Craft brewery on Country Calendar

Breweries doing positive work in climate space. Insights from biggest beer festival in US. Zeelandt turns 10 & not a hazy in sight. What would you pay for a 27-year-old Steinlager? And much more

Happy Friday and bon voyage if you’re setting off on a long weekend holiday.

Before we hook into proceedings, this email is way longer than normal, call it a long weekend extra special, but that means if you’re on Gmail the text might be truncated, but I’m told if you click “View entire message” you’ll able to see it all.

You might recall a few months ago that former Moa Brewing boss Geoff Ross and his wife Justine caused a stir when they appeared on Country Calendar as the new owners of Lake Hawea Station, where they run merino sheep.

The show, the highest rating in Country Calendar’s history, sent the show’s Facebook page into meltdown as many viewers let rip at what they saw as a “woke PC” pair of city slickers taking their millions made from booze and dropping it on vanity project — namely a climate-positive merino sheep station.

What the Rosses are doing at Lake Hawea Station should be applauded — climate positive, regenerative farming — but the delivery could have been better. Even the concept of a mattress for shorn sheep to land on at the bottom of chutes in the shearing shed had a marketing rationale behind but it came across as … well, “woke PC BS” to quote the critics.

That sets the backdrop for this week’s edition of the famous farming show — for the second time in five months there will be a brewing connection to with this week’s episode featuring Taupo sheep and beef farmers James and Elissa Cooper, who you probably know better as Lakeman Brewing.

Knowing James and Elissa, they will come across as the polar opposite of Geoff and Justine. But they are also working towards regenerative farming and are doing lots of positive things for the environment (more on that next week after you’ve had a chance to look at the episode!)

And speaking of farming and beer, there’s another show on that moment playing out that connection: Nadia’s Farm. The reality TV show focuses on a year in the life of Royalburn Station where Nadia Lim and husband Carlos Bagrie are trying to bring the station into the 21st century. Episode 2 features an attempt by Carlos to grow grain to make beer. If you regularly read these emails, you’ll know they achieved it, thanks to the teams at Gladfield (for malting the grain) and Altitude Brewing (for brewing it). There should be more on this in coming episiodes as we’ve only just got to the grain being tested to see if the proteins are low enough to make beer.

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Beer of the Week No 1

It was a few summers ago and we spent a week in Wanaka and then Cromwell. The days were hot and windy and the beer always needed to be cold. The abiding beer memory of that trip were the empty bottles of Boneface Hoptron APA scattered across an outdoor table late into the evening. It was the perfect drop for the place and time: light enough to refresh, hoppy enough to satisfy. I love a rock solid APA and this is a contender for the best I’ve had this year (alongside perennial gem Parrotdog Falcon and Brave Bottle Rocket).

And the best part is that Hoptron is now: a) in 330ml six packs and b) also in 440ml cans — for that time when you want just a little bit more. One of each the other night was a sweet spot for me.

Now there’s heaps more for subscribers below including insights on the state of American brewing from the Great American Beer Festival.