Proper True Yarn

Part 4 with Jack from Bellmere Butcher, wrapping up the series. First things first: the shop is at 65 Bellmere Road in the heart of Bellmere, near Caboolture. It's a back to front shopping centre, so Jack is working on a giant sausage sign for the street so nobody drives past.
Jack's grown up around food, his parents ran Italian restaurants in town, and after 10 years inside the same four walls of less than 50 square metres, the new shop is how he keeps himself and his team interested. New creations are on hold until they've got the room to make them properly every day, not as a one off. Hot food is coming too, but no menu: whatever's in the hot box is what's available. No pies either, out of respect for the baker in the same centre.
The bigger plan is weekend smokers out the front with taste testers and advice, the same thing Jack does at home when 30 or 40 people turn up on a Sunday with the kegs on. His line is that it's not butchers against butchers, it's butchers against the big guys. To prove it, he and the butcher up the road have a golf buggy challenge running, and he's been called out to a go kart race on the other bloke's property. Loser donates to charity.
⚠️ Explicit content. Find Bellmere Butcher at 65 Bellmere Road, Bellmere, and keep an eye out for the new shop opening.

Part 3 with Jack from Bellmere Butcher. Knuckles asks why the self proclaimed sausage king has never entered the sausage awards. Jack actually signed up this year, membership and all, then the reminder email landed and he saw what it takes: every sausage in every category, every ingredient listed, made, cryovaced and shipped by a deadline. With 12 staff jammed into a shop under 50 square metres, it's a job for next year. His figures don't lie and he's got nothing to prove. Knuckles just wants to know who cooks them, because one bad cook could wreck the best snag in the comp.
On beef, Jack has been loyal to Nolan's since he was a first year apprentice, the kind of supplier who'll sort him out on a Sunday when someone else has left him stranded. Reps are welcome to leave a price list, but he's not changing for a dollar a kilo. Knuckles backs it, saying the best eating beast he ever shot was a dirty old Jersey, not a pretty Angus heifer. The new shop gets a walk in butcher's vault with a block where Jack will cut your meat in front of you.
Then Knuckles asks how to pick a good chook, and Jack tells him what a bad one looks like. Cornish Cross birds, full white with blue eyes like a sci fi clone movie, six kilos in about four months, some so heavy they can't walk, and some growing two extra legs out their backside. Knuckles reckons breed the four legged ones and sell more drumsticks.
⚠️ Explicit content. Get into Bellmere Butcher, 65 Bellmere Road, Bellmere.

Part 2 with Jack from Bellmere Butcher, and this one's all snags. Jack had Facebook for Marketplace and nothing else until Blake, a meat marketing bloke, talked him into a month of videos. The first few were average. Then they filmed a sausage he'd dreamt up during COVID called the Counter Lunch: rump steak, hot chips and pepper gravy. Over 3 million views on the first proper video.
The comments went both ways and Jack couldn't care less, but Megan lost three days of sleep trying to reply to every one. Knuckles reckons the keyboard warriors are doing him a favour, every bad comment just pushes it further. What mattered was the door: every bugger walking in wanted rump steak, hot chips and pepper gravy sausages. Twelve months on, they've dropped a new flavour every single week, over 100 of them.
Jack explains what goes on behind it. Gravy made days ahead, $500 a week on hot chips with no margin in it, people driving six hours through the night and turning up to a window that only fits eight to 10 flavours. His plea: ring ahead and they'll make it for you. The new shop should take it to 20 or 30 flavours with its own kitchen and chefs.
His favourite? He eats that many he goes back to a plain snag, but right now he's on a jalapeño craze, especially the pork jalapeño ones made for Alpha Fest.
⚠️ Explicit content. Follow Bellmere Butcher for the weekly sausage drop, and if you're travelling, ring ahead.

Part 1 with Jack from Bellmere Butcher. Two weeks out from opening his new shop, Jack had his tradie mates (mostly cousins and family) knocking off with beers at 2.30 on a Friday, trying to come up with a yarn he could actually tell on this show. Then a little Kia pulls up in the middle of six blokes and a lady in her 80s gets out, looks at the sign and goes, "not the Bellmere Butcher", she was hoping for a Domino's.
The boys couldn't help themselves. His cousin the sparky asks if she shops there. Never, she's Woolworths and Aldi all the way and can't afford it. She reckons the new owner is spending big on that stone wall, the old guy was a legend, and she doesn't know how this new bloke makes a living. Jack, sitting there in full Bellmere Butcher uniform, agrees with every word. His mate in the Bellmere Butcher hat tells her he had to knock it off because the tight arse owner wouldn't give him one. She never clicked.
Then the real story: 10 years ago Jack was picking up cars along Bribie Island Road, kept driving past an apprentice wanted sign at the Ningi butcher and finally walked in. He did his trade there, met his partner Megan when she was the counter girl at Bellmere, managed the shop for years, then walked away when their daughter arrived eight weeks premature. A phone call to his old boss, now his best mate, and two weeks later he owned the place. Three years on, he's known as the sausage man.
⚠️ Explicit content. Get down to Bellmere Butcher at 65 Bellmere Road, Bellmere, and tell them the old girl sent you.

Part five with Luke Geiger is the Mount Isa Rodeo yarn, and it might be the funniest five minutes of the series. The setup: Luke and the boys land one of their biggest gigs ever, playing the Isa Rodeo alongside O'Shea, the Screaming Jets and Aussie rock royalty The Angels. After the Friday crowd thinned out on the Jets, the promoters flipped the Saturday order, so The Angels went on first and Luke's crew got the closing slot, sharing a green room with the Brewsters and Dave Gleeson, who spent the arvo singing cowboy songs with them out the back.
Earlier that day the barbecue boys on site had handed Luke, a self-confessed chilli man, a bottle of their hot wing challenge sauce, the Ghost of Chainsaw. He had a respectful amount on some roast meat, fiddled with the bottle, and thought nothing more of it. Ten minutes before showtime, packs on, ears in, guitar on his back, he ducks into the single portaloo for a nervous piss. What follows is the discovery that ghost chilli does not wash off your hands by itself, a door flung open with one leg in and one leg out, jeans at the ankles, a handful of portaloo soap, and a man scrubbing himself for Jesus and everyone to see while The Angels rip into Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again twenty metres away.
He made it on stage, still smouldering, and opened the set by thanking The Angels for opening for them, only to look across and find Gleeson and Rick Brewster standing side of stage listening. Gleeson stayed for the whole set and ended up jumping up to sing a Johnny Cash song with them, which Luke rates as one of the coolest things the band's ever done. The ep wraps with the world record stakes: one adjudication slip-up across 120 hours and the whole thing counts for nothing, which is roughly 30 four-hour gigs back to back, unpaid. Watch this space.