Garage Project win rare World Cup medal

GP first NZ brewery to win two World Beer Cup medals. Warning: Rex Attitude is back! A beer-powered motorcycle. An argument for cheap beer. Why sustainability claims don't sell beer.

It was a magical day for Garage Project at the prestigious World Beer Cup in the United States yesterday with their amazing Chance, Luck & Magic (2020) winning a silver medal.

A World Beer Cup medal is the most desirable award in beer. The event, which has just turned annual after being held every two years, awards only three medals in any category.

At this year’s event in Nashville, Tennessee, Garage Project took silver in the Belgian-style Sour category. There were only 309 medals handed out in an event which attracted over 10,000 entries from 50 countries. So you have to be uber-excellent to get a gong.

Chance, Luck & Magic is a blend of three vintages of spontaneously fermented ale and was named Champion Beer at the NZ Beer Awards last year. In sharing the news with Pursuit of Hoppiness, Garage Project founder Jos Ruffell said: “Shows how dialled in the NZBA judges are!!”

Ruffell was delighted with the silver medal, adding: “It’s pretty special given the category for us … feeling very happy.”

It’s only the fourth medal for New Zealand at the World Beer Cup which started in 1996. And GP have won half of them, after getting a silver in 2014 with Cockswain’s Courage barrel-aged porter.

Monteith’s Black won bronze in 2000 and in 2014 Speight’s Triple Hop took a silver.

The irony is that out of those four beers, only Monteith’s Black is still available in packaged form! Speight’s Triple Hop is a keg-beer only, although you can get it in riggers directly from Speight’s. Cockswain’s Courage is long gone (unless you have one under your house) and Ruffell doesn’t think there are any bottles left for sale of Chance Luck & Magic 2020.

You can still get the 2021 edition of Chance Luck & Magic, which won a gold medal in the European Ales category at last year’s NZ Beer Awards, where it’s older sibling took the trophy. The 2021 version retails for $55 for a 750ml bottle and if it ages as well as the 2020 version it might be worth getting.

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Beer of the week No 1

Well, it has to be this right?

As chief reviewer Tim Newman noted last year in the wake of this beer’s champion beer status, it has a lilting aroma of dried fruit, toasted walnut and complex oak punctuated by a razor sharp tang that hints at the force of the flavour pent up within.  That flavour is brutally sour at first, but soon coalesces into a symphony of incredible depth and structure, treating the palate to a vast permutation of flavours on the way to the exceptionally long finish.  Arresting and confrontational, while intricately complex and fragile.  An intrinsically individual beer, and as such, is one that may never exist in exactly the same form again.

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Rex Attitude returns

Well I never thought I’d see the day, but Rex Attitude is coming back.

Yeastie Boys slow and gradual return to the New Zealand market went up a tick with the news that Pot Kettle Black will be brewed again and now they’ve bitten the smoking bullet and announced the return of the most divisive beer ever brewed in this country, the 100% peat-smoked beer that smells and tastes like a whisky, or depending who you talk to… like sucking a wet band-aid out of an ashtray. If you’ve never tried Rex Attitude you simply must. I went from mild displeasure to warm love for this beer and can’t wait to sample it again.

A few select venues around the country will pour Rex Attitude from May 25.

In the, ah Big Smoke, you can find it at The Beer Spot (all 6 locations): Whangaparaoa, Northcote, Morningside, Huapai & Panmure.

Little Beer Quarter in Wellington will have it — and Yeastie Boys founder, Sam Possenniskie, will be making an appearance

The following day, May 26, Dunedin’s AlBar will have it on tap.

It will be more widely available from June 1.

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A quick reminder that if you want to do something special this Mother’s Day, get to Featherston’s Booktown event and see myself and Richard Emerson talking about how we wrote his biography, The Hopfather. I promise it will be entertaining, Richard always is.