New look for new-age Beervana

Deep Creek, Bach All Day non-alcoholic IPA win big in Australia. What is a craft brewery, exactly? Are we going to run out of beer cans? More New World Awards recommendations.

The Beervana festival is getting a makeover for its 21st birthday.

The new-look for the festival was revealed today with the primary image being a UFO beaming up a beer glass.

The bright colours and emoji-style icons are about bringing the branding in line with how the festival now feels, says director Ryan McArthur.

“The old branding didn’t represent the festival as it is now. This brings it up to date and makes it look unlike any other beer festival on the calendar,” McArthur told Pursuit of Hoppiness.

“We’ve moved away from the cliched beer festival stuff, away from gendered imagery, like beards.”

McArthur said the new branding and messaging was aimed at the “beer-curious”.

The festival, to be held in Wellington’s Sky Stadium on August 19 and 20, will welcome back breweries and fans from Australia after a Covid-enforced hiatus on travel.

It will be the festival’s 21st birthday, although as McArthur pointed out it, while a festival in Wellington has been going since 2001, it’s only been called Beervana since 2008 and only moved to the Cake Tin stadium in 2011.

Tickets for Beervana go on sale on June 20.

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All Day success

I’ve long been calling Bach Brewing’s All Day Non-alcoholic IPA world class and I’ve not yet been accused of exaggerating. This beer is something special and that’s been reflected in Bach picking up the inaugural non-alcoholic trophy at the Australian International Beer Awards in Melbourne last night. It beat out a bunch of international and Aussie non-alcoholic beers including entries from big European breweries and one from The Athletic, the benchmark non-alc brewery in America.

It was also a huge night for Deep Creek who won Champion Medium International Brewery (after being robbed by a self-induced clerical error last year). And he good people at Hallertau won a packaging trophy for their Keeper reusable bottle.

It was a night of redemption for Deep Creek after last year’s disaster when they were announced as the Champion Large International Brewery only to realise quickly that they’d entered their annual production volume incorrectly and thus were in the wrong category.

They gave back that trophy an even though they were entitled to the Champion Medium International Brewery (500,001-2.5 million litres production) title they gracefully let it lie.

There was no such drama this time, with seven gold medals ensuring they were in the box seat for the crown which they’d previously won in 2019. They also won the Champion Small International Brewery title (under 500,000 litres annual production) in 2017.

It was a particularly special night for Taranaki breweries with a half-dozen gold medals to Shining Peak (4), Three Sisters and Forgotten 43.

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Staying with awards

I’ve often said the 70 beers that make up the Highly Commended in the New World Beer & Cider Awards are gold medal-worthy. Consider the Top-30 to be palladium (now that platinum has gone down the pecking order of most expensive metals). Anyway, precious metal allegories aside, the Highly Commended are definitely worth checking out if you want to make sure you’re drinking the best stuff.

Another thing the New World Awards do really well is they generate news. It’s a reason for mainstream media to talk about beer in a way they don’t normally (which is why I hope you appreciate what we do here at Hoppiness!) So in a quick wrap of other news out the awards, we have:

• Beer Baroness talking about their small team and how they punch above their weight with award-winning beers

• Cameron Burgess of Southpaw explains the story behind the name of the brewery and a love of baseball.

• Kieran Haslett-Moore of North End talks about brewing Belgian-style beers.

• And the crew at Bootleg Brewing talk about T Straight Burnout Smokey Stout, possibly the best named beer in the Top 30!

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Beer of the week No 1

So this comes with a disclaimer, in that the man behind Badass Beverages, Dave Pearce, is a friend and a contributor to Pursuit of Hoppiness, but if I didn’t think the beer was any good I wouldn’t mention it. You see, my beer-reviewing mantra is straight out of the Bambi moral universe in which if there’s nothing nice to say, better say nothing at all. So with that world-view in mind, let’s proceed to Disko Inferno.

It’s a top-notch black lager that hits all the right notes, with the chocolate and slight roast character all poised to perfection ahead of a light, dry finish. This style is gaining traction in New Zealand and I think we’ll see more on the market as they offer complex flavour but easy-drinking. Dave being a mad music fan, I felt that for the appreciation of this beer you need to be listening to The Trampps.

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