Louis Powlett

"Having that extra cash was nice, but recognition outside the town was really nice," says Louis Powlett, co-owner and cocktail maven at Ballarat's Renard. "If I say I'm a bartender from Victoria, Australia, people just assume I'm in Melbourne. So it's nice to see recognition from bartenders around the world."

Powlett won the 2024 Passoã Porn Star Martini Competition, an online-only cocktail contest judged by luminaries, including Amsterdam bartending legend Tess Posthumus. It provided an opportunity to raise his profile that's hard to come by for bartenders outside big cities.

"A lot of the time, in regional Victoria, you don't even hear about the cocktail comps that are on," he says. "And for a global competition going remote definitely levels the playing field. It's just a lot more accessible for everyone to see and enter."

Old, gold and cold

Born in Melbourne, Powlett grew up in Ballarat, a country town with a population of around 115,000 to which he's passionately loyal. "The Ballarat motto is old, gold and cold," he says. "It's got all these old buildings; it's a Gold Rush town; and it's cold as hell." (To translate for northern hemisphere folk: During the Australian winter, Ballarat temperatures sometimes drop below freezing at night.)

Powlett fell into hospitality courtesy of his oldest brother, Teddy. At one point, Teddy had a string of Ballarat venues but, with two young children to look after, he's simplified his portfolio to a winery (Wayward) and a stake in Renard. Though the two brothers are five years apart and weren't close when they lived at home, Louis took a job with Teddy to help him get through uni.

"I started working in this exact same building, the venue that's now Renard, when I turned 18," he says. "I was helping out, doing glassing and admin, when it was a nightclub called the Faux Social Club."

After finishing his degree, Powlett found himself sucked in, first to bartending then to management. "I wanted to take a break, but by that stage I was starting to teach myself more about cocktails, and the further you move away from a vodka, lime and soda, the more you enjoy it," he says.

The Covid crunch

The pandemic proved a turning point in Powlett's career. Australia operated some of the world's strictest lockdown rules, although they varied from state to state. "Most Victorians just block it out, but it was pretty strict," he recalls. "You couldn't really leave home unless you were getting groceries; all businesses were closed unless you were doing takeaway; you could only visit one other household; and the rules kept changing."

The Faux Social Club was not just a bar but a full-blown nightclub, with a dark and moody aesthetic and a 3am license. It was immediately clear the brothers wouldn't be able to reopen for some time. Although still in their 20s, they also felt they were getting too old to run a nightclub.

"The conversation was, essentially: 'What do we do with Faux? Do you want to buy in and do something else with it?'" Powlett recalls. "I said yes, and we did the renovations together, and that was when we switched the business to Renard." (Renard, the French word for fox, is a nod to Faux, another French word that many customers insisted on pronouncing "fox".)

The brothers changed up the aesthetic, brightening up the space and refitting it, added some food options and shifted the focus to cocktails and wines, although they still occasionally use their 3am license. Powlett and his housemate worked on creating cocktails to add to their menu.

"We're known for late-night drinking from 10pm onwards," Powlett says. "Kids nowadays are a lot more happy to do that than go out nightclubbing and pay AU$15 entry and AU$15 for a vodka, lime and soda."

Bright lights, small city

Ballarat's hospitality scene saw a boom in the aftermath of Covid as city-dwellers escaped Melbourne's strict restrictions and soaring house prices and opted to work from home somewhere greener. "Off the back of that influx of people there were a lot of places opening up," Powlett says. "Now it's started dwindling again, condensing a bit, with a few places closing down, although that's not unique to Ballarat."

Powlett's work has evolved both since he became co-owner and since his godchildren were born, although Teddy still looks after the books. "As soon as you start to go into bar ownership, the role of a bartender changes pretty dramatically," he says. "It's a lot more about people, how to advertise a business, how to do your SEO. I even get to use my film degree as we play films on a projector."

For Powlett, there's still a difference between what works in a small town like Ballarat and what works in a big city: Like most Ballarat venues, Renard opens only Wednesday through Sunday. But he keeps the cocktail flag flying with a new seasonal menu four times a year, although he sometimes finds that his most innovative creations don't go down nearly as well as a pink, fluffy sour.

"There is a growing appetite for more classic cocktails-stirred-down, boozy, bitter-maybe because more people from Melbourne are moving to Ballarat or more tourists are visiting Ballarat," he says. "But the drinks that sell the most are definitely shaken sours, which limits you a little bit."

Powlett favours bitter, boozy drinks and enjoys R&D, but find innovations like fat washes, milk punches and clarification often don't play that well with his audience. "I'll always keep a good-selling drink on and the ones that sell the best are sours," he says. "I think I've got three or four on a menu of 12: There's a few that have sold so well I'm struggling to take them off."

Yet neither brother has any plans to move from their hometown. "Some people ask: 'Why don't you open up a bar in Melbourne?'" Powlett says. "They think the bar we've got here is very northern suburbs Melbourne. But we like that we're doing it for the town that's raised us. It's nice to improve the place where you come from."