Forecast cloudy, but fine

Cooper's brewery in Adelaide has beautifully sculpted lawns decorated with gum trees. Is this an elaborate joke? The company used to be laughed to derision in Australia for concentrating on ale — and in particular cloudy ale. Cooper's, it could be said, was up a gum tree.

But the brewery has had the last laugh. It's a flourishing company. It has broken out of its South Australia heartland and now enjoys national sales. It exports widely and its bottled beers are available in Britain.

It's family-owned, run by the fifth generation of the Cooper family who believe firmly in tradition and quality. When brewing giant Lion Nathan, owner of Castlemaine, attempted to buy Cooper's in 2005, 94.6% of the 117 shareholders, mainly family members, turned down an offer worth 450 million Australian dollars — that's around £200m.

In the politest possible way, the Coopers told Lion Nathan they couldn't give a XXXX for its offer. "That figure of 94.6% has become almost as famous as Don Bradman's batting average," operations director Nick Sterenberg said.

They take such matters seriously in Adelaide: I drove down Sir Donald Bradman Boulevard on my way to the brewery, while the post-box number for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is 99.8, the Don's astonishing average.

Cooper's dates from 1862. It was founded by a Yorkshireman, Thomas Cooper, who had emigrated from Skipton with his wife, an innkeeper's daughter. While Thomas worked as a dairyman and a cobbler, his wife brewed beer at home. When she became ill, Thomas tried his hand at making beer. Not only was his wife cured, but friends of the family raved about Thomas's beer and told him he should open a brewery.

For most of its life, the brewery was based in the Leabrook district of Adelaide. It used a brewing method similar to the Burton Unions here: primary fermentation took place in vessels made from the hardwood jarrah. The beer was then dropped into wooden puncheons, or hogsheads, where it continued to ferment and mature.

In 2001, Cooper's moved to its new Regency Park site for two reasons: it needed more capacity, while Leabrook had become a posh suburb, home to doctors and lawyers who objected vociferously to having a brewery in their midst.

Leabrook could produce 700,000 hectolitres a year, while Regency Park has a potential capacity of 250 million hectos. It's typical of the Cooper family that the big, bright, traditional brewhouse, based on mash tuns, mash filters and coppers, was designed by Briggs of Burton-on-Trent, in the heartland of English pale-ale brewing. The old vessels from Leabrook are in an on-site museum, packed with fascinating 19th and 20th-century brewing artefacts. The boardroom conference table is built from jarrah wood from the original site.

"We brew an ancient sort of beer — it was old in 1862," Nick Sterenberg says. He's a Brit by birth and worked for Courage and Charles Wells before moving to Australia, where he now speaks with an undiluted local accent. "The Coopers are unswayed by fashion. In the 1980s, Bill and Maxwell Cooper developed markets outside South Australia, using the slogan 'cloudy but fine'."

While the brewery's main beer, Pale Ale (4.5% abv), is hazy rather than cloudy, the flagship beer, Sparkling Ale (5.8% abv), belies the name. It takes a certain kind of chutzpah in Australia to deliberately produce a beer called "sparkling" that is opaque in the glass. Part of the Cooper's brewers' skill is to make a beer that keeps yeast in suspension during fermentation and conditioning. The present generation, Glenn and Tim, brew what they call "a significantly different beer". It has been taken up with enthusiasm by younger drinkers, especially university students.

"We have very loyal drinkers," Nick says. "We have a Cooper's Club where drinkers pay for a regular newsletter."

Hands-on and committed, Glenn and Tim Cooper are in the brewery every day, not resting on ancient laurels but running an expanding business. Malt extract accounts for around half of the brewery's production. Some of it goes to cereal and confectionery manufacturers but the bulk is turned into home-brewing kits. Cooper's is undisputedly the world's biggest brewing-kit producer, exporting 2.5 million cans a year to many countries, including Scandinavia and Britain. "Our kits are popular in countries where beer tax is high," Nick Sterenberg laughs.

The company is also developing new styles of beer. It brews its own lager, makes a wonderful oily, creamy stout and has recently introduced Mild (3.8% abv) and Dark Ale (4.5% abv), which has a fine roasted malt and chocolate character. In the late 1990s, it started to make an annual Vintage Ale (7.5% abv), with massive vinous fruit and bitter hops character.