Monday 25 June 2012

This is just a tribute

"This is not the greatest beer in the world - this is just a tribute" - Jack Black, if he brewed beer.

 Tributes. Before a book series made that word remind us of teenagers sent to their death, being a tribute was actually a pretty cool thing. It meant someone thought something was so cool, it decided you would be created in its image. It's all very biblical really.

Creative people usually come up with the best kind of tributes. Musicians write songs, artists paint/sculpt/draw and brewers brew beers. I've already blogged about the alcoholic tribute to Wellington's stoner/sludge/metal group Beastwars. And while I love that beer a lot, it probably isn't my top musical tribute beer.

That accolade goes to Epic's nod to Kiwi record label Flying Nun, in the form of the Flying Nun 30th Anniversary Pale Ale. The label is brilliant, in all its textured vinyl awesomeness. You can't help but run your fingers along it a few times, almost wishfully thinking some jangling guitar riff would pour out of it. It poured - while I listened to Die! Die! Die! - a clear-gold more akin to a mainstream lager. The taste, while calm and approachable, had a great smooth bitterness which instantly made you want more. Really, I can't think of a beer which sums up Flying Nun better - as approachable as The Clean, but with edge like only The Mint Chicks could bring to keep things interesting, keep you coming back for more to scratch that slightly-left-of-centre itch you just picked up. And it tasted great on the deck, in the sun, while blasting Die! Die! Die!, then surely it would taste good with any other Flying Nun act.

But there are also tribute beers to writers. One quite close to home is another Epic beer - their Zythos IPA. While not specifically branded as a tribute beer, on the bottle are the words "One Trick Pony". This refers to a post where blogger and genuine good bugger Phil Cook described Epic as a brewery which pumped out far too many IPAs. In typical cocky and confident Epic fashion, brewer Luke Nicholas made yet another IPA. But this time, it was made solely using the new Zythos hop blend. It's brash, but brilliantly balanced - exactly what the Phil Cook I know would go kittens for.

So while not exactly a tribute beer, I like to think it is a nod to the fact Luke cares about what Phil thinks and, thereafter, writes. Which really is the reason why most bloggers blog - to be read and paid attention to.

But the ultimate tribute beer has to be Flying Dog's Gonzo. One look and taste of this beer is enough to let you know that the brewers have made a seriously effort to uphold the ethos of Gonzo - quirky, queer and somewhat questionable in taste while being totally unpredictable and alluring, all at the same time. Not that Hunter would give a crap weather you like this beer or not; it is what it is, and if you don't like it you can be force-fed some acid and shiver off the high while chewing your cheeks to shreds among your portraits of Barbra Streisand. And not that these guys care what you do with the beer. Heck, they're happy enough to blow it up.

As Hunter said, good people drink good beer. Well, good people should be immortalised in good beer as well. I can't really think of a better way to say to someone 'hey, you're pretty awesome'. Here's hoping I can make a beer someday to let someone know they're pretty cool.

Saturday 23 June 2012

Awkwardness and respect

So, I went to the local liquor store earlier this evening to pick up a couple brews. While it usually is a bit exciting, it all got a bit crazy when I posted this picture on the Twitters.





On the left is the absolutely stunning Renaissance Craftsman - a chocolate oatmeal stout smoother than Bobby Womack. It had its release quite recently at The Malthouse in Wellington and it sounds like it is as good as ever.

The beer on the right, however, is a bit different. It is Yeastie Boys' 2012 incarnation of Her Majesty. Only problem is, it isn't supposed to be out yet...

OH SNAAAAAAAAAAAP!!!

The bottle store had just put it on the shelf this evening, so I had to get it. The plan was to have it as my "huzzah I've graduated" beer. But that may have changed after brewer Stu McKinlay told me it shouldn't be on shelves yet.

I'm thinking of it like a movie or album that's been leaked online before the official release date: while fair game if you want it, it goes against the spirit of what the artist/s wanted if you consume said art before it's intended release.

So, in my cupboard it shall stay until such time as Stu and fellow Yeastie Boy Sam Possenniskie actually want it to be drunk. I just think that's fair enough really.

But what can I tell you about it? Well, sweet sod all really. The bottle is somewhat vague in its description, probably on purpose.





For those that can't read that, here's the synopsis:

"Her Majesty is a warming strong ale, now in its third incarnation, that we release each winter as the days shorten. This year's model is a dark ale that brings together a mixture of rich British and German malts, a pinch of fruit and earthiness from its East Kent hops, a little secret something for complexity, and a slow cool fermentation to highlight the purity of the ingredients."

Apart from that, I can tell you it's 7% and comes in a 750ml bottle.

And I'm looking forward to drinking it.

Ain't it pretty!!!

 I was going to finish a post about Yeastie Boys, but I got an awesome email today with these images attached
 
HLT, mash tun and kettle :D
Yes, Chris Banks (the man behind Bank's Brewing Hardware) has been a busy man indeed. Aside from helping ParrotDog out with their brewery, he's also been putting together my three-tier gravity system. I would explain how good his work is, but I'll let the pictures do the talking...

The same, but from the other side
Sweet steel goodness
Sexy false bottom on the mash tun
Inside of the HLT
The poser shot

He said things should be ready in a few weeks. This means two things - a trip to Wellington, and a need to decide what I'm going to brew first. I'm thinking a pilsner will be an easy place to start, but the weather here in The Swamp is telling me a brown ale would be a winner.

I never really got into brown ale until I had 8 Wired Brewing's Rewired brown ale. Imagine getting a can of Double Brown, throwing it in the bin and getting a rich, light chocolate beer with some great fruity hop characters. So delicious! Went down a treat with this deboned chicken stuffed with curried rice (omnomnom for sure).

I also got my hands on a bottle of Søren's latest offering - the C4 Double Coffee Brown Ale. This tasted less like beer and more like coffee, as you would expect when it's brewed with some delicious coffee from C4 coffee roasters in Christchurch. I swear if you gave me this and a carbonated coffee side-by-side, I would not be able to tell the difference. The man really is a brewing wizard and I really hope I get to tell him so to his face during Beervana.


Speaking of which, I'm volunteering at the festival this year! So make sure you pay me a visit during Session One on Friday. I'll also be floating around at Session Two, and probably Session Three. It should be a great, beery weekend and I hope to meet heaps of great beery people.








Monday 18 June 2012

Buyers and sellers

For the last few days I've been struck down by the dreaded lurgy. Because of this, any alcohol consumption has been limited to honey-ginger-lemon-whiskey drinks or swigging away on bottles of medicine. On a Gonzo-ish sidenote, I now know why Lil' Wayne loves syrup so much - far too addictive.

Anywho, that does present a problem when my blog is about an alcoholic beverage. That is, until this article appeared on the NZ Herald website.

It all seems very inconspicuous really - Julian Davidson, the chief executive of Independent Liquor, says the company is doing well and has experienced growth since they started kegging more beers. But let us all be honest - he had to say that, didn't he? C'mon, it's not like he's going to write off the company he works for.

But it is the last couple paragraphs that make the most interesting reading:

Davidson said Independent was on the lookout for independent craft beer brands that it could acquire.

" ... there's probably half a dozen really interesting craft beer players out there that we'd be interested in having a conversation with."

I find this statement really odd. Independent already own the Boundary Road Brewery, which the head company pitches as having "innovative style", "providing more value, choice and flexibility" and "most importantly...has brought some real innovation and dynamism into the beer market".

Real innovation and dynamism? The BRB range has about as much innovation as a primary school science fair. So far they have released a pale ale, a faux-radler, an alcoholic ginger beer, a pilsener, a lager, a chocolate porter, another pale ale, an amber ale, another lager, and another pale ale. Hardly ground-breaking stuff.

In fact, the most innovative part of the whole range is that they managed to make their chocolate porter taste like a RTD. That shouldn't surprise too much though, as Independent Liquor are the same company which makes sugary, boozy RTDs like Woodstock, Cody's and Pulse - the equivilant of a Jagerbomb in a can. I managed to get a Chocolate Moose for free, and I'm glad I didn't buy it. It tasted of sickly-sweet chocolate and sugar. It's like sugar and Milo - I'm all for heaps of Milo and a bit of sugar to sweeten things up a bit more, but it shouldn't taste like there's more sugar than Milo. It defeats the purpose really.

So while Mr Davidson managed to dodge calling Boundary Road a "non-craft brewery", it is still interesting that the company wants to buy out some of the smaller guys. After the initial "say whaaaaaaaaat?!?!", it's almost a bit fun to think of who would be approached and who might actually sell up to the Asahi-owned company.

So, firstly, who would Independent approach? Basic business logic says they will either be on the hunt for a deal or a big growing company. If they're looking for a bit of a deal, they can't really go past West Coast Brewery. Recently put into liquidation, owner Paddy Sweeney has said he wants to buy it back - if he can. I don't know much about the situation, but I'm not holding out hope of that.
And it seems like a good buy - Dave Kurth makes bloody nice beer, and they were starting to make some good inroads into the lucrative Wellington market if the number of tap badges around the bars was anything to go by.

Recent buzz + a good brewer + a liquidator whose sole responsibility is to pay back the debts  = a pretty prime piece of business real estate.

Apart from West Coast, I can't think of any other breweries in the same position - not yet anyway - so the next best punt is a fast-growing company. According to business growth index Deloitte Fast 50, Tuatara grew by a massive 216.24 per cent from 2010 to 2011. That's like me growing a shade less than a foot a month for a year. If growth continues along the same track for a couple years, the company should be in a good place. Again, a very good business if you're looking at it from the outside and possibly someone Independent would be "interested in having a conversation with".

There are plenty of breweries who I reckon - and hope - wouldn't give Independent even the slightest impression they were interested in selling. And I hope all the Kiwi craft breweries think along the same lines, and collectively raise a collective middle finger to the three big guys in the New Zealand brewing landscape.

Why? Well, because they are all just far too cool to sell out to an overseas-owned company. They are actually being innovative and dynamic. And, most importantly, they are actually make good beer.

Postscript: It's stupidly good timing that I managed to write about this the day Lion - which is owned by Asian-based Kirin - announced it wants to buy out the rest of Little Creatures. Lion have had a big stake for a while and Little Creatures seem to still be pumping out great products (their Bright Ale was amazeballs on tap at The Malthouse), so I - along with plenty of other beer drinkers - hope things continue along this merry road.

Thursday 14 June 2012

The problem with being super

Those older than I will be able to remember a time when you couldn't buy liquor at the same shop which sold your vegetables, meat and nappies. You either had to head to a bottle store to take something home, or spend your imbibement time at a pub.

Part of me is glad you can put meat, veges and beer in your shopping trolley; there's something just so easy about ticking off the entire list, all under the same roof.

But at the same time, shopping for beer in a supermarket is a risky business. Sure, if you're lucky enough to have New World Thordon nearby you have no reason to worry. In fact, most Wellington supermarkets are well stocked and the stock is well rotated. However, I am not so lucky here in The Swamp.




For example - I once headed into New World Pioneer here in The Swamp. Apart from the usual bland crap, they had an island of great-looking brews, including Fuller's ESB, Kriek Boon, Epic Pale Ale.... and Emerson's Organic Pilsner.

There's just one problem - Emerson's un-organiced their pilsner in November 2010. That's more than a year since this beer was last brewed with organic hops.

Now, time for some beer nerdery....

Most beers fall into two camps - "drink fresh" or "drink aged". Pilsners, IPAs and lagers are usually best when had as close to the day they were brewed as possible. Other beers - imperial stouts, porters and Scotch ales t name but a few - can sometimes need a bit of time to open up and release all their best flavours.

So, for a pilsner to sit on the shelf for more than a year is not a good thing at all. No doubt if I had drank one, it would have lost its hoppy hit and been bland, boring and bad beyond any place the brewer imagined. It may also have had that chalky texture hoppy beers get when they lose that fresh bite. If the supermarket wasn't driven by profit and actually cared about its product, it would pull it. It hasn't and that annoys me to no end.

But New World Pioneer isn't the only criminal in this regard. There's a cafe right across from my work with a fridge full of "expired" beer, as well as multiple other supermarkets in the same boat. While it sucks for me to not get fresh product, I feel most for the brewers and the customers who do not know any better.

Think about it - you pour your time, money, energy and love into creating something. You send it out the door, flush with pride, only for some retailer to handle it badly and sell it when it shouldn't be. A customer wanting to try something new takes it home and thinks it's crap and vows never to try anything with your name on it ever again.

Does that make you feel stink? Angry? Frustrated? I wonder how Richard Emerson would feel if he knew how his product was treated by some up here.
 So while supermarkets are handy and can sometimes be pretty cool, I'm a big fan of bypassing them when doing beer shopping. Because sometimes, they're not so super after all.

Maybe the wrong time of year, but still delicious
And for the record - Emerson's Pilsner is absolutely delicious, bursting with that new world pilsner characteristic: fruit salad in a glass. A lot of people talk about a beer they would marry. Well, if I could have a summer wife and a winter wife (no offence hun), E-Pils would without a doubt be my relax-on-a-beach-in-a-swimsuit wife.

I have fond memories of spending two weeks off work doing nothing more than eating sandwiches, reading books, bathing in what had to be a record string of good Wellington days and drinking plenty of this beer. It really is one of those beers I just can't get enough of and can always depend upon to hit the spot. So, head somewhere where you can get a fresh batch of it and give it a hoon - it really shouldn't let you down.

I should also note that Pioneer NW has pulled all their Emerson's, but only recently. It was still there far longer than it should have been.

Monday 11 June 2012

A tipple for any time

Phil Cook - friend, former co-worker and owner of one of the best-kept beards I have seen - managed to impart many nuggets of wisdom, both spoken and demonstrated, when I worked with him at Wellington bar The Malthouse, such as:

- Don't take crap from people just because they wear suits. They're insecure, have more money than brains and, when they ask for the most expensive beer, tell them it is $660. It's just more fun that way.
- Beer nerds are usually identifiable by being bearded, working in IT, or both.
- Conventional grammar is over-rated.

But the one thing that sticks the most is his love of "occasion beer". The guy loves to do things only a real beer nerd would do, like source Canadian beer on Canada Day, be stubborn to (almost) the point of silliness in arranging American beer taps for the 4th of July, or simply buying beers to share with people just because they like them.

I think most people have some sort of understanding of this. People go to fancy restaurants when they have a special occasion. People buy stuff they don't need with their first paycheck from a new job. I'm sure plenty of people crack open a nice bottle of wine to celebrate birthdays/New Year/graduations/etc. We all know how to occasion, but we all occasion in different ways.

I, however, have taken the Phil Cook method to occasioning. If you haven't figured it out yet, I like beer. So, what better thing to occasion with?

I've had a fair few occasion beers in my time.....
I'm also a bit of a collector of things. These (he says from his keyboard, pointing at the picture on the screen), are some of the bottles of beer which I've had as occasion beers over the last few years. Keeping them is a bit of a mixture of things - some of it to remember occasions, others because they just look cool.

One of them I had with my Dad after a driving lesson during our traditional debriefs, another was the first beer I had at Hashigo Zake. One of them is a beer I celebrated/commiserated/occasioned my last day as a hospitality worker with. There's even a beer I split with Phil for no real reason at all (you can read about that exact bottle of beer here).

The coolest one up there - in my opinion - is the now-empty bottle of Hallertau Beastwars IPA. I keep it for a few reasons: that stupidly awesome artwork on the label, it's a limited edition beer, and because it is probably the one beer I looked forward to the most before it was launched.

You gotta admit, it's a great beard. Photo: The Rock
For those that don't know, Beastwars are a band. They're from Wellington, their frontman has a great beard and they play metal. They also happen to love craft brews. In this clip, I'm pretty sure their drummer is set to swig away on some Epic Flying Nun straight from the bottle. That's what you call a classy bogan.

Anywho, the story goes that Hallertau brewer Steve Ploughman thought up the recipe for an IPA while listening to Beastwars. Discussions no doubt occurred and the rest, as they too often say, is history.

When I caught wind of this, I was very excited. You know, the kind that gives you a joy-induced near-manic grin on your face. I love music - if anything, it was my first obsession - and I'm a big fan of beer. So, I hassled both Hallertau and Beastwars via Twitter to ensure I knew when and where the drop would land in Wellington first.

One lovely day, I was told it was in stock at Glengarry Thorndon. Cue frantic dash across Wellington and more frantic search of bottle store. What would have been much easier would be to ask the person behind the counter about the situation. Turned out it wasn't in for a while, but he took my number and txt me when it showed up a week later. That cued another frantic dash across the city to get said beer and get it home.

Call me a douche, fanboy or old-fashioned geek, but as soon as I got home I cracked out a glass and bottle opener, cranked the speakers on the sound system to max and chucked on Beastwars' album. And I sat there, drank it and let the sludgy metal wash over me and the rest of the nearby residents of Mt Cook, Wellington.

As for the beer - well, it tasted exactly like the album. It was big, in your face, and particularly angry while still being approachable.

I've got that bottle because it reminds me of a time when I was excited, exhilarated and just plain happy. Which is what occasion beer is all about really. It shouldn't be the only thing to make you happy and shouldn't be the only thing to give you joy (not that there's anything wrong with that), but occasion beer should be part of an occasion which makes you happy.

And that, to me, can only ever be a good thing.

Thursday 7 June 2012

Turning beers on their heads

There are times in life when bad things are great. If a plane crashes, that's undoubtedly a bad thing. But in my line of work, it will give us a front page lead for the next day and follow-up stories for the week to come. Likewise, good things can be bad. Things like being offered a free beer when you're sober driving, or being given a footrub, which makes you realise you're ticklish.

Photo: beeradvocate.com
This was always something that just sat at the back of my mind until I went for a month-long sojourn to South Africa earlier this year. A bit of research shows that the beer scene there is as-good-as totally dominated by South African Breweries (SAB). Mainly focused on brewing generic fizzy lagers, I knew it was going to be a long trip.

However, I did manage to find myself a bottle of Duvel hidden in the back of the chiller in a random liquor store somewhere in the depths of Durban.

And it was the worst beer I had during my time in South Africa. Something about that Belgian yeast that just wasn't right when I was lounging around in shorts (a rare thing in my case) with the temperature gauge reading 30ish degrees Celsius.

And just as brilliant beer can be - well - crap, so-called "rubbish" beer can actually be awesome in the right situation. I know plenty of people who wouldn't touch Bushmans with a ten-foot pole, but were more than happy to drink copious quantities of it in the space of 12 hours when taking part in a Crate Day.

The same thinking applied when I watched some of the Rugby World Cup games at the FanZone on Wellington's waterfront. While I now have an intense hatred for Heineken (thank you, you bastards, for ruining any piece of suave James Bond had left), there was nothing better than skipping class, sitting on the warm concrete, watching rugby on one of those oh-so-rare good Wellington days, while sipping away on a few cold plastic cups of beer.

If you're lucky enough to have had a Flying Dog Gonzo, you will see one of my favourite quotes from Hunter S. Thompson adorning the label: "Good people drink good beer."

But there is also another saying I quite enjoy: "All beer is good beer, but some beer is better".