Pacific Coast in liquidation
Double Vision's German collab dream. Tui terminates tours. Another Masterchef winner moves into beer. Auckland's new alcohol laws restrict sales at night. The end of the post-work pint.
Pacific Coast — the Mangawhai brewery that opened last year to great fanfare — is in liquidation.
It’s a little bit complicated because the business that went into liquidation is called Vanderlay Industries (an interesting name for Seinfeld fans) and it owns the brewery/production side of the Pacific Coast business.
Vanderlay Industries — owned by Adam Booth — was put into liquidation last Friday after an application to the High Court by the Commissioner of Inland Revenue.
However, Pacific Coast Beverages, which is the trading arm of the business, and Vanderlay Hospo, the taproom side of the business, are not in liquidation and continue to operate.
Pacific Coast posted the following to Facebook this week.
With the brewery now in the hands of liquidators KPMG, both brewer Sam Williamson and marketing & sales manager Matt Eats lost their jobs. The taproom and website continue to trade, selling what beer is left in tanks.
I spoke to brewer Sam Williamson in the wake of the announcement.
“No real shitty thing has happened, just a slow grind to nothing. We knew we weren't doing well, but we did think we had seen the worst and had high hopes for this coming summer.
“We just couldn’t get momentum quick enough before the crunch bit. We gave it a red-hot crack; built a beautiful brewery from scratch, it was efficient and could make great beer and was a dream to brew with.
“Matt Eats came on board and he really aligned all our branding excellently and quickly grew our reach with his effusive and passionate style of business. We had all of our COGS sorted and analysed. It should have worked, really, except for the volume. We were on lots of shelves but consumers don’t have the expendable cash to buy it. I feel our main flaw was that we didn’t get our taproom going quick enough. We started with the factory and were chasing low-margin sales for too long.
“A real shame that we didn’t scrape through to summer as I had just unlocked a few tricks in our processes last month that would’ve taken our beer quality up a few notches.
“I’m lucky to be able to look back on the project as an amazing experience. Walking onto a paddock three years ago, building a brewery to a high specification, having time to have well thought-through floor drains! Contributing to the brand creation and controlling recipe development. Brewing some delicious beer. Beach Break, our 4% Pilsner, was a real highlight — winning the Rising Tide Lagerfest and making the Highly Recommended list at the New World Beer Awards. A great opportunity to implement some contemporary ingredients and processes that have only come to light over the last five years.
“For instance, I developed a real passion for biotransformation (using it as a broad word here, encompassing a few different processes), which came through in most of our products as a tropical but clean juiciness.”
Matt Eats said the brewery “executed our plan really well” but bumped up against forces that couldn’t be controlled, notably excise tax and contracted, or tied, taps.
“Excise tax is a huge issue, tying excise to inflation and with no relief for smaller producers is crushing the industry.”
Matt’s point is that large breweries can absorb the cost of excise more easily than small breweries and he noted that Lion-owned Mac’s were selling six-packs of gateway craft for around $13 recently, “which is below our liquid production costs”.
“And the fact that around 90 per cent of taps are locked out to the wider industry is a real detriment to the scene as a whole. We have so many great producers making fantastic products and the fact they are locked out of 90 per cent of the [on premise] market is brutal.
“I came back from a trip overseas recently and I was really proud of the New Zealand beer industry — it should be a real success story but the lack of government support is crushing the industry.
“Small breweries employ significantly more people per litre of beer brewed than big breweries and the help drive tourism as well.”
It’s such a shame because Pacific Coast definitely captured the imagination of the beer world in the past 18 months, and they had so much going for them. It will be interesting to see what happens to a beautifully-located brewery but I feel the solutions will have some complexity.
Beer of the Week No 1
Depending on what happens to Pacific Coast, there’s a risk that we might not see some of their stunning beers again. Brewer Sam Williamson created some great recipes in his time there, notably the Tapawera Double Pilsner. But it’s their 4% Beach Break Pilsner that I love. There’s just so much flavour in such a lithe beer. It’s lightly hoppy but there’s citrus and grapes on the aroma and a light malt on the palate. Incredibly well balanced and all the brilliantly executed parts come together to deliver a rock solid but somehow delicate beer. Exceptionally clean, bright and vibrant.
Taking a break
Just one for your diary — or rather not for the diary. I’ll be taking a break next week so there won’t be a Friday Night Beers on August 23. I’m going to be wandering around at Beervana and experience tells me that trying to get this email done while travelling just means stress and mistakes, so I’m gonna give myself a leave pass. Back on August 30 though!
Tui tours terminated
The iconic Tui Brewery in Mangatainoka has stopped offering public tours after more than 25 years, Radio NZ reported this week.
The DB-owned brewery near Pahiatua is one of New Zealand’s oldest, after Speight’s.
Visitors to the site have previously been able to purchase a guided tour of the brewery daily at 11.30am.
But DB Breweries' Marketing Director Fraser Shrimpton told RNZ the brewery stopped offering the tours as of last Sunday.
“We are replacing the tours with a new beer-tasting experience,” said Shrimpton.
He said people could still visit the Mangatainoka site in the interim to eat at its cafe, buy beer and wander around the grounds.
About 25,000 people have visited Tui's Mangatainoka brewery annually.
The site's large production brewery was decommissioned in 2016 and replaced with a smaller plant and the majority of Tui beer is now brewed at DB's Auckland and Timaru breweries.
Beer of the Week No 2
New from Panhead Custom Ales, Pickup Hazy IPA is a welcome addition to the Upper Hutt brewery’s core range.
Packaged in an attractive powder blue can, this beer hits the sweet spot in more ways than one.
At 5.9% ABV it’s pitched mid-point between the gruntier Rat Rod Hazy IPA (6.5%) and the more sessionable Sandman Hazy Pale Ale (5.2%).
The flavour profile is designed for easy drinking — just the sort of beer you might pull from a chilly bin in the back of the ute after a hard day’s work.
The aroma is bright orange citrus with a hint of pineapple and the flavour carries through on the palate with an intense, super-ripe (even over-ripe) orange flavour coupled with pineapple juice, and sweet lemonade notes.
The mouthfeel is creamy but it’s offset by a prickly carbonation and the flavour journey ends with just a hint of citrus bitterness to deliver a refreshing finish.
This beer is available at select New World stores, your home of craft beer.
Double Vision’s German collab delight
The crew at Double Vision in Wellington are frothing after getting the chance to do a collab beer with legendary German brewery Schneider Weisse.
Schneider Weisse are one of three German breweries coming to Beervana next week. And Double Vision were asked if we had any chiller space to keep the overseas beer shipment cold until the festival.
In return, DVB co-founder Warren Drahota said they “bashfully” asked Beervana boss Ryan McArthur if they could be hooked up with anyone who wanted to collaborate.
“We were shocked to hear the name ‘Schneider Weisse’ come out of his mouth. What an opportunity for us to unite such far ends of the spectrum together. We are a small brewery that breaks damn near every rule for the sake of experimentation and are just throwing ourselves at this with a hope and a prayer... Whereas these guys have history, tradition, scale and follow all of the best efficiency practices,” Drahota added.
“How cool for them to open up to some of our ‘wild’ while they teach us some traditions and we learn a heap from their longstanding experience.”
They’ve brewed a wheat beer (of course) using malts and hops from both Germany and New Zealand. But in a nod to the NZ-way, it’s a hoppy wheat with Hallertau Blanc hops in the boil and Motueka and Nelson Sauvin in the dry-hop.
As for the yeast …
“Well, the lab at Schneider Weisse air-freighted us their in-house yeast that has been around since the beginning. This is insane for us, so we wanted to propagate it up the right way to get the perfect flavours from its fermentation profile. As we don't have a lab at Double Vision Brewing, we called to our mates at Froth Tech to help us out. Cheers to Ryan and Simon for their help on this.
“And make sure you get down to meet Elena Fersch — brewmaster at Schneider Weisse — at Beervana!”
The beer will be launched at Beervana next week.
Dusty’s Beer of the Week
In a dystopian landscape littered with mod westies there emerges a saviour of the old style — from Epic Beer comes Atari Baby, a 6.7% beacon of hope packing the tried and true Chinook, Colombus and Simcoe in the hop arsenal, everything you want an need from a WCIPA: hop-forward punches meets resiny oily mouthfeel with slaps grapefruit, peach, apricot and black pepper spicing, with a citric bitterness on a chewy malt bill prove that yet again Epic do epic IPA ...this my utopia. — Dusty
McLeod’s do Northland proud
The Northern Advocate newspaper caught up with McLeod’s co-founder Geoff Gwynne in the wake of their outstanding performance at the NZ Beer Awards earlier this month when they took out champion medium brewery and champion beer with Tropical Cyclone double IPA.
Asked what set Tropical Cyclone apart, Geoff said: “I wish I could tell you why it was Tropical Cyclone’s night, we’ve been making that one for nine years.”
McLeod’s Brewery in Waipu wins big at NZ Beer Awards
Tim’s Beer of the Week
Despite being named for the man who leant his own name to the law which brought in prohibition in America, Christchurch’s Volstead Trading Company does not shy away from brewing a great West Coast IPA, and Fool’s Gold (6.5%) is their latest. I don’t often comment on the appearance of a beer, but the (foolish or otherwise) deep gold and crystal clarity that this one shows off had my mouth watering just from the sight of it…
Local Nectaron combines with US superstar hop Mosaic to produce exceptionally lush aromas of grapefruit and mixed berry, with softer tropical and rockmelon pungency further within. The palate plunges straight into ultra-ripe tropical fruit and rich malt, with more berries and an undercurrent of fresh pine and superbly integrated bitterness gradually rising into the long finish. — Tim Newman
Auckland’s new alcohol laws revealed
Auckland supermarkets and bottle stores will not be able to sell alcohol after 9pm when new laws come into force in the city in December, the NZ Herald reported today.
There will also be a two-year freeze on new liquor stores in the central city and 23 other areas with high alcohol-related harm and crime is also on the cards.
The new rules are part of a Local Alcohol Policy (LAP) developed by Auckland Council and which are expected to be ratified by at a full council meeting later this month.
The new rules mean:
Supermarkets and bottle stores cannot sell alcohol after 9pm (the cut-off is 11pm now).
Bars, restaurants and other on-licences cannot sell alcohol later than 4am in the central city and 3am elsewhere.
Applications for new bottle stores in the central city and 23 other areas will be rejected for two years unless they meet a very high threshold.
Sports clubs and RSAs can sell alcohol no later than 1am.
No change for liquor licences for festivals and events. They will continue to be assessed by the district licencing committee.
You can read the full story and background here.
Masterchef winner moving into beer
We’ve already had a New Zealand Masterchef winner moving into the beer world, with Nadia Lim and her husband Carlos Bagrie behind the Garage Project-brewed Swifty … and over in Australia one of their Masterchef winners from the early days is going in a similar direction.
Adam Liaw has teamed up with James Squire brewery to create a pale ale designed for food matching and what caught my eye is that they turned to one of my favourite, and under-praised, hops: Rakau.
“Beer and food pairing isn’t as explored as wine pairing, and I wanted to change that,” Liaw told Forbes Australia. “My approach was rooted in the science of how flavours interact on a molecular level, which is something I’ve been passionate about since my university days.
“For me, it was important to focus on the structure of the beer—the body, the mouthfeel, the way the flavours interact with different types of food,” he says. “It wasn’t about making something flashy; it was about creating something that worked on a fundamental level.”
“The way that food and drink match together is about a number of things,” Liaw explains. “Firstly, you need the savouriness, the ‘umaminess’, of a beverage, which alcoholic beverages naturally have, to make the food taste better. But then you have the structure of tannins that balance out the richness of food. Beer doesn’t usually struggle with tannins, but sometimes it can actually be too dry.
“It was important to get the body right, so it’s a nice full-bodied beer that still tastes dry, but then you add these aromatics from hops like Rakau—things like stone fruit and green vegetables—and you get this lovely freshness.”
Adam Liaw wants to change how we approach food and beer (forbes.com.au)
Beer of the Week No 3
Speaking of McLeod’s as we were … I went to the fridge this week to grab one of their gold-medal winning beers, Harvest Moon. Next to Longboarder Lager, this is probably my favourite McLeod’s beer, which is a big call but it’s my tastebuds speaking and I’ll standby them! Harvest Moon is a Dark IPA — possibly a better descriptor than Black IPA for this style. It’s the perfect collision between a punchy American-style IPA and a dark ale … and here I’m thinking more a Mild Ale than a stout or porter. As a result the malt profile blends seemlessly with the hoppiness to create a remarkable two-track taste sensation where you’ve got maltiness rolling along one track and hoppiness on the other, and they combine into a powerful freight train of flavour.
The end of the post-work pint
I’ll confess that among the pleasures of my first full-time job as a sports reporter at The Press in Christchurch were the regular evening pints at the now-gone Warner’s Hotel next door.
There’s something special about joining your colleagues after work (or in the case of newspaper people, during work!) for a couple of pints.
It was many moons ago now but I can still the inside of that bar, and see exactly where certain co-workers would perch themselves in “their seat”. It was a lot like Cheers in that regard, with Norm and Cliff in their respective seats and Frasier in his.
But, like so many things from last century, the post-work pint is about to bite the dust it seems.
The end of the post-work pint: why drinks with colleagues are over and out | Pubs | The Guardian
Right, that’s me for another week, but before I go, if you’re looking for that last-minute Father’s Day present, I’ve got the solution!
My new book, Sweet Spot — 36 iconic golf courses that celebrate the best of New Zealand, is out now. Because myself and co-author Phil are a small team we get these shipped pretty quickly on an overnight courier, meaning you’re guaranteed to get it in time for Father’s Day on September 1 if you order now.
Catch you in two weeks!
Michael