Aftermath of 'offensive' beer rubbed out by Advertising Standards Authority
Tui brewery now just a pub. Scientists discover beer brewed in space will taste better than earth-brewed beer. Middle East consumers pivot from US soft drinks to non-alc beer. Beervana — big is better
Welcome back beer friends!
Friday Night Beers returns after the Beervana hiatus and this email is as packed as Sky Stadium on a Saturday afternoon!
I will round back to Beervana in a moment, but I wanted to start with a hat-tip to colleague Denise Garland, who has been on fire with news-making this week.
Denise had two great stories this week for Radio New Zealand — first the Advertising Standards Authority Complaints Board ruling that Te Aro’s “Kupe” branded beer breached advertising standards and therefore has to be withdrawn from sale.
She followed that with the bombshell revelation that New Zealand’s second oldest brewery site, Tui in Mangatainoka, hasn’t been producing beer for three years! Three years. How did they keep that one quiet?
Let’s start with the Kupe saga. This has done the rounds this week, with many other outlets picking up the story, but if you’ve been otherwise occupied, here’s the link: Brewery told to remove its Kupe beer from sale | RNZ News.
And if you want a deeper dive into the decision, you can read the full ruling here.
The ASA found the Kupe beer and all the advertisements for it “were likely to cause serious offence, especially to Māori”.
The ruling is fair, but I’d like to look at some points raised in Te Aro’s defence that are a little perturbing.
Take this (my emphasis in bold):
“The naming and release of this beer was not a publicity stunt. We never considered that including Kupe would stand out from the other famous historical explorers, much less become newsworthy. Since the release of a news article bringing to light the feelings of some parts of society, much commentary has been made online. While the bulk of this commentary has been negative, it has sadly been aimed at the journalist and Dr Karaitiana Taiuru. Te Aro Brewing Company would never want to be associated with this sort of discussion or be used as a platform for creating societal discord. We were shocked and saddened by the amount of anger and racist rhetoric the article created, however we believe this was the journalist’s doing, stirring up controversy in search of a story. We have been criticised for remaining silent on the issue, however we wanted to avoid further fanning the flames of racial division caused by the article.”
A priceless example of shooting the messenger/blaming the media!
And then there’s this:
“As for the reported problematic relationship between Māori and alcohol, we consider this to be a racial stereotype.”
Seriously? Just google “Māori alcohol harm” and see what turns up.
One of the original complainants Karaitiana Taiuru also took exception to this line.
“They said they thought the Advertising Standards Authority were basically being racist by saying Maori had a problem with alcohol. We see Te Whatu Ora, New Zealand Police, many of our own whanau, we know there are issues there with alcohol and Maori,” he told Waatea News.
The decision by the ASA means: “Advertisements, packaging and product name to be removed and not used again.”
While the beer is “sold out” on Te Aro’s website, the image still lingers.
Our beer is from Mangatainoka — Yeah, right
DB marketing director, Fraser Shrimpton confirmed this week that the Tui brewery — founded in 1889 by Henry Wagstaff — is now effectively a glorified pub.
“The [Covid-19] pandemic restrictions through 2020 and 2021 largely prevented DB from operating the brewery and we shifted the remainder of this production to our Timaru and Auckland breweries in 2021,” Shrimpton told Radio NZ.
“We are in the process of redeploying the brew plant and equipment to our other sites around the country.”
Earlier this month, DB confirmed it had brewery tours at Tui and would instead offer a beer-tasting experience.
It’s the second iconic brewery DB have shuttered in recent years after they stopped brewing at Monteith’s in Greymouth in 2020, again shifting production to Auckland and Timaru.
Beer of the Week No 1
Bach Brewing are on a tear in 2024, to the point that I feel like declaring them the best producer of NZ-hopped hazy IPAs in the country. Their Sticky Buds Fresh Hop IPA was astonishingly good but didn’t feature in many dispatches from Instagram-land which had me scratching my head.
And they are at it again with their New Zealand Beer Awards trophy-winning hazy IPA, Bungy Smugglers.
Brewed for the Smith’s NZ IPA Challenge in June, this is an absolute ripper of a hazy/juicy beer.
It’s hard to argue with the quartet of Riwaka, Nectaron, Nelson Sauvin and Motueka in a Kiwi-hopped beer. The beats are sweet orange, grapefruit, some herbal goodness and a pinch of woody-spice. Hazies can often go one dimensional on me, but this is complex, nuanced and multi-faceted. The mouthfeel and carbonation are en-pointe and the bitterness just-right.
A taplist for the ages at 16 Tun
16 Tun — the craft beer bar in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter — is turning 10 years old next week and they are celebrating with what can only be described as a tap list that captures a big chunk of modern beer in history in New Zealand.
It’s a taplist for aficionados, for sure, but I’m sure it will have wider appeal.
Of note is a keg of 2016 iStout from 8 Wired. Yep, 8-year-old 8 Wired iStout! Plus, they’ve got a 2018 keg of Funkonnay from Hallertau.
There’s Townshend ESB on hand pour and Three Boys Oyster Stout on nitro.
The rest of the taplist reads like a who’s who of the past 10 to 12 years:
Epic Hop Zombic and Pale Ale
Hallertau Statesman and Maximus (No 2 & No 7)
Liberty Citra and Knife Party
Sawmill The Doctor
8 Wired Hopwired and Wild Feijoa
Parrotdog Bitterbitch
Garage Project Party & Bullshit, Pernicious Weed and Aro Noir.
Panhead Supercharger
Emerson’s Bookbinder & Pilsner
Three Boys Wheat
Duncan’s Yum Yum Yuzu Lager
McLeod’s Longboarder
Get down there if you’re in Auckland, it’ll be worth it.
Tribute to a man who indirectly helped our hop industry
Ian Gordon is name you likely don’t know, but he was the man who taught New Zealand’s leading hop scientist, Ron Beatson.
Ian passed away recently and it’s fitting here that we pay him a small tribute, because his input helped put Ron Beatson on the path to hop-breeding, and without Ron our hop industry wouldn’t be as vibrant and amazing as it is now.
I learned of Ian’s passing from Chris Mills, from Kereru Brewing, as Ian had been a regular customer of Kereru and Chris had got to know him over the years.
Chris posted on Facebook this week:
“Tonight I am hoisting a glass to the recently late Ian L Gordon. Ian was longtime fan of our beers and a professor whose first student at Massey was a Dr Ron Beatson, a then-budding horticulturalist who would later bring his skills to NZ hops research. Ian shared many observations and pleasant critiques with me and I would like to consider myself a bit more than just a casual acquaintance.
“Tonight I am drinking a beer of ours made with Nelson Sauvin and Motueka hops. Hops that exist because of lessons and spirited debates from 50 years ago that helped push things in the direction that have resulted in NZ having a tremendous wealth of unique, and celebrated varieties of hops which are in beers all over the world today.”
I dropped a line to Ron Beatson about this and he replied:
“Yes, I was Ian Gordon’s first post-graduate student back at Massey University when I completed a MAgrSci back in 1974-75.
Ian was a fresh lecturer out of Aussie at the time. He set me on my path to a plant breeding & quantitative genetics career, but I lost contact with him pretty much apart from a couple of conferences that we both attended. We had a good rapport at the time though & he encouraged me to follow up to complete a PhD (I did this in the USA), which was the icing on the cake for my science career.”
Beer of the Week No 2
I came back from Beervana with a palate that needed rest and recuperation after an onslaught of pastry stouts, smoothie sours, big IPAs and some excellent hefeweizens. And it’s become something of a tradition for me to go with simplicity for a post-festival beer. As I was rummaging through my fridge looking for a lager, I found a can of Swifty (4.2%) lurking near the back. I got a six-pack earlier this year — around April from memory — when the beer launched.
Having seen an advert on TV for the next season of Nadia’s Farm, and having seen Garage Project give this a bit of push in New World stores, it appealed as the perfect compare and contrast to the Beervana excesses.
And honestly, I love it for what it is. It’s not a beer that’s going to blow your socks off but my glass was gone in the blink of an eye and I immediately wanted another one, which is as good a test as you can get.
Brewed by Garage Project for Royalburn Station, and using barley grown on the Arrowtown farm owned by Nadia Lim and Carlos Bagrie, this is simple but effective and does what it says on the tin.
As I noted, this is getting a good push in New World stores at the moment, and having bumped into the New World beer crew at Beervana, I know they are plugged into what’s going on in beer
Beervana: big is better!
If you went to Beervana I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Personally, I had a great time. This was my 13th or 14th Beervana and it always feels new and different.
Before the event I was asked to contribute some thoughts to an article about the relevance or importance of Beervana in the current economic climate, a fiscal weather bomb that’s hit small breweries pretty hard.
I wrote:
Beervana has always been a celebration of what's new in beer. And more than ever the industry needs some spark, or to use an apt metaphor, some fizz.
It's been a rough couple of years for beer, as post-Covid inflation and rising interest rates bite into discretionary spending and maybe, just maybe, the love affair with craft beer has also waned. The long honeymoon is over, for sure, but that doesn't mean the consumer-producer relationship is dead. Sometimes you just need something different to reignite the passion — and Beervana is just the place for that.
This year in particular, there are some crazy-imaginative offerings such as Duncan's 1% alcoholic ice creams, or their lemon meringue float (4.7%). And there are some unreal pastry stouts, aka dessert beers, such as Garage Project's 12.4% Banana Bread, Coconut Rum Cake and Chocolate Fudge Brownie Stout.
There are also some cool beer cocktails, with Liberty Brewing dreaming up goodies such as their Dr Pepper, a lager made with cherry and almond syrup, while Brothers Beer are utilising their two Italian brewers' backgrounds to bring a Grape Ale, a beer made with sauvignon blanc grapes!
It may sound crazy, and it may sound like it's “not really beer” but the craft industry was built on boundary-pushing and innovation and this year the breweries are delivering that in a style that I think will re-capture the imagination of punters.
And if that's not enough, or rather if it's too much, Beervana convinced three of Germany's most well-known breweries to come to Wellington to celebrate the classic styles that made Germany the beer capital of the world.
Whatever way you look at it, this Beervana feels like it will put the romance back into beer and hopefully that will get people fizzing about craft again.
Was I right? Some stats from the event certainly show an uptick on the economics:
In total, 12,200 went people through the doors at Sky Stadium — with ticket sales up 5% on last year.
Two of the four sessions were sold out (Friday day and Saturday day sessions).
Total spend at Beervana was over $1m across the two days.
Anecdotally, a lot of breweries I spoke to were incredibly happy with their result, and for a small brewery like Brew Moon from Amberley to be putting up “sold out” signs is a good indicator.
The best beers? These were the 20 beers “voted” the best by those using the Beervana app. In a change to previous years, beers weren’t scored but rather ranked according to how many people “liked” them.
Moffat Beach Brewing Co Iggy Hop Double IPA, 9%
Moffat Beach Brewing Co Your Own Private Idaho Hazy IPA, 9%
Three Sisters Brewery Chocolate Nutella Banana Cream Pancake Sour 6.5%
Altitude x One Drop Overflow Blended Golden & Imperial Pastry Stout, 10.5%
One Drop Brewing Co Wipe Me Down, Smoothie Sour, 6%
Altitude Brewing Choc Nut Slab Peanut & Milk Chocolate Pastry Stout (Nitro), 9%
One Drop Brewing Co Lesssgo Smoothie Sour, 8%
One Drop Brewing Co Wynwood Hood Smoothie Sour, 8.2%
Saint Leonards Brewing Meditations Quad Citra DIPA, 7.9%
Saint Leonards Brewing Treebeard WCIPA, 7.7%
Coolum Beer Company Flat Out IIPA, 8.1%
Coolum Beer Company The Big Pineapple Tropical Stout, 7.5%
Brouhaha Brewery Imperial Strawberry Rhubarb Sour Rhubarb Sour, 8%
Altitude Brewing Extra Dose Cinnamon Roll Golden Pastry Stout (Nitro), 10.5%
Saint Leonards Brewing Raspberry Sour, 4%
One Drop Brewing Co Geddit Smoothie Sour, 5.9%
One Drop Brewing Co Full Up Pastry stout, 10.5%
Saint Leonards Brewing Dunkelsbock, 6.5%
Altitude Brewing Jam Sessions Vol. 13: Strawberry & Sea Buckthorn
Smoothie Sour (Nitro), 6.4%
Brew Moon Brewing Company Layer Cake Pasty Sour, 5.5%
The trends are obvious, it seems. Big. Aussie. Smoothie Sours. Pastry Stouts.
For mine, the best beer by some distance, was Saint Leonards Dunkelsbock. It’s not often I have the same beer twice at Beervana, but I couldn’t say no to this.
All the Saint Leonards beers were banging by the way. They are doing great things up in Auckland.
I spent a fair bit of time at the German stand featuring Schneider Weisse, Schneeeule Braurei and Sudden Death. The Schneider Weisse beers were outstanding: notably the Festweisse and the Hopfenweisse.
Sudden Death’s Rye IPA was the best example of a Rye IPA I’ve tasted — thanks to Martin Bridges for the tip-off on that. And I had to try their Lush Blossom Punch just to see how they could possibly fit pineapple, coconut cream, banana, orange, lime purée, vanilla and sea salt into one 5% beer. Looked like a pina colada made by a child as an art project, kinda tasted like one. Weirdly delicious!
The food offering was outstanding: the birria beef tacos from Bacon Bros in Christchurch were sensational.
The best stand award goes to Abandoned Brewing’s teddy bear beer tower. It looked like a croquembouche made of soft toys. And inside all the cuteness were beer taps. How they come up with stuff is beyond me.
Dusty’s Beer of the Week
To say I was pumped when I found out a few months back that Mount Brewing Co was putting out a Black IPA was a colossal understatement! La is part of the new yin-yang series, this release featuring a Black and a White IPA. This black brewty rolls at 6.3% and has all the kit that makes a Black IPA the king of the style in my opinion: chocolatey, roasty vibes upfront on a resiny, piney mouthfeel, a gentle carb with fleeting pithy citrus pops. A slow drying chocolate finish completes an exceptional example of a Black IPA! Hoppy Friday! — Dusty
Can you brew beer in space?
If humans are going to get off-planet and either settle on Mars or voyage further out of the solar system, we’re gonna need beer right?
Well, that’s what researchers are now investigating — precisely, how brewing might be affected by microgravity, Popular Science reported — not (just) for the prospect of one day sipping brews in space, but for ensuring humanity’s survival beyond Earth.
Virtually every civilization throughout history has relied on fermentation not just for their booze, but for making everything from bread, to pickles, to yoghurt. As humanity’s technological knowledge expanded, we have adapted those same chemistry principles to pharmaceuticals and biofuels, among many other uses. And while it may not be the first necessity that comes to mind when planning for long-term living in a lunar base, or even on Mars, the process will be crucial to long-term mission success.
The results of the study, published in the journal Beverages, indicate microgravity may not only speed up fermentation processes — it could also produce higher-quality products.
Microgravity did not adversely affect the number of yeast cells or their viability. Instead, the rate of fermentation increased — probably due to the cells’ constant suspension, a state which maximized nutrient availability by preventing settling.
Surprisingly, however, the yeast exposed to microgravity produced fewer esters, the byproducts of fermentation that create both desirable and undesirable beer flavours. While suspension could be responsible, the researchers learned a yeast gene that regulates ester production might also play a part; the gene was expressed less in yeast samples exposed to microgravity than in control samples.
Bad luck if you want a nice banana-estery hefeweizen, but good news if you want to avoid fault-driven esters.
Tim’s Beer of the Week
While one of the world's most renowned brewing nations, Japan has always seemed to be stuck in an eternal nascency when it comes to modern hop-driven craft beer, at least with regard to what finds its way to our shores. Different brands pop up now and then, but none ever seem to hit the mark with Kiwi drinkers. Still, I’m always curious when the Japanese craft beer ship comes back in, so this week I’m taking a look at this pale ale from Shokunin, which itself is sort of a craft eschelon of the more well-known Orion range of Okinawa brewed lager.
The first and foremost point of difference to a local example of pale ale, right from the aroma, is the beer’s resolutely malt-driven stance. It’s more akin to a traditional English pale than anything brewed here, with malty and grainy notes taking centre stage and the vaguely spicy and earthy hops lending freshness. The bitterness is mild, which exposes some interesting yeast-driven flavours of apple and banana.
All in all, it’s a weird take on pale ale, at least as we’ve come to understand it here. But by no means an unpleasant one for the curious drinker. — Tim Newman
Toastie triumph again for Okere Falls
Before I left I mentioned the breweries that were finalists in the Great NZ Toastie Takeover. Well, the breweries didn’t win but a huge supporter of craft beer did!
For the second time in three years, Okere Falls Store took the top toastie tiara — this year with Figgy in the Middle: Swiss cheese, pickle cheesecake mix, walnuts, figs, streaky bacon, rocket, chilli honey, blue cheese and McClure’s Pickles inside buttered sourdough and topped with copious amounts of grated parmesan.
I’ve you’ve not been to Okere Falls Store, it’s definitely worth a visit, as they do great food and have a fantastic beer offering. The nearby Okere Falls are pretty cool too!
Middle East ditching American soft drink for non-alc beer
There’s a trend brewing in the Middle East in the wake of Israel’s attacks on Palestine. Consumers are switching to non-alcoholic beers, and ditching US soft drinks brands such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola because they see them as supportive of Israel amid its bombardment of Palestine. Pepsi sales are not helped by the fact PepsiCo owns the Israel-based SodaStream, having bought it in 2018.
Reuters reported that AB InBev has seen demand for zero-alcohol brews rising among residents of some Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia.
Consumers are making political choices, but they are also buying into the health benefits of zero alcohol beer relative to soft drink.
Beer of the Week No 3
I don’t know what’s cleverer about this beer from Wilderness Brewing — the great recipe or the name! Wielrijder translates as “cyclist” — the Dutch equivalent of “Radler” — which until early this year was trademarked by DB. Using the Dutch version was a good way around that obstacle, even if it looks hard to pronounce: I’m just going with “wheel rider” in my head. Anyway, enough faffing about the label. It’s the beer we’re here for; and this is a gem. I love Belgian blonde ales and this has all the character you want from that style of beer with the addition of a somehow-simultaneous bright and earthy character from the lemon. Perfect for this time of year and hopefully with the current citrus harvest there will be another edition coming soon! In the meantime, if you’re a collector of good things, I did notice that Wilderness is now selling a vertical series of their wonderful Cerise — a barrel-aged dark saison with cherries and raspberries. They have the 2018, 2020 and 2023 versions as a mini-pack for a vertical comparison.
Reasons to be confident
We’ll finish on an upwardly spiraling note, with this story from the Australian Financial Review, which takes an optimistic lens to the current crisis in craft beer.
Australia’s 600-plus craft brewers are facing some of the toughest times, but diversification into ready-to-drink alcoholic spirits, a redoubling of efforts to build brands with longevity, and renewed grit and determination are giving a hint of optimism.
More than 20 have gone bust in the past year, as consumer spending shrinks just as the federal government substantially increases excise in line with soaring inflation, squeezing already thin margins for the smaller players.
Thanks again for being part of the Friday Night Beers experience. See you again next week.
Michael
Cheers Michael! ❤️ from Saint Leonards
That Grape Ale from Brothers Beer was a standout for me. It was completely different, well balanced, and refreshing. I hope to find more of it over summer.