Bodriggy Brewing Company.

Bodriggy Brewing Company

Four serving tanks stand along the back wall and some of the beer goes from tank to glass without ever being put in a keg.

Why go

Pete Walsh and the team who run Dr Morse across the road stood in a 1500 square metre Abbotsford warehouse full of parked cars in early 2017 and described where the brewhouse and the three bars would go (The Crafty Pint). It opened in August 2019, licensed for more than four hundred people, with sixty-two taps across the building and more than twenty non-beer drinks on tap including wine. The back bar of tequila and mezcal nearly reaches the ceiling and was put together to match what the kitchen cooks, which is Central and South American. The beer runs from crisp pilsner and summer ale out to kettle sours and lichtenhainer, a low-alcohol wheat beer almost nobody brews (Broadsheet). The name comes off the roof: the building was Bodriggy Villa, a stonemason's house, before it spent decades as one of Australia's first LPG conversion centres.

Order this / avoid

• Order: Speccy Juice, the session IPA brewed with The Old Bar and its football club, which came 39th in the national GABS Hottest 100 of 2024. Then whatever is coming off the serving tanks. From the kitchen, the anticuchos, done as beef heart and grilled potato in a sticky char siu register, and the jalapenos stuffed with smoked swordfish.
• Avoid: wandering in and taking the first table. The space is broken into distinct rooms and they feel completely different, so walk it once first. If you want a cocktail, Stingrays Upstairs is a separate bar with its own hours.

What locals & experts say

• Will Ziebell, The Crafty Pint, in the bylined Abbotsford crawl: Add in left-of-centre events, a giant glitter ball and (sometime in 2020) new spaces on side lining Johnston Street and you've got a brewery venue up there with the most distinctive and impressive in Australia.2
• GABS Hottest 100 Aussie Craft Beers of 2024: Speccy Juice placed 39th in the national public poll, as published in The Crafty Pint's results.3
• Broadsheet, on the point of the place: the food menu makes it worth coming here just to eat, regardless of anything else, which is a sentence rarely written about a brewery.4
• Untappd, as a beer-category signal only (read 1 August 2026): seven different Bodriggy beers logged by drinkers in a single day, which says the house roster is wide and moving. Crowd rating averages are not used, and this proxy applies to craft beer and to nothing else.5
• No Melbourne chef names it. Across 74 picks by 44 working chefs and writers in Broadsheet's industry series, Bodriggy appears in none.7

Good to know

• Where: 245 Johnston Street, Abbotsford. Dr Morse, under the same ownership, is across the road.
• Timing: Monday to Thursday midday to 11pm, Friday to Sunday midday until late.
• Booking: walk-in, and the capacity is over four hundred, so a group is manageable without one.
• Rooms: the main brewpub, Stingrays Upstairs as its own cocktail bar, and the Froff Shop out the front for takeaway. This entry covers the brewpub.
• Music: a stage with regular DJs and bands, and residencies that run for months.
• Diet: the venue publishes no allergen or dietary statement, so nothing is flagged. Absence of a flag means unknown.
• Hygiene: Victoria publishes no venue ratings, only Safe Food Victoria's register of convictions under s.53D of the Food Act 1984, and this venue is not on it.8

Verdict

should-visit — Four serving tanks stand along the back wall and some of the beer runs from them straight into the glass, never touching a keg. That is capital spent on the drink rather than on the room, and it is the kind of thing that separates a brewery from a bar with good taps. Sixty-two taps across the building, a brewhouse out the back, and a house session IPA, Speccy Juice, brewed with the football team from The Old Bar up the road, which finished 39th in the GABS Hottest 100 of 2024. The Crafty Pint's Will Ziebell, who writes the Melbourne beer beat, calls it 'a brewery venue up there with the most distinctive and impressive in Australia'. The kitchen is Central and South American and the back bar of tequila and mezcal was built to sit next to it, so this is not a brewery where the food is an afterthought. Walk in, take a group, stay late, and go upstairs to Stingrays if you want a cocktail. It holds at should-visit rather than higher because the best writing on it is six years old and no Melbourne chef names it.