Great Food. Cold Beer. Big Energy. Welcome to Hop City Bar.

There's a bunny on the bar. Green. Neon. Wearing sunglasses. And it says everything you need to know about Hop City Bar.

The bar at South City Square in Woolloongabba has been open for just over five weeks, and already the schnitzels are selling out. The wine list is outselling expectations. The cocktails — all 25 of them — moved 50 in the first week alone. Not bad for a guy who used to spend 12 hours a day in a tower crane.

"I'm a sucker for punishment," says Cheyne Meehan, laughing. "I'm not shutting down. No way."

From the Crane to the Bar

Cheyne's backstory is the kind that belongs in a movie. Twenty years in construction — starting as a rigger like his father, then driving tower cranes for the last decade of it. He'd spend hours suspended above half-built Brisbane buildings, watching people work far below, running the numbers in his head. He wanted to open a brewery.

"Everyone's like, Cheyne, you should open a brewery," he says. "I'm like, yeah. That's hugely ambitious."

He kept thinking. He kept planning. And in August 2020 — right into the jaws of COVID — he opened Happy Valley Brewing Co. in Stafford. Five and a half years on, Happy Valley has just hit its 500th brew. This August 8th will be their sixth birthday — and a Saturday again, full circle, trivia night and karaoke planned.

But the journey here wasn't smooth. Craft beer hit a wall around late 2022. Government support dried up. Interest rates climbed. People stopped spending on $8 craft cans when Great Northern was sitting there for $2.

"For three years, I never made a profit," Cheyne says plainly. "It was either shut down Happy Valley and call it a day, or double down and open Hop City."

He doubled down.

The Best IPA in Australia

Before we get to the bar, we need to talk about the beers. Because this isn't just a good selection on tap — this is award-winning stuff.

Earlier this year, head brewer Jake Harrison — who Cheyne called at 8:30am the morning after his previous brewer left, because "if there's any brewer in the world that I want, it's that guy" — put together a list of 17 beers he wanted to enter in the Royal Queensland Beer Awards.

Cheyne's response? "Fuck it, let's put them all in."

They won a medal for every single one. They also took out five trophies — more than anyone else in the entire competition — including Grand Champion for the 50k (their flagship IPA), Best Queensland Brew Pub, and Best Queensland Beer.

"We know we have the best IPA in Australia currently," Cheyne says without a hint of irony. He's not wrong.

Hop City Bar now pours eight Happy Valley taps — including the 50k — plus a ginger beer and a guest tap (currently an alcoholic lemonade from Common Ground in Milton). Come August, you'll also find them at the Ekka with two stands in Craft Beer Alley.

The Bar Itself

The space at South City Square — 105 square metres inside, with a 125-seat fully undercover outdoor area — was not a simple fit-out.

The architect is Gareth Hartnell from Ink House Studios, a friend of Cheyne's who drinks at Happy Valley. "His attention to detail is next level," Cheyne says. "To the little gaps in the floor between the tiles — that's how much detail he goes into."

Six months of design, regulation, and kitchen planning went into working around four zigzag walls, a structural pole, liquor licence requirements, DDA wheelchair compliance, and a 500mm thick concrete slab that got drilled in the wrong spot at one point. The mezzanine level — 75 square metres holding over 70 people — cost over $200,000 on its own, required to upgrade their liquor licence from a 60-person bar licence to unlimited capacity.

Outside, retractable electric blinds run the full length of the terrace. 6,000-watt heaters make even the coldest Brisbane winter evening genuinely cosy. Misters are ready for summer. Live musicians on Sundays are pending landlord approval — and Cheyne reckons the market's there for it.

Inside, there's the bar. And on it, etched in the front panel: HOP CITY BAR in that unmistakable bold lettering, flanked by the grinning neon bunny.

The Bunny

The logo deserves its own section, because the story behind it is genuinely great.

Cheyne's first instinct was to centre the brand around hops — "there are hops in every beer," he reasoned. His wife Sarah disagreed. "It's a bar, Cheyne, not a brewery." He swallowed his pride, handed the brief to a graphic designer, and got back something decent but a bit tacky. Not quite right.

So he briefed a second designer: Hop City Bar. Maybe a bunny or something. She found an image of a punk bunny online — crosses for eyes, pink and purple. She ran with it. Called at 8am to say she'd stayed up all night because she was so excited about the project. Sent it through.

"Every single person we showed when it came through — that's awesome," Cheyne says. "So it is stuck."

The fluoro green and yellow. The sunglasses. The attitude. It works on everything — the bar front, the menus, the signage, the social. Lightboxes are coming soon. The bunny is staying.

The Food

General Manager Jarrad Funk joined Cheyne three to four months ago, bringing 15 years of hospitality experience — from kitchen to front of house and everything in between. He wrote the menu, cost the goods, ran the cocktail tastings, hired the staff, and kept the operation running while splitting time between Hop City and Happy Valley.

"I'm a very data-driven person," Jarrad says. "Cheyne loves a chat."

They're yin and yang — and it shows in the menu. Jarrad calls it "elevated pub plus" — not fast food, not fine dining, but firmly in the quality bracket that the South City Square crowd deserves.

The stars of the show so far? The chicken schnitzel — made fresh daily, house-crumbed, with crispy potato gems and Caesar salad. Upgrade to a parmy for $6. The tacos — beef cheek, crispy chicken, or sticky pork belly, all $17. The Hop City Burger with its 200g beef patty and signature sauce. The Crispy Korean Cauliflower Wings with gochujang glaze — a crowd favourite for the vegetarians.

But nothing — nothing — moves like the schnitzels.

"We pulled a negative review because we ran out of schnitzels," Jarrad says, laughing. "We're making fresh schnitzels every single day of the week. We couldn't make them fast enough." In the same breath: "We've had at least a dozen people in the last two weeks say it's the best schnitzel of their life."

The wine list has outperformed all expectations. The cocktail list — finalised over a Friday afternoon session that Cheyne says "there was no driving after" — runs 25 options. Jarrad tweaked a few, kept most, and the result is a list that punches well above what you'd expect from a bar this new.

Everyone's Welcome Here

Hop City is, at its core, a neighbourhood bar. Cheyne thought the demographic would skew 25–35. It's actually 35–45. The wine list going off in week five makes complete sense. So does the family table in the corner, the after-work drinks crowd on a Thursday, and the couple doing the crossword at the bar on a Tuesday afternoon.

"We don't want our wine drinker to feel like they're too fancy for the place next to the beer drinkers," Jarrad says. "It's something for everyone here."

The mezzanine — that hard-won upper level — will host Tuesday night trivia (every Tuesday from 28 July), function bookings, and eventually private events with a mobile bar. Christmas packages are being built out now. There are big plans for 18th birthdays, corporate events, and whatever else South City Square didn't know it needed.

And the beers? Jake Harrison is already at it. A mango and macadamia Wiesbaden is fermenting as we speak — 15 kilos of macadamia nuts from a mate's farm in Alstonville, added just this week.

"That's the thing," Cheyne says. "We can get creative and just do what we want."

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Hop City Bar — 148 Logan Road, Woolloongabba (behind NAB, South City Square) Bar hours: Sun–Wed 11am–9pm | Thu–Sat 11am–10pm Kitchen hours: Mon–Tue 4pm–8pm | Wed–Sun 12pm–8pm 📞 0410 215 242 | teambunny@hcbar.com.au Instagram: @hopcitybar | Facebook: hopcitybar Bookings: sevenrooms.com/explore/hopcitybar