Duncan's celebrate "weird" win at Smith's NZ IPA Challenge
Grape-grain hybrid beer shares top honours in Aotearoa Stout Challenge. Future uncertain for Three Boys famed Oyster Stout. Garage Project do battle against "fake" ginger beer.
Happy Friday beer fans and welcome to the latest installment of Friday Night Beers — your one-stop shop for New Zealand beer news and views.
It’s action-packed this week and we start with Duncan’s Brewing and how they broke a big(ger) brewery stranglehold and surprised themselves with “weird” winning feeling at the Smith’s NZ IPA Challenge in Queenstown last weekend.
After Good George and Parrotdog had each won back-to-back titles in an event that sees 31 breweries putting up their best NZ-hopped IPAs, Duncan’s — a brewery more often associated with ice cream sours and pastry stouts — won the top prize ahead of Bach Brewing and 8 Wired. Parrotdog took out the People’s Choice Award.
“It was pretty unexpected,” said owner-founder George Duncan. “And kind of weird. As you know, we don’t exactly specialise in IPAs. So it's a real good win for us.
“We do brew IPAs but we do a lot of other stuff whereas other breweries, their mainstay is IPA. So yeah, it was definitely a shock.”
George noted that “because of what we do” — crazy, genre-bending beers — winning competitions is usually outside their experience.
“But at the same time I was really, really pleased with the beer.
“Our brewer, Evan Currie, did an excellent job of executing that beer. The recipe is actually very similar to what we brewed for our fresh hop this year, and we just tweaked the recipe from fresh hop to pellets and we were super-stoked how that came out.”
Like their excellent fresh hop beer, Return of Kem, this one, Research Kemicle, employed a “dynamic” hop duo of Eggers Special and Riwaka.
The use of the name “Kem” is a tribute to Kem Eggers of Eggers hops.
“We get all our New Zealand hops from Eggers hop farm. And Kem is an absolute character,” George said.
“You can't go wrong with those hops,” he added. “Riwaka in the whirlpool and Eggers Special in the dry hop.”
Eggers Special is a relative of Riwaka, bred by the team at Eggers Hops.
“Eggers Special is like this perfect blend of Riwaka and old-world European style hops. You get elements of the tropical passionfruit that you get with Riwaka but then you get this underlying deeper tone to it. It’s just a bit more dynamic.
“With Eggers Special, you get a lot more of these spicy, citrusy notes coming through, as well as that classic tropical.”
Research Kemicle was released yesterday in 440ml cans and George is ruing the fact he didn’t put any of it in kegs. He figured with 31 beers brewed for the Smith’s NZ IPA Challenge there’d be too many kegs of NZ-hopped IPA on the market.
“Plus, we were not expecting to win. And then you win and you're like ‘oh God we could have sold like a whole freaking batch of kegs’.”
Do yourself (and Duncan’s) a favour and get some!
Beer of the Week No 1
Off the back of the NZ IPA Challenge, I just happened to crack a new release in that style: Panhead Road Hog NZ IPA.
First up, the colour of the can is just mint, right? And it references the colour of the hot rod it’s named after. I don’t much about cars, but I can appreciate that Road Hog is a very cool looking beast, and it was apparently famous in the 70s around the Waikato region.
The car has just been restored by Greg Stokes of GMS Hot Rods in North West Auckland
Anyway, this to me is beer that moves in the same orbit as Parrotdog’s new Raptor APA, in that it’s got an old-school crystal malt character that was on a receding tide for a while in beer recipes. So, it has that caramel-sweet note to the malt that can carry a bit of hop heft. I was first directed to this beer by Brent McGlashan of Mac Hops, who described it as a very good example of a New Zealand-style IPA, and to me that’s a ringing endorsement as Brent knows New Zealand hops inside out.
In short: a very good, richly satisfying, hoppy, well-balanced beer you could happily sit on for an evening and not get bored.
Merlot magic makes for winning stout
The Aotearoa Stout Challenge co-hosted by Moon Under Water and Punky Brewster last weekend in Christchurch threw up a judging anomaly: a tie.
After two rounds of judging, first-place equal went to Parrotdog’s Imperial American Stout (want!) and Sideways Stout, a beer-wine hybrid collab between Fork & Brewer and Back Nine Brewing. Third place went to ChinChiller’s Chilli Stout. And Christchurch newcomers Gambit Brewing took out the People’s Choice Award.
The imagery for Sideways Stout references the fabulous movie of the same name and the impact (negative) that film had on Merlot consumption.
I spoke to Brayden Rawlinson, head brewer at Fork & Brewer, about the beer.
First of all, I learned that Back Nine Brewing is the home brew enterprise of Brayden’s mate, Jesse Chalmers.
“He lives just north of Wellington in Linden and when he bought the place, he found a bunch of grapevines. They’re table grapes, and he just started chucking grapes in his beers,” Brayden explains. “And I’m four or five years into my grapes and beer project.”
So it made sense for them to brew a grape beer. And Brayden had a 20-litre keg of Merlot grape must from Gladstone Vineyard in the Wairarapa, which was left over from the making of a rosé.
“For the stout challenge, it has to be a new beer. And, unfortunately, at the moment, we can’t do much big brewing at Fork because we’re sitting on quite a lot of stock as the hospo industry in Wellington is a bit slow at the moment.
“But I’ve got Grainfather G70, which I use as a pilot kit and a small fermenter that can handle 130 litres. The G70 output is around 65 litres so to fill the fermenter I usually have to brew back-to-back and it turns into a bloody 12 hour a day to get two kegs, which is kind of silly.
“But Jesse’s got a G30, the 30-litre model of the Grainfather so we basically set him up in the brewery on his G30 and he brewed his stout and I brewed 65 litres of my stout and we combined it in the tank with 20 litres of Merlot grape must.
“The must had 4-6 hours skin contact from a merlot rosé so it was really rich in anthocyanin and all those thiol precursors — it's really good for brewing. We just chucked it all in a in a fermenter and the beer ended up tasting like a chocolate covered jelly donut.
“I also employed another technique that I'm really kind of delving deep into, which is carbonic maceration, which is a winemaking technique that’s popular in Burgundy. It's an intracellular, enzymatic fermentation that happens within the grape prior to primary fermentation and it pushes the primary flavour and aroma characteristics of the grape. A lot of the wines from there that are designed to be drunk fresh, within six months of vintage, like Beaujolais Nouveau. And they just smell the taste like strawberry Hubba Bubba chewing gum and. Like really artificial.
“Anyway, I had a few bunches of merlot grapes and chucked them in a backpack with some dry ice. A couple of days carbonic maceration and the CO2 is impregnated in the grapes because it's gone through the skin. You bite the grapes and they're fizzy. And that kind of just provided the aromatic top notes ... It was a really overengineered beer.”
The brew produced just a handful of kegs. One 30-litre keg went south for the contest and three 20 litre kegs were left over, one of which was pre-sold to Wellington bar Bin 44, which has an event on this weekend called Dark Side Of The Wharf. Two more 20-litre kegs will eventually go on tap at Fork & Brewer.
I’ll have more about Brayden’s wine-beer experimentation in a future edition.
Dusty’s Beer of the Week
One of the OG’z from Three Sisters is their 5.2% Hot Rod smoked lager hopped with Jarrylo on a base of Vienna and Munich malts. It pours a rich ruby red with notes of pear and lemon and subtle spicing, the smoke factor is present yet not dominant providing a nuanced layering to an intriguing lager. — Dusty
He’s not bluffing — new podcast episode live
Ralph Bungard of Three Boys Brewery is one of the legends of the New Zealand beer scene (and a man with some strongly-held viewpoints). He joins us on episode 2 of the Third Pint Theory, co-hosted by myself and Beer Bigwig, Martin Bridges.
He also talks about being the reigning Champion New Zealand Brewery from last year’s NZ Beer Awards, about pivoting towards being a “local” brewery with a tight focus on Christchurch. Plus, there’s a particularly big news revelation towards the end of the pod about the future of their famed, multi-award-winning Oyster Stout.
Beer of the week 2A & 2B
Got a real surprise this week when a box of beers arrived from Boneface in Upper Hutt (thanks team!). The biggest surprise was seeing a Liberty Brewing beer in the mix … but then I read the fine print so to speak.
Turns out that long-time great mates Joe Wood of Liberty and Mike Neilson of Boneface apparently found a secret crop of late-harvest Riwaka hops and decided to make a beer together; only they couldn’t decide on a style so Joe brewed a Imperial Pilsner and Mike created a big hazy IPA. Both are substantial units, not just the men, but the beers: clocking in at 7% and both called Longshot with a golf theme … that being Joe’s big passion.
I suggest you have a warm-up beer before tackling these. A nice hoppy pale ale at around 5-6% just to get your palate ready for the full-on assault that follows.
Both of these are innnnntense. There’s massive diesel fume notes off both, and a rocketing sweet-spice character. After a few sips they mellow out and the pilsner has that lovely grapefruit pith bitterness, while the hazy drives more to sweet citrus, almost orange notes.
Good beers both and a real Riwaka ride.
A real zinger
I saw Garage Project this week released a new video for their Zinger Ginger Beer and it plays up a “fake” vs “real” theme. It’s cute, but it also highlights an interesting development in the modern brewing era — with breweries increasingly broadening their portfolios to include alcoholic lemonade and ginger “beer”.
Back when ginger ale or ginger beer was just a soft drink, it wasn’t such a big deal but when actual beermakers start producing these things, nomenclature takes on a different tone. If you’re a brewery and you’re calling something a “beer” surely it has to meet the definitions of being a beer — or that’s what Jos Ruffell of Garage Project argues. And that means it has to be brewed, from grain, with hops and fermented with yeast.
I’ve had a few conversations with Jos on this subject and I agree with him, but also reckon it’s now too hard to put that particular genie back in the ginger ale bottle. Plus there’s also the whole spectrum of IPA we deal with these days, including non-alcoholic IPAs (which in the strict sense are not IPAs at all).
Anyway, the Garage Project campaign taps into all this in a subtextual way.
“What is a ginger beer? If you look at everything that's on the market, Mac's for example, is basically ethanol, ginger flavour, ginger extract colour, etcetera,” Jos says.
“And the other part is ginger-flavoured ciders which are grocery compliant.”
To Jos, unless it’s brewed from grain and includes hops, then it shouldn’t be called a beer.
“Zinger is a proper, brewed, ginger beer from a barley-free grain base so we can have it gluten-free. It’s a beer, not a ginger flavoured RTD or a ginger-flavoured cider.”
While their alcoholic lemonade range, Konbini, is also fermented with grain, in this case rice, Jos is keeping the grist bill for Zinger under his hat for now.
“Fundamentally we’re brewers and we like fermenting things and that's always going to be how we approach things.
“With Konbini, we have literally brewed a 100% rice beer. It's even got hops in it in order to be legally defined as a beer.”
Jos says they take inspiration from Sierra Nevada in this territory.
“Ken Grossman up at Sierra Nevada, was asked when they started doing hard kombucha, ‘is this a departure for you guys, being such a traditional, purist brewery?’
“And his response really resonated with me: ‘Look, if it's fermented, it's got soul'. I'm cool with that.
“If we're actually brewing it, we feel good about it.”
Speaking of those non-alc IPAs ….
Tim’s Beer of the Week
I’ve been dragging the chain, I’ll admit it, but this officially the year that non-alc beers have finally gotten through to me. None more so than Epic Brewing’s foray into this increasingly dense (and increasingly competitive) arena with Super Zero.
How to describe this one… I almost want to call it the Double IPA of non-alcs, but that would be just a touch hyperbolic. It is however, definitively the hoppiest of the bunch that I’ve sampled. The impact of the grassy, green grape and gooseberry hop character hits hard and clean on the nose, and holds on strong through the palate and right into the finish. There’s even a commendable bit of bitterness on display, the balance of which has been one of the last hurdles for non-alc beers to surpass (at least for my palate).
It still isn’t going to be mistaken for a full-strength IPA, but it does represent another small, advancing step towards that impossible peak. — Tim Newman
Get those toasties in ya belly
The annual Great New Zealand Toastie Takeover kicked off this week and the number of breweries participating grows year on year.
This year there’s entries from Urbanaut, Shining Peak, Jimmy Coops (Lakeman), Brew Craft Beer Pub (Croucher), Garage Project, Panhead, Sprig + Fern (the Mapua and Tahuna taverns) and BEERS, who’ve been a finalist more than once.
Each toastie will be available until August 5, after which 12 finalists will be announced. The supreme winner is announced on August 20. To be eligible, cafés, restaurants, bars, food trucks and pop-ups come up with a toastie that must feature two slices of bread, cheese (or a vegan substitute), McClure's Pickles and it must be able to be eaten by hand.
Okere Falls in Rotorua was named the supreme winner in 2024 with its Figgy in the Middle, featuring Swiss cheese, pickle cheesecake mix, walnuts, figs, streaky bacon, rocket, chilli honey, blue cheese and McClure's Pickles, sandwiched between buttered sourdough bread, topped with parmesan.
Beer of the Week No 3
Loved this Pilsner, in a rare can appearance, from Kaikoura’s Emporium Brewing.
This beer has gone through a few iterations over the years. It may have started as modern German pilsner, but it’s now firmly in the New Zealand-hopped camp with Nelson Sauvin and Taiheke (a great pilsner hop) but with a nod to its origins with a firmly bitter finish. It’s got great depth of flavour with a nice woody-herbal character keeping the fruit accents in check. Thoroughly enjoyed it!
That’s all I’ve got room for this week.
Michael
I always look forward to "Friday night Beers" as my Sunday-morning-with-a-coffee read, thanks Michael and team. Yep, I'm slow out the blocks on the weekend...
I always look forward to "Friday night Beers" as my Sunday-morning-with-a-coffee read, thanks Michael and team. Yep, I'm slow out the blocks on the weekend...