Friday Night Beers

A week in beer

Welcome to the weekly round-up of beer news and reviews from Pursuit of Hoppiness editor Michael Donaldson.

Here you’ll find stories from our website and around the beer world.

I’ll kick it off with one of our more popular stories in recent weeks, the rise and rise of non-alcoholic beer.

Zeroes now the heroes

When you feel like being social but sober. When you don’t want a pity brew. If you’d like one with lunch, or after a workout. When you want something with character, or if you always thought non-alcoholic beer tasted like malty water, if you wanted an independent craft beer as opposed to a multi-national … at last there’s something for you.

Maybe you’re making lifestyle choices, trying to cut down on alcohol — adopting mindful consumption or leaning towards moderation — or trying to see if you can do Dry [insert month of your choice here — there’s even Sober October now]. Or maybe just making sure you can be the designated driver for one night without feeling like a complete square. In any of these pursuits, it’s good to know you’re not alone and the evidence for that is mounting in the sales of non-alcoholic products.

The rise in popularity in alcohol-free beer is reflected in the latest data from Stats NZ, which saw the category jump by 177 per cent after a 100 per cent increase the previous year.

In New Zealand, alcohol-free is defined as less than 1.15 per cent ABV. The beers might be small but the growth is huge.

Two years ago, Stats NZ data shows, there was less than 500,000 litres of sub-1.15 per cent beer available for consumption. That doubled to just over 1 million litres available in 2021 and last year jumped again to 2.775m litres.

---

From beer writer to brewer

“All I know about Westport is that people call it Methport”.

It sucks how many times people have said something like that when I told them I was moving here.

Luke Robertson tells the story moving from Footscray, Melbourne (the 13th coolest neighbourhood in the world, according to a Time Out Magazine poll last year) to Westport, his old hometown where he bought the local brewery.

---

A cat, a caravan and classic beer

Emporium Brewery in Kaikoura has just opened a new taproom to complement their mini-putt golf and escape rooms. Pursuit of Hoppiness went for a visit.

---

Beer of the week 1

The name is a mouthful and the beer is too! That’s because there’s two on-trend techniques going on in Sunshine Brewing’s Rolling Stones Cold Dip Hopped IPA. The Cold IPA trend requires some rice or corn (in this instance it’s rice) to lighten the body in the style of American and Japanese lagers and it’s then fermented at a relatively cold temperature with an ale yeast, hence the name. Dip-hopping (too long to explain here so there’s a link below) essentially lowers the onion-garlic flavour that myrcene (an essential oil) can bring. So there’s a lot going on here, and the final product is quite a slick, smooth, all of flavour drinking experience. Waves of deep and sweet hop goodness with no edginess but with an all-round, mouth-filling bitterness. It’s quite a sumptuous experience.