Savouring a pint of Purple Moose’s golden Snowdonia Ale on a spring evening, I watch the sun setting over Porthmadog Harbour, Cardigan Bay shimmering beyond. Behind the town, a soft purple haze settles over Yr Wyddfa and the wild Eryri mountains.

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While tourists flock to the Llyn Peninsula in the summer for its seaside charms, Porthmadog retains its industrial heritage, based on slate, shipbuilding, and railways. The town is still home to the world’s oldest-surviving railway company, the Ffestiniog Railway. Its steam locomotives puff up densely wooded mountain slopes, and past small patches of Celtic rainforest, before emerging into the slate-strewn, moon-like landscapes of the old mining centre, Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Here, the welcoming local brewery tap, the Australia, is named after a distant continent, and its decor feels more reminiscent of a craft beer bar from Peckham than a pub in this traditional, Welsh-speaking region. The brewery’s name, too, gestures towards Canadian wildlife rather than the ospreys, dolphins, and pine martens that are native to the area. These quirks and contradictions are all the work of the real-ale-loving Englishman behind Purple Moose: Lawrence Washington.

I first meet Lawrence in the brewery, which is situated within the industrial back streets of Porthmadog. He’s clear-eyed and thoughtful, with a wiry frame shaped by mountain running. While he originally hails from Cheltenham, railways and real ale brought him to North Wales.

“I had a family connection volunteering on the Ffestiniog Railway, and when I was younger I would often stay up here in a hostel working on the telegraph wires and the signalling system,” he says.

Lawrence studied music at the University of Huddersfield in the mid ’90s. That’s also where he first developed a love of real ale, at The Rat & Ratchet—which became the original Ossett microbrewery, responsible for Ossett’s famous White Rat beer.

“That’s probably the most significant thing that happened to me there, apart from getting a degree!” he jokes.

This experience nurtured a long-standing interest in home-brewing in Lawrence. “I loved its creativity. For my degree I concentrated on music composition, and that creative streak also expressed itself in crafting new beers from raw ingredients.”

Prompted by the introduction of Small Brewers Relief in the early 2000s, Lawrence made a logical connection, and opted to combine his two passions.

“Real ale and railways go so well together,” he says. “In Porthmadog, people come to the railway and they’ll also be looking for decent beer. Landlords across northwest Wales told me there was a huge demand for locally brewed Welsh beer, but they couldn’t get hold of any.”

Purple Moose quickly filled these gaps, thanks in part to its sense of locality. From the outset, Lawrence wanted to name the brewery’s beers after the region’s geography and history.

Glaslyn Ale, a pale bitter with aromatic hops, was named for the river that rises in the Eryri mountains and runs into the harbour. Cwrw Madog, or Madog’s Ale, is a traditional Welsh bitter that commemorates William Madocks, another Englishman, after whom the town was named. In 1811, he built the Cob, a mile-long sea wall that diverted the Glaslyn to form the harbour. A railway was constructed along its length to transport slate from the mountains.

This link with the local slate industry extends to the brewery building itself. “It was a foundry, and part of the Union Ironworks, opened in 1862 with much of its output machinery for the slate industry,” says Lawrence. The brewery commissioned a special beer, Union Foundry Ale, to celebrate its 150th anniversary.

““...the railway volunteers drink Purple Moose “religiously,” with up to five firkins of Snowdonia turned over in a week.””

Lawrence’s history with the Ffestiniog Railway helped established another loyal market for Purple Moose: Its beers are now served on steam train excursions. I chat to cellarman Cefyn Williams when I visit Spooner’s, the railway company’s pub on the station platform. He tells me the railway volunteers drink Purple Moose “religiously,” with up to five firkins of Snowdonia, the brewery’s sessionable pale ale, turned over in a week in the summer.

While its beers have clear local inspirations, the brewery’s own name has a more oblique origin.

“I had a taste for dark beer, the rich maltiness that comes through. So, I spent a long time developing what was, for me, the perfect dark beer, which I called Dark Side of the Moose,” Lawrence says. As a Pink Floyd fan, the “dark side” came naturally to him.

The beer itself is a complex bitter with subtle blackcurrant aromas, courtesy of Bramling Cross hops, and was runner-up in CAMRA’s Winter Beer of the Year in 2015. At the other end of the brewery’s range is Ysgawen, or Elderflower Ale, a fragrant golden ale introduced in 2009. It’s proof that Purple Moose doesn’t just occupy the dark side.

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Bangor-born Nico Llewellyn is the secretary of CAMRA’s local Gwynedd branch. He says the impact of Purple Moose’s arrival in the area can’t be overstated.

“Lawrence has a wonderful way of connecting with local communities. He treats the pubs he supplies really, really well,” he says. “We would survey countless pubs across North Wales, and if they served Purple Moose, it was a great sign of quality for the Good Beer Guide. They were so good, with consistent flavours, and so their beers spread out into other parts of Wales as well as Gwynedd and Anglesey.”

This remains true today, with Purple Moose available on draught everywhere from remote pubs like the Pen-y-Gwryd—located at the Nant Gwynant mountain pass, where Edmund Hillary prepared for the first ascent of Everest—to the seaside bars of Llandudno. 240 pubs are currently supplied with Purple Moose’s cask ale, and its beers are also widely available in bottle and can.

In 2023, Purple Moose took on a second threatened pub, the Station. It sits directly on the British Rail platform at the other end of town, and serves a large housing estate.

“The locals came to me asking whether it was going to end up like the Australia,” Lawrence recalls. “They were really worried. I said, ‘No, my view is it’s your pub. We’ll just keep it open for you.’” True to his word, it even continues to sell Molson Coors’ keg beers.

Festooned with Welsh dragon bunting, the pub remains a staunchly traditional Welsh local. I visit on a quiet weekday, enjoying an ale from Purple Moose as the sun streams through the station windows, illuminating the no-frills, pre-Beeching decor and furniture.

The prominence of Welsh in Purple Moose’s branding has helped it be embraced by the local population, Nico says. Take Calon Lân: a seasonal amber bitter, the beer is brewed every spring for the Six Nations rugby tournament, and its annual arrival is highly anticipated by local drinkers. Its name comes from a well-known Welsh hymn, and translates into English as “pure heart.”

“Purple Moose was one of the original pioneers. Every single pub just wanted to have the language on the pump clip,” Nico says. “The Welsh was on top and the English was beneath. For example, ‘Cwrw Eryri,’ and then underneath it was the translation into ‘Snowdonia Ale.’”

In time, the brewery’s logo—a cartoon of a tipsy purple moose head, drawn by Lawrence in the early days—caught on as a local mascot, although it soon spread beyond the brewery’s heartlands.

“You could go to a pub anywhere in Britain and go, ‘Oh look, they’ve got a Moose on,’” Nico says. Loyal drinkers send Lawrence photos of their Purple Moose cuddly toys on holiday, everywhere from Hollywood to the Falkland Islands and even Everest Base Camp. Purple Moose car stickers are a common sight in town.

The connection remains so strong that the brewery’s 2025 rebranding caused controversy when the font size of the Welsh-language brewery name, Bragdy Mŵs Piws, was reduced compared to the English version. “After they’d kept the Welsh right the way through, this recent rebranding has caused a lot of upset in the local community,” Nico says.

For his part, Lawrence acknowledges the concerns, and promises to address them in the coming months.

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I’m sitting in the Australia towards the end of a busy bank holiday Monday evening. Customers are thinning out, but there’s still a family group from Birmingham, complete with kids bouncing footballs around; they’re finishing their meals before returning to the nearby caravan site. A group of outdoorsy 20-somethings from Liverpool drink Purple Moose’s Antlered IPA.

Seventies music plays in the background: “Killer Queen,” followed by “Brown Eyed Girl.” An elderly regular rolls a cigarette on the bar counter while a late-arriving middle-aged drinker warns the barman that he’ll be ordering lots of halves to work through the entire Purple Moose range.

My pint is one of Purple Moose’s ventures into keg beer, Mŵsh. It’s a lager brewed in the style of a Kölsch, which means it can technically be made with the brewery’s house ale yeast. Like its German inspiration, it’s light and refreshing.

The brewery tap is the only pub in the country to be called “the Australia.” Why here? Nigel Edwards, the manager, says nobody knows for sure. “Its first mention as a pub by this name was 1851. Locally, there are stories that the slate came down from Blaenau and it went over to Australia in the boats.”

As the story goes, a Porthmadog ship ended up Down Under, the crew saw how lovely the weather was compared to Wales’ grey drizzle, and they abandoned the ship, which had to be brought back by an Australian crew.

““People say, ‘We’re going to Australia on the bus.’””

— Nigel Edwards, Manager, The Australia

The brewery stuck with the ship theory on the pub sign. “Regardless of the name’s origin, we’ve got bus stops outside, and people say, ‘We’re going to Australia on the bus,’” Nigel says.

Buying the Australia in 2017 wasn’t Purple Moose’s first venture into running a pub, however. In 2012, it joined a consortium of four North Wales brewers to run the Albion in Conwy on the North Coast. The pub is still managed under this arrangement, and has a CAMRA nationally listed 1920s heritage interior.

By contrast, there’s no such heritage, or even a nautical theme, at the Australia. Instead, it’s equipped with hefty pine furniture, industrial-style lighting, and handy plug sockets and USB charging stations for the digital nomads. The walls are painted dark and used as blackboards. One lists the beers’ many awards. Another details the brewing process, accompanied by a drawing of a Welsh dragon. Of course, the upholstery is purple, and there are moose heads liberally stencilled on the furniture.

Prior to Lawrence’s tenure, the pub had been run under Enterprise Inns’ ownership. “It was a dive, a complete dive,” Nico says. “Honestly, you’d never go there.” Police were regularly called out to break up fights.

Transformed by real ale and a redesign, it now appeals to a wider range of customers. “On the top level, there are cosy little booths where you can have a beer and a chat,” Nigel says. “Down the bottom, it’s more open and communal for bigger groups.”

Sam Walker, a holidaymaker in his late 20s visiting from Bedfordshire, spontaneously joins us to explain what the pub means to him.

“Me and Hannah, my fiancée, come here every year at the same time. We make it like a ritual thing,” he says. “And, without us even realising it, my friends at work visit here too. They’re like, ‘Go to the Australia. Everyone loves it.’ Our local pubs just sell stuff like Moretti or Madri. If you come here, you want to try something that you haven’t had before.”

Lawrence came to Porthmadog for the railways but, despite his modest aims for the brewery, stayed on and ended up transforming the area’s beer culture in the process. A little more than 20 years on, the mythical Purple Moose has become as much a part of Porthmadog’s landscape as the railway running over the Cob, the mountains, and the language spoken in every pub.

Lawrence says he’s happy with the brewery’s success. In many ways, he didn’t expect it, and remains humble about how far it’s come. “I just wanted to see the Purple Moose Brewery name listed in the back of the Good Beer Guide,” he laughs.