The Local Taphouse Melbourne

The Local Taphouse opened on Carlisle Street in St Kilda East in 2008, co-founded by Steve Jeffares and Justin Joiner, and was one of the first venues in Australia to put 20 craft taps on the wall and explain each one. Crafty Pint's archive of Australian craft-beer-bar coverage credits The Local Taphouse — alongside its now-also-closed Darlinghurst sibling — with co-creating Good Beer Week in 2011, an event that anchored Melbourne's craft beer calendar for over a decade. The Carlisle Street venue closed permanently in late 2024 after the lease expired and the founders chose not to renew.

Why include a closed bar? Because half a dozen still-current Melbourne craft-beer listicles point at the address, and a reader following one of those links deserves an honest profile, not a 404. The right visitor in 2026 is looking for context on what was there and where to go now (Carwyn Cellars in Thornbury, Stomping Ground in Collingwood, Mountain Goat in Richmond — see the pairings below). The wrong visitor expects to walk in for a pint.

Carlisle Street's red-brick frontage opened into a U-shaped ground-floor bar with the 20-tap wall front and centre — every tap badged with brewery, style, ABV and IBU on a chalkboard the staff updated daily. Upstairs was a function room and the rooftop deck where the Australian International Beer Awards launches, Sydney Craft Beer Week events and the Good Beer Week GABS launches reliably ran. Crafty Pint's farewell coverage in November 2024 noted the deck had hosted 'every important Australian craft launch of the last decade' — a fair reading.

The default order through the bar's 16 years was a tasting flight of four (around $18–$22 in the final years) — the bar staff would walk a first-time visitor through the style ladder, IPA to stout, and let them pick the keepers. Mountain Goat, Stomping Ground and Boatrocker beers were consistently on rotation alongside imports from Mikkeller, Stone and Brooklyn Brewery; r/melbourne's beer threads from 2018–2024 consistently named The Local as 'where you went to try the new release before it hit the supermarket'.

Food was pub-share — burgers, schnitzels, wood-fired pizzas, the standard Melbourne craft-beer-room menu — built to drink with rather than to compete with the kitchen. The Good Beer Week dinners that paired courses with rare kegs were the venue's most-loved nights; Beer & Brewer magazine's 2019 cover feature called the format 'the template every craft beer bar in Australia copied'.

On a Wednesday GABS launch the room was 80% industry — brewers, distributors, beer media; on a Sunday afternoon it was Carlisle Street neighbours, families upstairs and a steady walk-in trade off the street. The mix is what every craft beer bar wanted to be and most never were. Crafty Pint's closing-week interview with Steve Jeffares captured the run as 'sixteen years, two thousand tap takeovers, one Good Beer Week — that's enough for one address'.