NQ Lager “Have your own beer” Cartoon Map Poster

Carlton & United Breweries Ltd has been arguably Australia’s best-known brewery. Generally referred to as CUB, it has a range of popular beers; names such as Foster’s Lager and Victoria Bitter (VB) date back for more than a century. CUB also has the broadest international reputation of any Australian brewery because of its large-scale export marketing and licensing agreements granted to a number of overseas breweries.

The success of the new company was largely due to the wise and dynamic management of Emil Resch. Appointed general manager, he was one of Australia’s most outstanding brewers of the time. He directed the installation of a laboratory, and the old ‘rule of thumb’ practices gave way to scientific methods of controlling the quality of beer production.

In January 1913 CUB became a public company, Carlton & United Breweries Ltd. The post-World War I period saw considerable expansion in production facilities and export growth, and the installation of plumbing and beer-drawing equipment to almost 1000 hotels and clubs in Melbourne and country Victoria.

The acquisition of other breweries began in 1924 with the takeover of Hodges Brothers Brewery, Geelong. The following year Fitzgerald’s Brewery, Castle­maine, and the Victoria Brewery of Cohn Brothers, Bendigo, were also taken over. All three were closed, but the acquisitions included no fewer than eighty-four hotels spread through­out northern and central Victoria.

A merger with CUB’s main competitor, the Mel­bourne Co-operative Brewery Co. Ltd, took place in 1925 to make CUB the largest brewing enterprise in Australia. Other acquisitions followed, particularly in Queen­sland, and branch breweries were started in Darwin and in Fiji. This poster was used for a far North Queensland market.