Altitude's trophy winning attitude
Queenstown brewery dominates Aussie awards with multiple trophies, gold medals. Sunshine Brewing crowd funding goes live. Beervana presale on until Monday. Clarkson vows to save British hops.
Happy Friday beer lovers! welcome to your weekly wrap of news and reviews from the beer world.
And it’s happy days down by the lake in Queenstown where Altitude Brewing are celebrating (another) stunning awards performance at the Australian International Beer Awards, held in Melbourne last night.
Altitude, in my view, are the best brewery in the country right now in terms of award-winning beers and it’s a testament to their brew team that their core range are consistently picking up big awards.
At the AIBAs they retained their title as Champion Small International Brewery and took home two other trophies with long-standing favourites — Foggy Goggles Hazy IPA winning the Modern Pale Ale trophy and Powder Day Pilsner named the Best Pilsner.
It’s two years running that Altitude have won best Modern Pale Ale after Sled Dog took the trophy last year.
Powder Day has now won two big awards in a row after winning the NZ Lager & Pilsner trophy at the NZ Beer Awards last year, where Remarks won the Juicy/Hazy IPA Trophy and Altitude took home the Champion Medium Brewery crown.
Their five AIBA gold medals were across an array of styles: Pilsner, Hazy, IPA, Irish Stout and a field beer. In total they won 20 medals at a 100% strike rate.
Co-founder Eddie Gapper, who celebrated his 50th birthday today, said this latest success feels even better than previous wins.
“It feels better each time. And the thing that’s most pleasing is how thirsty the team has remained after fantastic results in the past. They still have the drive to produce fantastic beer. And that’s never dimmed or wavered despite everything that’s happened to the industry over the last five or six years.”
He was also rapt their core range beers had done so well over successive years with Foggy Goggles winning best modern pale ale after Sled Dog did it last year, and Powder Day doubling down across two sets of awards.
“It’s extraordinary. These are the staples that run all year, every year and they get the same amount of care and attention as the one-offs.”
It was a big night for a number of other Kiwi breweries, with Garage Project winning the Champion Large International Brewery for the fourth time in a row.
Bach Brewing won the trophy for best non-alcoholic beer with All Day Hazy IPA, and Heyday won the design trophy with Soul Cat.
There were a number of gold medal winners from NZ (and apologies if I miss anyone as apparently the results PDF was missing sections!).
Altitude: Powder Day Pilsner, Foggy Goggles Hazy IPA, Peak Chemistry IPA, Silent Peak Irish Stout, Window of Opportunity (Field Beer).
Brothers Beers: Nectaron Fresh Hop Hazy IPA, Mad Science #3 Double Hazy IPA
Garage Project: Engeltjes Pis (barrel-aged sour), Mountain Call (Experimental Beer)
Rhyme X Reason: Mount Alpha IPA, Black Lips Porter
Bach Brewing: All Day Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA
Brave Brewing: Terrible Lizards IPA
Renaissance: Stonecutter (Scotch Ale)
Three Sisters: Hot Sand Dash (Belgian Session Ale)
Scrolling through the results, the New Zealand breweries were largely on their game with very few beers from this side of the Tasman missing a medal and with a number of breweries have 100% strike-rates.
A handful of talking points:
Bach Brewing’s All Day Hazy is now easily the best non-alc beer in the country. It picks up award after award. And the performance here is world-class. It beat beers from Sierra Nevada, Brew Dog, Samuel Adams, Budejovicky Budvar and a bunch of internationals from Germany, Netherlands, China, Korea and Australia’s best, such as Heaps Normal.
Garage Project Engeltjes Pis now rivals Chance, Luck & Magic 2020 (from the same stable) as the most internationally-awarded beer produced in this country.
The return of Renaissance Stonecutter Scotch Ale to awards stage is heart-warming. It’s been a great beer for a long time.
The champion beer of the event had a strong New Zealand connection. Mountain Goat’s Bract To The Future IPA was brewed as part of the NZ Hops Ltd Bract Brewing programme and features experimental hop NZH-106. And if that’s not a reason to get the commercial version, I don’t know what is!
Beer of the Week No 1
My timing is spot on here. By chance I had Brothers Beer’s Nectaron Fresh Hop IPA last night and later that evening they won a gold medal at the Australian International Beer Awards with this beer.
First up, though, how the hell did they get away with the branding 🧐 … it’s sensational, as is the beer itself.
A powerful dank — truly dank! — aroma kicks things off (and I’ve got this off a lot of Nectaron-hopped beers this season). Underneath that pungently aromatic introduction there’s a completely different set of flavours, with lots of sweet, pinging citrus and sultry pineapple. Light, textural body, firm finish. Top notch (and I wrote all that before the judges in Aussie handed down their gold medal verdict!)
Sunshine crowdfunding up and running
The Three Sisters / Sunshine Brewing equity raise is underway and it’s off to a good start with over $15,000 raised in the first day.
They are looking to raise a minimum of $250,000 with a cap of $2 million. Investors get a slice of both Sunshine Brewing and Three Sisters after the New Plymouth-based Three Sisters bought the iconic Sunshine brewery earlier this year.
In the information memorandum, Three Sisters say the funds raised will be used as follows with the Gisborne taproom upgrade and re-organisation of assets the main spend on the minimum raise.
* Gisborne taproom upgrades $141,370
* Reorganisation of collective assets $100,000
After that it gets ambitious with additional venues in Gisborne, Auckland and Christchurch on the cards.
They say the Gisborne taproom upgrades are about improving customer experience, presentation, and trading performance of the existing venue, while the re-organisation of assets is about maximising operational efficiencies across two breweries which means shifting equipment across the North Island.
If they get to $750,000 an additional Gisborne venue is slated — “deepening our presence in a market where Sunshine already has brand recognition and local goodwill”.
Amounts over $1 million raised will see further expansion into Christchurch and Auckland.
“Together, these next-stage investments are intended to turn the combined Three Sisters / Sunshine platform into a stronger, more efficient, and more geographically diversified business.”
Three Sisters Brewery Ltd (and Sunshine) | PledgeMe
Dusty’s Beer of the Week
Clash of the hemispheres where Mosaic meets NZH-109 in this 8% DIPA, Odin, from North Shore outfit Mythica Brewing.
Gargantuan amounts of blueberry meets sweet sticky malts with undertones of mango, nectarine, lime. Rich, full-bodied, with a succulent mouthfeel this is a dangerously quaffable brew. — Dusty
Beervana tickets on pre-sale
For the super-dedicated and those who want to save themselves a few dollars, Beervana is offering special pre-sale tickets at reduced prices until May 20. General ticket sales open June 3.
GA tickets are $52 per session (going up to $58 on June 3) while early entry tickets are $69 (going up to $77). There are also good deals on group tickets, double-sessions and the full two-day immersive experience.
The festival is on August 21 & 22 at Hnry Stadium (aka The Cake Tin) in Wellington.
Tickets | Beervana 2026 - Beervana
Beer of the Week No 2
After last week’s story about Garage Project distributing Two Bays gluten-free beer, I promised a review. But before that, I see Two Bays IPA picked up a Consistency of Excellence Award at the Australian International Beer Awards last night — recognition for winning a gold medal three years running.
I taste-tested a few of these beers on a friend who is gluten-free and all I got were rave reviews across the range. It was impressive how happy this made her.
I thought I’d benchmark their work with their 2025 World Beer Cup gold medal-winning Pacific Ale. It’s based on the style made famous by Stone & Wood, which usually relies on a heavy dose of wheat so it was intriguing to see how it tasted.
Made with millet and corn, and hopped with Galaxy and Nelson Sauvin, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was nothing about the taste profile that told you it was gluten-free apart from a slight nutty character to the malt. Fresh, bright and quaffably light, it’s great beer.
Second Guinness brewery slated for Ireland
The popularity of Guinness waned a little bit at the start of the year in Britain— and I’m not saying the recent turbo-fad is over as global sales were still up and that global demand is enough to have parent company Diageo invest in a second Irish brewery.
St James’s Gate in Dublin will continue to be the only brewery that supplies Guinness for Ireland, the UK and North America. Diageo has just opened a new brewery in County Kildare that will be used primarily to brew Diageo’s other brands such as Harp, Smithwick’s, Kilkenny and Carlsberg.
But a second, Guinness-only, brewery is slated for the same site. Kildare “Brewery 2” will make Guinness and Guinness 0.0 for what Diageo calls “emerging markets”.
Martin’s Beer of the Week
The McLeod’s 802 series is so intertwined with previous brewer Jason Bathgate (802 is the area code for Jason’s birthplace in Vermont) that I was unsure how it could continue under new brewer Gav Williams. I had nothing to fear — this edition (#75) is a belter.
Featuring classic hops from the USA (Amarillo), Aotearoa (Motueka) and Australia (Galaxy), this beer exhibits that super-saturated fruit flavour that characterises the best unfiltered beers. In my opinion, the Amarillo really shines through here. The first impression I got reminded me of the descriptor from legendary Kiwi beer writer Phil Cook which spawned its own beer — “Angry Peaches”. Slightly over-ripe stonefruit to the max! — Martin Bridges is the co-host of The Third Pint Theory podcast.
Clarkson to save British hops
Petrolhead turned farmer and brewer, Jeremy Clarkson is setting himself the goal of “saving” British hops with a multi-million pound commitment to buy only British hops for his Hawkstone Brewery.
Distributor Charles Faram posted on LinkedIn:
“As co-owner of Hawkstone, Clarkson is advance-buying three years of British hop production from our grower collective, an initial 153 tonnes worth £2.77 million. This will boost UK hop production by 15% and, in the words of our Managing Director Paul Corbett, ‘reverse a decades-long downhill slide.’
From 5,709 hectares of hops in 1979 to just 542 hectares in 2024, British hop growing has faced enormous challenges. Today, only 42 hop farmers remain across the southeast and West Midlands. This partnership provides security, confidence for growers.”
Hawkestone released this video the other day, which doesn’t really say a lot, but it’s a good use of Bittersweet Symphony.
Tim’s Beer of the Week
The way time of harvest affects the character of hops is still an emerging pattern, but a fascinating one nonetheless. Nelson Sauvin evolving from fruity and tropical to dank and diesel as it’s allowed more ‘hang-time’ on the bines is the famous example, but every hop goes on its own individual journey as it matures. Upper Hutt’s Boneface brewing may share that sentiment, as they’ve come out with a ‘late harvest’ fresh-hopped IPA for a second year in a row.
Aftermath has one of those “moment-you-crack-the-can” aromas that are just immediately in your face. Riwaka, Nectaron and Nelson Sauvin deliver a potent mix of tinned fruit salad, overripe passionfruit, gooseberry and lime sherbert. Beyond the intensity of the aroma there’s almost a textural element, somehow it even smells sticky.
The palate follows through gloriously, with a sumptuous but super clean malt base that allows the huge fruit flavours to go absolutely nuts on the palate. The bitterness is perfectly balanced and arrives right before the fruit character can overripen. Easily my favourite of the Boneface ‘Face Off’ range, and in the running for my favourite of the entire season. — Tim Newman is the chief reviewer for Pursuit of Hoppiness magazine.
Beer of the Week No 3
Just when you thought India Pale Lager was no longer thing, up pops a fresh hop iteration from Sunshine Brewing in Gisborne.
Hopped with Rakau and Peacharine from Freestyle Hops, this is a peach juice bomb.
A minor quibble is that the head retention was really poor, which is a shame for a fresh hop beer, but the flavour was oustanding and using the imperial lager base works to let the hops do the work.
I will leave you with a story about an “arm’s race” to create themed drinking vessels for sports events, as only they can do in America!
After baseball teams introduced plastic “baseball bats” for fans to drink from NHL ice hockey teams are going the same way with hollow, plastic hockey sticks.
Described as “part drinkware, part souvenir” the Minnesota Wild were the first NHL team to use the product know as a beer twig.
The Carolina Hurricanes have introduced a beer skate (basically a refined shoey) while the Buffalo Sabres have a plastic sword as a drinking vessel. It’s described as an “arm’s race” among the teams.
Hopefully you can see the video, it’s from The Athletic (the media outlet, not the brewery!) and their stuff is often paywalled but I was able to view it.
What is the Beer Twig beer at Wild games?
The question is, what would you use at an All Blacks game?
Thanks for tuning in and catch you next week.
Michael
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