A Beer of her own
The youngest daughter of Australian food icon Maggie Beer chats to SALIFE about growing up ‘poor’, her last conversation with sister Saskia, and pursuing a legacy of her own.
Elli Beer doesn’t step on and off an escalator — she leaps.
The Barossa Valley entrepreneur and daughter of Australian food icon Maggie Beer holds a pesky childhood fear of them, thanks to her big sister, Saskia.
“She told me if my foot gets stuck, I’ll get shredded,” Elli, now 49, says with a dry laugh.
“To this day, I have to jump on and leap off at the end.”
Thankfully, the one about eagles dropping shark eggs into their family dam didn’t stick. But it makes for a good story.
Elli is sharing memories of her late sister “Sassie” from the light-filled kitchen of her renovated 1920s Tanunda cottage.
Over herbal tea (“I’m a no-caffeine girl”), we discuss what it was like growing up in one of Australia’s most famous food families, plus the success and grief that have shaped her path to date. Her next step is the launch of her first solo venture, Barossa Gin Lab — a hands-on gin experience at the Marananga School Precinct, an eight-minute drive away.
This is the year Elli turns 50, and she’s making it count.
She’s already taken a solo trip through Europe, where she caught up with friends, got rained out of a Bruce Springsteen concert and “kissed an Irishman on a rooftop”.
“(My daughter) Zoe being 29 and me being nearly 50 might indicate she wasn’t exactly on the radar,” Elli laughs. “Of course, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
“But, for 30 years, I’ve had people dependant on me.”
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Still living at home are Elli’s two other children — Darby, 11, and Ben, 18. All three of her “motley crew” feature in the many photographs scattered throughout Elli’s living space, which also includes cherished photographs of her parents, Maggie and Colin, and Saskia, at the now-famous The Farm in Nuriootpa. It was this property the Beers called home for years.
“I didn’t have an overly traditional childhood because we grew up in the restaurant, but I didn’t know any different,” she says.
“Dad and (builder) Alan built the Farm Shop together — we were living in a caravan — then, where the filming kitchen is at the Farm Shop, that was our house.
“I had no idea that we were poor because we were happy,” Elli says.
Maggie and Colin moved to the Barossa Valley when Maggie was pregnant with Saskia, in 1973. They started from scratch, buying a vineyard and farming pheasants.
“What you see now is not how it started,” Elli continues.
“Mum used to make our clothes … my first new pair of shoes, my grandmother bought for me when I was 11. Dad would work in the vineyard, get changed and come into the restaurant.
“Their success is extraordinary, but it came with a lot of hard work.”
Maggie Beer ‘the icon’ didn’t materialise until Elli was in her mid-20s. The family’s Pheasant Farm restaurant — where Maggie cooked — had earned wide acclaim, and she found television fame on ABC’s The Cook and the Chef with Hilton Adelaide chef, Simon Bryant.
“We’d be out shopping, and people would come up and have photos and Dad and I would be like, ‘This is weird!’” Elli says.
“It’s hard to measure but I don’t suspect I’m any happier now than I was when we had so little, because the connection to each other hasn’t changed.
“Despite who Mum is, first and foremost, she’s my mother; Colin’s wife; and a grandmother. If asked, she’d give it all away for any one of us.”
If only.
Nothing could soften the family’s devastation of losing their daughter and sister, Saskia, in the early hours of February 15, 2020.
Word of Saskia’s death spread quickly through South Australia’s hospitality scene. At 46 years of age, she had built her own successful food company, Saskia Beer Farm Produce, and was respected and loved by her peers.
Elli was there when paramedics attempted to revive her sister at her home.
“Some things you never forget,” she says.
“I had to make the phone call to Mum and Dad … they were in Adelaide. I instinctively rang Dad.
“There’s a hierarchy to grief. The kids banded together to support my grief, because I was supporting Mum and Dad’s. They’d come up to the house and, it was awful, but Mum had to prop up Dad despite her grief, and so I was propping her up.
“We got through it, to be at the point we are now, because we bound together. Dad’s not quite as comfortable as Mum and I in talking about Sas, but he’s getting better at it.
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“I think it’s always been important to say their name; you have to talk about them.”
Of course, not all memories are sunshine and rainbows.
“Sassie made me watch Jaws when I was about six, and I was swimming in the dam and she said, ‘Look out, there’s a shark!’. I said, ‘There can’t be a shark’, and she said, ‘The eagles get their eggs and fly over to drop their eggs’,” Elli smiles.
“There are all these little quirks that you remember, and you remember fondly even if you’re like, ‘Oh she was a horror’, because she was – she was my big sister. And sometimes, whether it’s talking about her or seeing something or remembering something, it hurts – but it only hurts because of how much I loved it.
“We all miss her. I mean, she’d still be bossing me around …”
Little was publicly confirmed about Saskia’s final moments, only that she “died unexpectedly yet peacefully in her sleep”. But Elli shared that her sister had a “great day”, having been out for lunch with her husband, Pete, for Valentine’s Day.
She holds her final text conversation with her sister close to her heart.
“I wanted to know if she wanted to meet me up at David Franz,” Elli says. “She said, ‘No, Pete’s got plans’, and I said, ‘All right, love you’. And her (reply) was, ‘Love you’.”
Pandemic shutdowns graced the Beers’ time and space to grieve. But it wasn’t too long (perhaps not long enough, she admits) before Elli was back doing the hospitality work she loved at the Farm Shop and Eatery restaurant.
“My ex-husband said I was a workaholic, and, well, I guess it’s only when you think about it as work,” Elli says. “With hospitality, you’re creating something different for people every day. It’s energy, and I’ve always fed off energy.”
The Barossa Gin Lab joins five other new businesses in the now-complete Marananga School Precinct: restaurant staġuni, Canteen Barossa, Goldie Pottery Studio, New Wave Wines cellar door and the Hidden Flower Farm, which will also host workshops in the Lab. That’s the idea of the precinct – that the ventures “cross pollinate”.
“I’ve been in business for 27 years but this is my first solo venture,” she says. “Is the rest of my life going to be caretaker of The Farm? It can be more than that.
“Doing something new doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you were doing.”
Armed with notepads and a lunchbox – in keeping with the property’s school theme – Gin Lab participants will taste a range of gins before creating their own blend, using distillates from nearby Seppeltsfield Road Distillers.
“Gin is the best vehicle in the alcoholic world to get unique flavours into,” Elli says, adding that she’s the “taster” of the family.
“God help me, don’t put me in the kitchen,” she says. “Dad and I decided it would be unfair if we cooked because for Mum and Sas, cooking brings them great joy.
“But I’ve got a great palate. The first thing I was taught was smell. Dad would hand me a corked wine and I would say, ‘Oh that’s a yabby bag’ (like wet hessian), and he would say, ‘Exactly bubby’. I was probably eight years old at the time.”
The Marananga School Precinct itself is also a lesson in having a go, she says.
“Dad used to say to me, ‘It’s all right bubby, it’s not an arm or a leg’,” Elli says. “You shouldn’t be afraid of trying.”
And so, it’s here at 457 Seppeltsfield Road, where Elli is making a leap (without an escalator in sight).
“Through various life experiences – good things and bad things – when you finally get to a point where you have a sense of self, you don’t have to second guess it,” Elli says.
“Anything is possible.”
This article first appeared in the November 2025 issue of SALIFE magazine.
