Rising fortunes ... Scott Garnett, left, and Richard Adamson at the Phoenix Hotel, Woollahra Photo: Marco Del Grande

A friendship forged at the bar of Wollongong University in 1990 has resulted in Sydney men Scott Garnett, 36, and Richard Adamson, 35, living their dream at the helm of a brewing company.

Seventeen years on, their label, Barons, has secured a $30 million deal with a St Petersburg company that will see their craft beers enter the Russian market this month.

The Russian deal comes hot on the heels of a $30 million American export deal with United States Beverages, one of that country's largest beer importers.

Not bad for two friends who started their brewing career much the same as most cash-strapped uni students, tinkering with a standard home-brew kit in the backyard.

"Rich and I got to know each other extremely well at the bar at Wollongong University," says Garnett, who is the managing director. "I was studying business and Rich was studying politics and psychology. We had nothing in common from a curriculum perspective but we pretty much started brewing beer from day one."

"We started with the basic brew kit and as we went along we got more advanced, experimenting and it took off from there," says head brewer Adamson. "We really moved past what you'd call your standard home brewer. We would import our own ingredients from Europe. We took it to a different level."

Part of that "different level" was hosting beer parties in the backyard of Garnett's Randwick house from the mid-to-late '90s.

"We would get 300 people there drinking our brews," Garnett says.

Garnett worked for a media company in Britain for two years from 1998. With Adamson visiting on a regular basis, the pair "tried a lot of beers" throughout Europe.

On Garnett's return, they resurrected their famous beer parties, this time in Bondi, and began hosting their own Oktoberfest for budding amateur brewers.

Adamson completed a two-year postgraduate degree in brewing at Ballarat University while Garnett started investigating opportunities within the brewing industry.

By the end of 2004 — after Adamson had had a very bad day at his IT job — the pair decided to get into the brewing business in earnest and established Barons Brewing Company in 2005.

The Barons name came into play when Garnett turned to Adamson, quipping "I just want to be a beer baron".

Today, Barons produces about 20,000 cases a month from Australian Independent Brewers at Smeaton Grange, near Camden.

"We've shipped four containers of 540 kegs each to St Petersburg and we have orders for six more containers," Garnett says of the Russian deal.

"So that's one to two containers per month and we expect it to grow to 20 containers a month over the next 18 months when our Moscow deal kicks in."

Barons is exporting its full range comprising Barons Lager, Barons Pale Ale, Barons ESB and Black Wattle — wattleseed ale made using Australian native spices.

Barons was solely focused on the Australian market until Garnett and Adamson heard via industry contactsof a Russian group looking to import Australian beer.

"They heard about our deal with the US, got on our website and they liked what they saw," Garnett says.

"We were put in contact with the distributor over there and we started discussions about six months ago."

"They sampled our product — we agreed to a deal in principle - so we went over in September to finalise the agreement."

Garnett says his first trip to Russia "blew his expectations away".

"The take-up has been fabulous. I am actually surprised at how well it has been received. As anation — because Russia is only 14 years out of communist rule and there's quite some uncertainty politically — they live for today. So imagine that, you've got tons of cash, you're in a really cool place and you live for the moment."

"They drink a whole load of beers from around the world but they don't have any Australian beers. We're definitely the first Australian craft beer there. There is Foster's but it is brewed locally." Barons expects to have at least 60 taps of craft beers in St Petersburg by the end of October with a target of 500 taps by mid-2009.

For locals, Barons is sold on tap in pubs such as the William in East Sydney, the Royal at Paddington and the Shakespeare in Surry Hills.