Welcome to the first in a series of stories showcasing one drink, one bartender, at one great bar. This series is made possible by Brown-Forman's Elevate program — to learn more, contact your Brown-Forman representative.
Two hours north of Sydney, in the city of Newcastle, you’ll find some great restaurants and small bars. But there are a couple of Novocastrian bars that have stood the test of time, and one of those is The Koutetsu. The bar has been among the Top 50 on the Boothby Best Bars NSW list each year since the list began in 2023.
Opened by bartender and owner Chris Wilson in 2014, The Koutetsu has an industrial but warm feel to the space, with drinks that lean towards classic and approachable — as Wilson talks about in the interview below, along with what the name means, and the Newcastle scene more broadly.
Let’s get into it.
BOOTHBY: What’s the big idea behind The Koutetsu?
CHRIS WILSON: What we do here is we focus on service and and great quality drinks. We make every drink as if we’re making it for ourselves or for our partner — it doesn’t matter what you order, classics or cocktails from our menus, we put the exact same amount of effort and love into every drink.
BOOTHBY: So a big emphasis on cocktails. Can you describe the sort of cocktails you do?
CHRIS WILSON: We make all our own syrups, our shrubs, oleos, bitters, oils — everything is juiced daily. Fresh is best is what we try to do.
BOOTHBY: You own the place, but we’ll also find you behind the stick here?
CHRIS WILSON: Yeah, I’m still here, 11 and a half years in, four nights of the week. I’d love to open seven days a week but that’s just the reality in Newcastle at the moment. One day we’ll get there.
BOOTHBY: When did the bar open?
CHRIS WILSON: We opened in December 2014, so that’ll be 12 years in a couple of months.
BOOTHBY: Cocktail bars and the way things are, how has the scene changed here in that 12 years?
CHRIS WILSON: I’m in my early 40s, and what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people my age are moving back home after living in big cities, whether they’ve lived abroad or they’ve lived in capital cities around Australia. They’re coming back to Newcastle. And they’re finding these restaurants and bars here and it takes them back to where they were. There’s a lot of really nice cocktail bars in Newcastle and they’re getting those drinks that you only ever used to get when you travelled to a bigger city. So being a regional town, I think we’re punching above our weight.
BOOTHBY: Tell us about this drink, you’re doing an Old Fashioned riff.
CHRIS WILSON: A tiny little riff on a on a classic Old Fashioned using the Woodford Reserve. The classic way of doing it, with some pepperberry leaf bitters and a little house made blueberry syrup as well. We just put a tiny couple drops of that on top of the sugar cube, to get a little bit of fruitiness into the cocktail. It’s stirred down and then we’ve made our own little chewy blueberry pastilles.
BOOTHBY: How did the name for The Koutetsu come about?
CHRIS WILSON: It’s Japanese. It means steel. If you look around the venue, the tables all steel. We made all these tables ourselves. When we opened the bar we were obviously on a very tight budget, it was the first venue that I’ve opened. So we made everything ourselves except for the seats and a couple of the table stands. We used whatever we could from inside the venue to reuse it. A friend of ours, Zana, she happened to come through when we were doing the building and she said, ‘Oh, you should call it The Koutetsu. And we ran from there.
BOOTHBY: You’re in Newcastle, a city with a historic connection to steelworks — was that a connection too?
CHRIS WILSON: Well that was a total accident. It wasn’t until about three years in, when a guest actually said, Oh, I get it now, the Koutetsu, it’s steel — the steel city.
I’m from Newcastle, I love Newcastle, but you know what I mean?
BOOTHBY: It hadn’t flicked through your head at all?
CHRIS WILSON: [laughs] No I had too many things on my mind. Newcastle is a beautiful city, but it was absolutely a total accident — a happy accident I guess you’d call it.
BOOTHBY: That’s great. What were you doing before you opened this place?
CHRIS WILSON: I’m actually a baker and pastry chef by trade. Not knowing at the time, I was from a pub and a nightclub background. Pints and schooners and then speed of service — four deep at the bar all night long, loud music, that kind of thing. And then I just fell in love with it one day, and I knew I could do it, but I wanted to do it on my own and on my own terms. So that’s why at 32 years of age I bit the bullet and decided to open this place. Obviously there’s been a lot of learning curves along the way and sleepless nights and all the rest of it. But I feel that my pastry chef days definitely help me when it comes to measurement, repetition, trying to replicate, that kind of stuff if you’re a couple of grams out, it can turn it. It all falls oapartut.
BOOTHBY: Over that 12 years, there must have been some hard times.
CHRIS WILSON: Oh mate there’s been plenty of hard times. Everyone went through Covid, every industry went through it, but obviously it affected our industry. I don’t think we’ve recovered. I really don’t think we have.
I’m learning every day. There’s plenty of sleepless nights. And a lot of them are brought on by myself for wanting to be better. A lot of the time I’ll go home and write notes about drink ideas and that kind of stuff at 3:30 in the morning after a 15 hour day. But it’s an absolute love affair.
BOOTHBY: What do you love about it?
CHRIS WILSON: Making people happy I think is the main thing.
Pepperberry & Blueberry Old Fashioned
Ingredients:
- 60ml Woodford Reserve Bourbon
- 6 drops of pepper berry leaf bitters
- 1 sugar cube
- 8 drops housemate blueberry syrup
Method:
Place the sugar cube on a napkin over an Old Fashioned glass. Add the bitters and blueberry syrup to the sugar cube, and muddle it will a little water in the glass. Dissolve with 60ml of Woodford Reserve. Stir down with ice and garnish with a blueberry pastille and an orange twist.
Recipe by Chris Wilson, The Koutetsu, Newcastle
