Paddy Gower's booze confessions

What has Nadia Lim got to do with beer? A chance to join Craftwork's cool club. Moutere Inn's milestone 500th beer, America's million beers, milk from spent grain...

The beer story of the week has been the documentary Patrick Gower On Booze. There’s nothing like a prominent media personality offering himself up as a kind of sacrifice to get other media organisations falling over themselves to cover the story.

And fair enough, it’s a good story that Paddy’s told, with a pretty harrowing and embarrassing capture of him completely wasted, hanging out with a bunch of young students obviously embarrassed themselves to see this well known personality so drunk in their flat. In another era this footage would have been cut but Paddy and his team realised that it was crucial to his personal story. It was a brave move and it’s a key element in a conversation-starter about binge drinking.

However, I do think the documentary lacked a critical context. Paddy briefly touched on some factors that led to the creation of our binge drinking culture: notably the six o’clock swill era but he missed a chance to talk to incredibly knowledgeable people such as historian Greg Ryan at Lincoln University. Greg has great insights into the legacy of six o’clock closing and the impact it’s had in generations of New Zealanders, particularly men. Unpicking all the threads that make up a drinking “culture” would be a great six-part series.

So yes, there’s so much more that could have been done with this topic but it’s still worth watching for Paddy’s personal journey and his own insight into why he took so heavily to alcohol — basically as a means of giving him confidence when he thought he was “too ugly” to talk to women at parties. I think many of us can relate to this.

One good piece of commentary on what the show lacked came from Amberleigh Jack on Stuff.

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Beer of the Week No 1

The shortest day of the year is almost upon us so this beer from Sunshine Brewing in Gisborne feels a good one for that mid-winter hump day.

I found this beer to incredibly intense, with all the flavours quite clearly etched on my palate. There’s cold espresso, chocolate, vanilla but it’s not what I was expecting in terms of being super-creamy. It was only when reviewer Tim Newman delivered his take on the beer that I realised what was going: there’s no lactose.

Here’s Tim’s excellent view on this beer:

Part of Sunshine Brewing’s continuing Eclipse series of dark beers, this one is brewed with vanilla, cold brew coffee and cacao.  With those ingredients, my tasting notes have never been less necessary, but I can confirm that all those flavours are there in spades.  So far this might seem like a by the numbers dessert stout, but there’s one key difference here:  No lactose. The addition of lactose (unfermentable milk sugar) is almost ubiquitous in dessert stouts, so it was a daring move to skip it in this one, and a move that in my opinion has totally paid off.  Without that extra sweetness and despite a 7.5 per cent ABV, the beer is lighter-bodied and fresher, with the flavours presenting more individually.  It’s solved the problem I (and many other drinkers) have with dessert stouts that are often just too damned sweet and heavy.  Big thumbs up to Sunshine Brewing for this one and fingers crossed that more brewers will kick the lactose in their stronger beers.

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Nadia Lim’s new brewing career?

Yes, that’s Nadia Lim in the photo. And yes, the food icon has a connection to beer. She and husband Carlos Bagrie own Royalburn Station and they’ve teamed up with Queenstown’s Altitude Brewing to create a beer brewed with grain grown on the station.

Royalburn, on the Crown Terrace, is a farm famous for its barley — in the 1800s, it was one of the first to supply the young Speight’s brewery with barley for malting. More recently, The Mountain Scene reported, the barley’s been used for cereals, but Bagrie wanted to explore other options so sent off samples to a lab for testing to see if it was suitable for malting.

The grain was malted at Gladfield in Canterbury and has been combined with locally sourced hops from Garston and local water to create a Queenstown-sourced Italian Pilsner.

Bagrie says the collaboration’s ‘‘one of the most fun projects we’ve been involved with’’. The keg-only Royalburn Italian Pilsner will be tapped on July 1, for Bagrie’s birthday. A good reason for a trip to Queenstown?

You can read more about the beer and the grain harvest here.

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Craftwork memberships available

If you’re a fan of Craftwork in Oamaru, or of Belgian-style beers, there’s a few places left in their 2022-23 membership. It’s a rare chance to get a regular delivery of some often hard-to-find beers plus there’s great tasting notes, cool wee gifts and one-off beers you won’t get anywhere else. And you’ll get treated like royalty if you ever go visit them in Oamaru. Email craftworkbrewery@bookbinder.co.nz for details.

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Moutere Inn chalks up a milestone

The famous Moutere Inn in the hop-growing Tasman region is celebrating a coming milestone: pouring their 500th different beer since they became a dedicated craft beer bar.

And when you’ve got a special occasion you need a special beer so the team at New Zealand’s oldest pub have decided that their celebration beer will be 8 Wired Double Scoop Chocolate Cherry Frangipane Stout.

The pub also asked patrons to vote on which beers of the past 14 years they’d most like to see again and apart from some votes for beers from the sadly closed Harrington’s and Invercargill breweries, the celebration tap list is as follows: Emerson’s Bookbinder, Epic Lager, Garage Project Pernicious Weed, Garage Project Garagista and Three Boys Oyster Stout.

Not a bad line-up and a great reason to visit the pub if you’re in the area.