Gab & Chris the Local Hero Legends! Melbourne Food & Wine Festival Awards 2025

 A Toast from the Sailors Grave Team!

What a bloody awesome news it is! We’re beyond stoked to share that Gab and Chris Moore, our fearless founders, were named “Local Hero” Legends at the 2025 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival Awards, handed out by Food & Drink Victoria. Legend, folks! We’re bursting with pride as a team. After all, we see how hard they work every single day in the brewery.

What’s This Award All About?

Launched in 1993, the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival Legends Hall of Fame pays tribute to the leaders, groundbreakers and visionaries of Victoria’s food, drink and hospitality industry including Food Producer, Drink Producer, Chef, Sustainability, and more. A panel of industry all-stars (including MasterChef’s Sofia Levin, journalist Roslyn Grundy, Wine Victoria CEO Dan Sims, and others) picks winners from nominations by past Legends. This year, it was two big awards per category - one Legend, one Trailblazer - to celebrate both pillars and rising stars in Victoria’s food-and-drink scene.

So for Gab and Chris to be named Local Hero Legends... that’s a moment we’ll be celebrating for ages. I mean, how cool is it to have a "legend" boss from "Hall of Fame"? And they ARE such great leaders. Sometimes I personally feel they are a bit crazy (only sometimes!) but there are so much to learn from them. Devotion, passion, creativity, and most of all for me, to dream big.

Who Else Walked the Stage?

The awards ceremony took place at Maison Bâtard on 25 August 2025.

• Tim White & Amanda Schulze (Books for Cooks) - Legend for Communicator/Educator
• Chris Young  (Trader House) Legend for Chef/Restaurateur/Hospitality Professional
• Michael Dhillon (Bindi) Legend for Drink Producer
• Trailblazer awards went to Alice Zaslavsky (Communicator/Educator), Nagesh Seethiah (Chef/Restaurateur), Aaron Trotman (Drink Producer), Sava Goto (Food Producer) - all blooming stars in their fields. 

Dunetown in the Spotlight

What a ride it’s been for Gab and Chris - from rolling out from the old Orbost butter factory in 2016, tapping into the wild coastline, local produce, and coastal flavours... to building Dunetown, our farmhouse-style destination brewery nestled on the wild East Gippsland coast. 

For us as a team, it’s been incredible to help bring Gab and Chris’s dream to life, to see this vision grow from scribbles and late-night chats into a thriving, buzzing home for beer, food and community. We’re so proud to see their years of hard work recognised with this award. To be part of this journey feels like sharing in something truly special, and we couldn’t be happier to see them get the recognition they deserve.

And it’s not just us who think it’s special - so much love has poured in from locals, visitors, and fellow food-and-drink folk.

What’s Next for Sailors Grave Brewing?

There’s more to come, friends - this award only fires us up more:

• More wild-inspired brews: Expect adventurous, locally foraged flavours from the dunes to the bar. Beers you don't see enywhere else that surprise you!
• Exciting events: Have you come to Deep in the Weeds? Our music and beer bash at Dunetown with live bands and Gippsland's fave foods? Well next year we want to grow the event bigger and even better. There are so many more events we want to do at Dunetown.
• Community-first growth: We want to keep building, creating, and collaborating -with environment, culture, and farming woven through everything we do. And just as importantly, we want to show the beauty of East Gippsland to the world, inviting people to visit, sip, and soak in everything this magical corner of Victoria has to offer that we love.

Thanks for all your support being part of this journey. Whether you’ve sipped our stouts in a bar, soaked in a sunset with a can of gose, or just following on social media to support our fun little corner of the beer world (or, let me guess, you love seeing Gertie the goat photos) - it means everything to us.  

To legends, local heroes, and the ones who just love good beer - here’s to more stories ahead!

For more imformation about the awards, visit Melbourne Food & Wine Festival.

Photo credits: Food + Drink Victoria