Tom Croft and Daniel Emery

They were mates at high school, mates at UNE, and they are now – unusually – mates while they jointly build a thriving craft bar-and-brewery business.

Being craft brewers and bar owners was not on the to-do list of Daniel Emery and Tom Croft when they were studying Urban and Regional Planning at UNE, and enjoying Earle Page College life. But their Welders Dog brand was born indirectly as part of their university experience when Ryan Campling, another college friend, founded St John Craft Beers in Launceston, Tasmania.

When, on leaving UNE, Dan hatched the idea of going into partnership on a craft beer enterprise, it was a visit to St Johns that persuaded them to go all-in.

That was in 2014. Tom quit his job as a town planner at Port Stephens the week after they decided to go for it, and from that moment they have committed wholly to building their Welders Dog brand.

It started with a bar in Armidale, committed to serving great craft alcohol in a cosy social environment. In mid-2017, Welders Dog opened its bar in Tamworth; that same week, the tanks for the Welders Dog brewery in Armidale arrived. And now, the pair are preparing to open a new bar in Inverell, their home town.

From the beginning, Tom and Dan emphasised quality – quality drinks, good staff who were knowledgeable about the alcohols on offer, a warm, personal bar environment. They made sure their first bar in Armidale pushed down deep roots in the community by staffing the bar themselves, seven days a week for a year, as it became established.

Their approach has paid off in a number of awards for the Welders Dog brand that recognise the quality of its venues and beers. Most importantly, it has earned a loyal clientele – "not alcoholics", Tom says, "just people who come in for a few drinks each time because they enjoy the environment".

The brewery was a natural offshoot of the bars. Threequarters of the brewery's output goes to Welders Dog venues; the remainder is sold mostly into regional NSW. The ability to onsell their own product, with full quality control, gives them a handy advantage in the brutally competitive craft beer market. Of Australia's 750 craft brewers, only about 10 per cent are reckoned to be sustainable in the long term.

The next step for the brewery business is to find its "spiritual home", as Dan puts it: a location where brewing and large gatherings, like festivals, can happen side by side.

Identifying the ingredients of the secret sauce in any successful partnership tends to ignore the fact that it is the sauce itself that matters. It's all about the relationship between the ingredients. In the case of Dan and Tom, it's about a friendship that goes back to their school days in Inverell.

"When it comes to the big decisions, we look out for each other first and the business second," Dan says. "Knowing that we're looking out for each other makes the rough patches easier to navigate." Their business mentor, Wee Waa farmer Corey Piper, has identified their rare ability to put each other ahead of their business as paradoxically one of the business's greatest strengths.

It doesn't hurt that from the start, both have been enthralled with the business world. "At UNE, we loved Economics 101, the course that everyone else hated," Tom recalls. They devoured business books, taking especial delight from the rags-to-riches story of Virgin's Richard Branson.

In retrospect, they think they should have both taken university courses that were more business-oriented, and started into business earlier. But even as they were studying, they were throwing around ideas for going into business together, and dabbled in penny stocks. And eventually, the Welders Dog idea caught fire.

In hindsight, they reflect, naivety was a necessary quality for diving into a venture that would for a long time demand so much of them and their families for little return. But they had each other, and gradually, through the months of doubt, a solid business materialised.

The Welders Dog was formed in the country, and is likely to remain in the country because that's where its founders are at home. For Dan and Tom, that's a feature, not a bug. Unless they are one day persuaded otherwise, the regions offer ample scope for good business, and provide their sort of lifestyle. As much as they love business, they don't want business to come at the expense of fun.