundreds and hundreds of batches but I still wasn’t happy with it. Greg brought in his Bizzarro Bitter Aperitivo and we added the tonic – it was fantastic,” Cox says.
The Mischief Brew team and Grigouriou went halves on the tanks and canning equipment, with Mischief developing its sodas, Delinquente launching a spritz and pet nat, and the two working on a range of collaborative products.
Already the Bizarro collaboration is being exported to the US and New Zealand, with Japan and Korea next in line.
“We are moving into a whole new realm. Up to the end of 2020, we hadn’t sold anything outside of South Australia,” Cox says.
“We only really started this range in late 2020 and the response has been amazing.
“It has taken off in hospitality with more than 80 accounts, which is ideal for us before we look to retail.
“People are coming to us, which is nice. We’re at the start of something very exciting.”
At the moment, Mischief Brew is just Cox and Giles, with friends coming in to help on canning day.
“That can’t last forever, but at the moment it is really important and embodies who we are as a brand,” he says.
The artwork on the cans plays a similar role. While Giles does all the graphic design, the artworks were created by Kerri Anne Wright as lino cuts.
Mischief Brew was born from a niche product that fostered the esoteric quality of “if you know, you know”. For Cox and Giles, that is still very much the brand’s identity.
“We are broadening our range and even heading in a new direction, but the brand still conveys its edginess while being more commercially viable,” Cox says.
When Food & Drink Business caught up with Cox, the Omicron variant was wreaking havoc with its highly contagious nature and creating subsequent headaches for employers trying to find staff.
“I ended up helping out a friend who owned a wine bar, and it was almost like an undercover boss situation. I could see how people responded and interacted with our drinks, they were treating it as an experience, like they would with a wine. It gave me a lot of confidence we were on the right track,” he says.
As the pair expand the range and explore other collaborations, they are determined to keep raising the bar.
This article first appeared in the March 2022 edition of Food & Drink Business.
