The beer borrows its whole story from an eighteenth-century rogue.

James Squire is a beer brand, but first it was a man. English Wikipedia records that James Squire was baptised in Kingston upon Thames in December 1754, was sentenced in 1785 to seven years’ transportation for stealing poultry and other goods, and sailed with the First Fleet, which reached Botany Bay in January 1788. In the young colony he was punished for taking horehound, a herb with a hop-like bitterness, from the hospital stores; he later told the Bigge inquiry of 1820 that he had been brewing for thirty years.

Once free, Squire was granted land at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River in 1795 and opened a tavern there called The Malting Shovel, licensed in September 1798, according to colonial records cited by English Wikipedia. He is credited with the first successful cultivation of hops in Australia: in March 1806 he took two hop vines from his own grounds to Government House, and Governor King rewarded him with a cow from the government herd. In May 1822 the Sydney Gazette wrote that he was the first to bring hops “to any perfection” and that “Squire’s Beer” was well known. His grandson, James Squire Farnell, became premier of New South Wales in 1877.

The modern brand began in a Sydney suburb nearly two centuries later. English Wikipedia says the brewer Chuck Hahn opened the Hahn Brewery in 1988 in a former stables and furniture factory in Camperdown, and that the operation received financial support from the brewer Lion Nathan in 1993. In late 1998, citing Keith Deutsher’s The Breweries of Australia (1999), it says the site was relaunched as Lion’s craft-brewing arm and renamed the Malt Shovel Brewery, after Squire’s tavern, with its pale ales, ales and porters sold under his name. Brews News dated the formation of the James Squire brand to 1999.

Every beer in the range takes a chapter of the namesake’s life.

The identity is built on biography. English Wikipedia notes that the core beers each carry a moniker tied to the James Squire story: among them One Fifty Lashes pale ale, Four Wives pilsener, Nine Tales amber ale and Jack of Spades porter. The first echoes the sentence Squire received in 1789 for the horehound theft: 150 lashes, English Wikipedia records.

That story became the centre of the advertising. Campaign Brief reported in April 2021 that Lion had appointed the newly formed independent agency Milk & Honey United, led by Steve Jackson and Andy DiLallo, to lead the James Squire business after a competitive pitch. A year later, B&T reported in April 2022 the launch of the platform “Ordinary Be Damned,” which Lion’s portfolio director Malcolm Eadie called the brand’s first masterbrand campaign. Its centrepiece was a 90-second film directed by Justin McMillan and shot in Tasmania for its landscapes and historic architecture, with a voiceover by the actor Rory McCann, ending in an old brewery courtyard and a banquet hall where Squire sits at the head of the table.

The line outlived the agency. Mediaweek reported in December 2023 that a new campaign by Thinkerbell, aimed at contemporising the brand for modern Australians, kept “Ordinary be Damned” as its line; the credits listed Weave as the design agency and UM as the media agency, and Albertus Lombard, Lion Australia’s premium brand director, was quoted on bringing modernity to the brand.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Australian beers: Victoria Bitter, Carlton Draught, XXXX, Tooheys, James Squire, Boag’s and Cascade. Between them they belong to just two groups, both owned from Japan. Victoria Bitter, Carlton Draught and Cascade belong to Carlton & United Breweries, which was formed in Melbourne in 1904 from a merger of six breweries, became part of Elders IXL in 1983 and so of the Foster’s group, passed to SABMiller in 2011 and to Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2016, and has been owned by Asahi since June 2020, English Wikipedia records. Cascade joined CUB in 1993, the Tasmanian Business Reporter says.

XXXX, Tooheys, James Squire and Boag’s belong to Lion, which took shape in October 2009 when Kirin bought the brewer Lion Nathan, English Wikipedia says. The Queensland and New South Wales names came first: Castlemaine Perkins, the Brisbane home of XXXX, merged with Tooheys of Sydney in 1980, the combined company was bought by the Bond Corporation in 1985, and Lion Nathan took full control in 1992. James Squire is younger: it was launched at the Malt Shovel Brewery in Camperdown, Sydney, founded as the Hahn Brewery by Chuck Hahn in 1988, backed by Lion from 1993 and renamed in 1998 after the tavern of the First Fleet convict-brewer James Squire. Boag’s, the Launceston brewery formed as J. Boag & Son in 1883, was bought by San Miguel in 2000 and by Lion Nathan in November 2007.

A beer brand’s identity is carried less by a recipe than by a name, a label and the place it promises — a brewery tower, a home state, a founder’s story — even after the company behind it has changed hands several times. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself: who started it, who owns it now, where it is brewed and how its look has changed.

A craft-era brand inside one of Australia’s largest brewers.

The owner has been the same from the start, though the owner’s owner changed. English Wikipedia says Japan’s Kirin bought most of Douglas Myers’s stake in Lion Nathan in 1998 and later held about 46 per cent; in September 2009 Lion Nathan shareholders approved a full takeover by Kirin, and the business has traded as Lion since 2011. The same company owns the Tasmanian brewer Boag’s and holds half of the Yarra Valley gin maker Four Pillars, English Wikipedia notes.

The brewery that gave the brand its home has had a harder recent history. In June 2024 Lion announced it was proposing to close the Camperdown site at the end of August 2024, Inside.beer and Drinks Trade reported, with production moving to Lion breweries in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales and to Little Creatures sites in Geelong and Fremantle. Lion’s co-managing director James Brindley cited a decline of 100 million litres in beer volumes since 2019 and rising costs, and said the brewery had “played a pivotal role in pioneering the craft beer movement in Australia” and was best known for the James Squire range.

The name needs care in searches. English Wikipedia notes that the convict is also recorded as James Squires, and the brand’s own site is jamessquire.com.au.

For a design guide, James Squire shows how a brewer can turn one documented life — a convict, a tavern and a hop garden — into beer names, film scripts and a brand line that survived a change of agency. Compare Boag’s, Lion’s Tasmanian lager brand, and Kirin, the Japanese brewer that owns Lion. For this guide we use oxblood, colonial ink and hop gold with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep James Squire’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.