Everything you wanted to know about IPA but were afraid to ask

8 Wired's foray into whisky, aged in ex-Bumaye barrels! Garage Project's experiment in restraint. Did Steve Jobs invent the word microbrewery? Boozy kombucha. The world's most expensive beer & more...

First up, if you read the magazine you will have seen Matthew Curtis’ excellent “ultimate” guide to IPA.

There are a couple of little backstories to that. The first is that I chased Matt to do the story for us after his original version was published by marketing outfit MASH in 2020. My view was that if Matt didn’t do a version for Pursuit of Hoppiness I’d have to plagiarise him!

Second, when illustrating the cover of the magazine, artist Greg Downie wanted to capture the “look” of an IPA so he went to the shop and bought one (Sawmill West Coast IPA, since you ask), poured it into the glass and then tried to capture it.

I think he succeeded most excellently and I do love this cover.

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8 Wired’s Whisky

8 Wired has released a cask strength, single malt whisky that spent six years in three sets of barrels, including those that previously housed 8 Wired’s cult high-alcohol imperial stout, Bumaye.

8 Wired’s Soren Eriksen says making whisky was a chance to do a commercial version of something he’d always dabbled in.

“The nerd in me wanted to do it,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve been home distilling for as long as I’ve been home brewing.”

The whisky is officially being launched on Monday at Bar Martin in Mount Albert, Auckland, but is available for pre-sale now.

I was lucky enough to get a wee sample, and while I am no whisky connisseur, I know what good tastes like and this is divine. It’s smooth, slightly chocolatey from the porter wash and definitely moreish.

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Garage Project’s “restraint”

I caught up with Garage Project founder Pete Gillespie this week to talk about their new Treehugger Pilsner, a beer designed to raise money for native tree planting in Canterbury, where Gillespie hails from.

The fund-raising aspect is wonderful, but I was more interested in some of the production tweaks they used to make the most “sustainable” beer possible. That included putting spunding valves on fermentation tanks to keep natural carbonation in, saving on CO2. I know homebrewers who use spunding valves for keg-conditioned beer and having the process applied at scale is quite cool. He reckons the beer tastes better as a result.

The other thing they did was to show “restraint” in the hopping regime, which Gillespie said was against his nature but the effect was to get better results with the hops they did use, in his opinion, with more tropical and fewer diesel notes coming through.

The packaging is also not Garage Project, but in being economical with ink and paper they’ve actually created a pared-back look that is, sorta, quintessentially GP — as in, just when you think have a certain look, they change direction. They’re a bit like early Bob Dylan in that regard!

The beer itself? I thought it was fantastic, but then it was right in my wheelhouse at 4 percent ABV, creamy texture, delicate hopping, clean finish. Ideal summer beer and you could easily knock back a few without trouble.

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Beer of the week No 1

Speaking of Pilsner, that brings us to this week’s first recommendation. Now I’ve had oyster stouts, clam stouts and crayfish porters but an Oyster Pilsner? This to me is quite wild. The beer comes to us from do-no-wrong Alibi Brewing and was brewed with oyster shells from Te Matuku Bay Oysters with input from West Australia’s Blasta Brewing. It turns out the inspiration for the beer was the oyster-loving NZ boss Konvoy Kegs, Tom Madams, and the Blasta crew were in town so helped write a recipe. On the nose, there’s a definite mineral, shell-like aroma and while I didn't get a full-on salty taste there is a littlebite of brine. I think the beer felt both slightly sweeter than a normal Pils and slightly heavier, texturally. It was very a satisfying drop, complex enough to keep you interested but Pils-enough to not distract. It was excellent before dinner and then the second can was extra-excellent with my dinner: it’s that kind of beer, one that adds to proceedings.

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Don’t abandon Abandoned

If you get a chance maybe buy a beer from Abandoned Brewery this weekend. They are reeling after thieves stole around 1000 litres of beer from a cool storage room at the brewery. Most of the beer was in 20-litre kegs but some was in 50-litre kegs and around 50 kegs were stolen, which means it was quite an effort by the robbers. As owner Tim Ward noted the thieves might try to flog the beer so if you hear of anyone selling cheap kegs in Wellington, you know what to do.