Willie the Boatman
Willie the Boatman was founded in 2012 by Nick Newey and Pat McInerney, two home brewers from Sydney's Inner West. Their first beers reached the market in 2014, and a taproom opened in St Peters in 2015 in Precinct 75, a former paint factory. In late 2025 the venue moved to a smaller space within the complex. The name recalls William Kerr, a convict who rowed people across the Cooks River in the 1830s. Since March 2024 the business has belonged to the UK-based Powder Monkey Group, alongside Southern Highlands, Akasha and Wayward.
Beers by Willie the Boatman
6 beers← scroll to see all 6 beers →
The recurring character behind the beers
Willie the Boatman brew across 3 style families.
Across these 6 beers, 4 notes keep showing up:
Four notes carry across the range. That's a tight house style — most breweries in the catalogue share just one.
Compared with the wider catalogue of similar styles:
How we measure this
Two thresholds are at work here:
- The signature list shows notes that recur in at least 6% of this brewery's beers. A low bar — enough to flag a pattern, not high enough to call it an exclusive trait.
- The peer comparison below shows only notes where this brewery's coverage differs from similar breweries by at least 20 percentage points. A higher bar — enough to call a real difference, not a nudge.
A note can appear on the signature list without appearing in the peer comparison: it recurs here, but similar breweries do the same thing.
Nectar
Their beers place in the Top 49% of the catalogue on average, across 6 ranked beers. One clear standout well ahead of the rest.
Similar Breweries
hopIQ exclusiveBased on style overlap and flavor profile
About Willie the Boatman
Willie the Boatman was founded in 2012 by Nick Newey and Pat McInerney, two home brewers from Sydney's Inner West. Their first beers reached the market in 2014, and a taproom opened in St Peters in 2015 in Precinct 75, a former paint factory. In late 2025 the venue moved to a smaller space within the complex. The name recalls William Kerr, a convict who rowed people across the Cooks River in the 1830s. Since March 2024 the business has belonged to the UK-based Powder Monkey Group, alongside Southern Highlands, Akasha and Wayward.
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