Parrotdog swoop onto Air NZ flights
Good Beer Hunting goes into hibernation. The Athletic grows even bigger as non-alc train gathers speed. And now, IPA is good for you, it seems! Hot Water Brewing back with fantastic new look.
Happy Friday Beer Fans!
The big news today is that Parrotdog are flying high, literally, after securing a deal to be Air New Zealand’s beer of choice on flights.
Air New Zealand announced an overhaul of their inflight food and beverage service with a focus on New Zealand-made produce.
“Customers travelling internationally with Air New Zealand can now raise a toast to a new carefully curated beverage menu featuring a selection of New Zealand’s finest spirits and craft beer,” said a press release published on Scoop.
“The new selection is designed to showcase the unique craftmanship from around New Zealand and will feature onboard and in select Air New Zealand lounges.”
Parrotdog Birdseye Hazy IPA and their non-alcoholic Watchdog will be the beer offered to business premier travellers, who can also get Scapegrace gin and whisky, Reefton Distillery vodka and National Distillery rum.
Premium and premium economy get less choice with the non-alcoholic Watchdog offered alongside Rogue Society gin and vodka.
And Parrotdog Lager will be on tap at “select” Air New Zealand lounges.
Air NZ — on the ground and in the sky — has previously been the domain of Lion, with Steinlager, Mac’s, Emerson’s and Panhead all available.
I asked both Lion and Air New Zealand whether those beers will still be available in lounges and basically everyone I contacted at Lion was on holiday or travelling and Air New Zealand, as I fully expected, failed to get back to me.
I suspect Lion beers will still be available in lounges, but to secure the in-air deal is a big deal for Parrotdog.
Good Beer Hunting goes into hibernation
Good Beer Hunting, the creator of America’s best beer journalism, is closing down.
I thought it was pretty bad, but not unexpected, when Brews News in Australia announced it was putting up the “closed” sign, but I didn’t expect the same thing to happen with Good Beer Hunting.
A landing page for the website is now long note from Michael Kiser, founder and publisher. It started:
“I’m coming to you today with a difficult message — but a simple one.
“Good Beer Hunting — after nearly 15 years, and at least 10 of that that I would consider serious years — is going on a platform-wide hiatus. It’ll be indefinite. It might be permanent.”
The site was underwritten by Guinness, amongst others, and had a paid subscription model but it wasn’t enough said Kiser.
“Instead of trying to manage our costs with advertising, we’ve been able to form longstanding partnerships with companies like Guinness, which has helped mitigate at least some of financial losses we took on every year. We also launched an experimental subscriber community called the Fervent Few, which took a meaningful chunk out of the debt and paid its dividends by connecting readers and fans from all over the world during the loneliest parts of the pandemic. But in reality, even these things combined didn’t cover the gaps as we continued growing.”
You can read Michael’s full statement here: On Becoming Hawk
And that seems like a juncture to remind you that:
Beer of the Week No 1
Grant Caunter, the founder of State of Play, is a one-man walking advertisement for the power of going alcohol-free.
Since giving up alcohol during the Covid pandemic, the former Heineken high-flier has shed more than 45kg in weight and has become huge advocate for the dry lifestyle.
State of Play is the only specialist non-alcoholic brewery in New Zealand, so creating great zero options is Grant’s sole purpose.
I’ve been on record — and for a while quoted on a billboard! — about the Nectaron Unfiltered, which delivers a huge pineapple and orange aroma and a body that makes it feel more substantial.
But I’m here today to rave about the work Grant has done on tweaking his original IPA. The first iteration was a little sweet for my liking but the latest version is humming. There’s more bitterness than when it first came out (more Motueka and Nelson Sauvin hops) and it’s much cleaner (new yeast, I think). As Grant recently told me, it’s hard to make changes to a beer like this when he’s brewing 10,000 litres at a time at bStudio. In this case, the changes have resulted in a beer that’s hoppy and refreshing and well worth the silver medal it picked up at the Australian International Beer Awards recently.
If you tried it when it first came out and weren’t entirely convinced, give it another go.
And you can find State of Play beers, along with a heap of other non-alcoholic options at your local home of craft beer, New World.
Te Aro’s Kupe can — is all publicity good publicity?
Last week’s missive was queued to go out on Friday morning as I was taking a long weekend off … and thus I missed Denise Garland’s excellent scoop on Te Aro Brewing’s Kupe can as part of their Age of Discovery series.
Te Aro Brewing Company’s use of Kupe to promote craft beer ‘highly offensive’ - expert - NZ Herald
Or if you prefer to listen:
Controversy over brewery naming beer “Kupe” | RNZ
To me, the nub of this story is summed up by tikanga expert Dr Karaitiana Taiuru (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Toa) who said he was “gobsmacked this is actually happening in New Zealand in 2024 … Depicting and using a famous Māori and Pacifica ancestor such as Kupe for alcohol is highly offensive.”
The reason Kupe shouldn’t be on a can, is the same reason a topless woman shouldn’t be on a can.
There’s been a bit of commentary online about this — though I note Te Aro have limited or closed comments on their social media accounts — and a lot of it has focused on whether Kupe should have been included alongside colonial explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan.
To me that skirts the point. Te Aro are not newcomers to the brewing scene. The Upper Hutt crew have been around for 10 years and I don’t think you can be a decade-old brewery and not know about this stuff. It’s been reported on for years in mainstream media and specialist beer magazines such as Pursuit of Hoppiness.
This has been such a problem that the Brewers Guild of New Zealand produced a guide on the appropriate use of Māori culture in the brewing industry.
In 2016, Auckland’s Birkenhead Brewing Company apologised for using images of Te Arawa ancestors Tūtānekai and Hinemoa on two of its beer labels.
Several UK and European breweries had also been accused of cultural appropriation for using Māori images and kupu on their beer labels in 2017 and 2018, including a Belgian brewery for naming one of its offerings “Māori Tears”, and a brewer in Bath for having a caricature of a Māori man riding a Kiwi while performing pukana on a beer label.
In nearly every case mentioned above there has been some contrition and acknowledgment of a mistake.
But Te Aro remain surprisingly silent and wouldn’t comment for Denise’s story.
Perhaps it was a genuine mistake. But for all the reasons given above I think any New Zealand brewery that took even a moment’s pause to think about using Māori imagery in association with beer would need only that moment to realise it was a mistake and they’d drop it.
So to push on with the idea and go as far as designing cans and getting imagery made and still not stop, shows either complete recklessness or a cynical desire to make news for all the wrong reasons.
Look, if you want to make a range called the Age of Discovery, sure, make it. But use different people. There’s even a raft of fictional explorers you could rustle up, from Captain Nemo, to Gilligan, to Dora the Explorer.
And at this point, the argument is not whether the beer is any good or not. There’s plenty of good beer out there and most of it is created with an understanding of the wider world and a sensitivity to the concerns of others.
Tim’s Beer of the Week
As a toast to the high of 7.9C we achieved here in Christchurch mid-week, here's a comfy pastry stout from local brewers ChinChiller. This seems to have been the year that marshmallow entered the scene as a workable adjunct, with more than a few suddenly popping up at the various awards circuits. For my taste, most have fallen well into the “too much” side of the flavouring spectrum, but this more middle-strength entry gets it right.
With Toasty Mellows, a chocolate marshmallow stout (6.8%), chocolate and roasted malt are prominent on the nose, with the confected sweetness of the marshmallows supporting (thankfully) rather than dominating. The palate too strikes a nice balance between the grain and the flavourings with plenty of malt crunch and scorched grain bitterness on the finish. Full-bodied, but still rapid enough to keep those big flavours on the move and the drinkability high. — Tim Newman
The Athletic take giant strides
Dry July seems the right time for this: Athletic Brewing, the non-alcoholic brewery co-founded by hedge fund trader turned brewery CEO Bill Shufelt, has nearly doubled its valuation to about $800 million in just two years following a $50 million equity financing round, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
The company will use the new financing to grow their team and fund renovations at their third US brewing facility in the San Diego area. The new facility will allow The Athletic to double their brewing capacity in the US, Shufelt told Fortune magazine.
The Athletic now outsells Heineken and Budweiser to be the top nonalcoholic beer brand by sales in US grocery stores, according to a WSJ analysis of NielsenIQ data. They also rank in the top 20 breweries in the US based on volume.
Shufelt said its singular focus on the non-alc category allowed it to get a leg up on the competition.
“Non-alcoholic beer was previously thought of as a very small market, but we see an enormous opportunity to add both occasions and populations to the adult beverage world by opening new days of the week for existing consumers and actively recruiting new consumers to the category altogether,” Shufelt said. (I think this means that people who used to not drink on Tuesdays, for example, can now have a non-alc beer!)
Shufelt told the Wall Street Journal that the non-alc has gone from zero to hero in less than a decade.
“Ten years ago, there were no options. We had to totally change the product and the marketing.”
Among The Athletic’s celebrity backers are Momofuku founder David Chang and cyclist Lance Armstrong.
Dusty’s Beer of the Week
Been a while between Alibi Brewing Co brews but was excited about this brewty: Home Slice is a 6.2% NZIPA hopped with Waimea, Nelson Sauvin, Riwaka and Nectaron. Dank asf upfront initially with notes of lemon, lime gooseberry and overripe pineapple, mouthfeel is crispy with a prickly carb all sitting atop of a lean clean malt backbone, a home slice of kiwi hops. Crusha of a brew!
IPA is good for you! Again
It feels like a roller-coaster, or a merry-go-round — take your pick — but after lots of reporting on the “no safe level of drinking” data, the counterpunch came from research extolling the benefits of red wine.
And now, it turns out IPA might be good for you.
New research shows hops can have an antigenotoxic effect. This means they have the potential to protect against DNA damage by helping prevent mutations in genes. The study found that hops were not antimutagenic, however.
(I spent way too long trying to figure out what antimutagenic means and it’s too complicated for this!)
The research, carried out on mice and published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, concluded that “moderate chronic consumption of IPA beer and hops infusion showed antigenotoxic effects”.
(“Moderate Chronic” also sounds like a good name for an IPA, I reckon)
Last year, it was shown that beer could also exert ‘greater effects than probiotics’ and, in moderation, could be good for your gut and immunity, stimulating microbiota diversity – more evidence that beer and a healthy lifestyle can co-exist.
So, I guess we’re now in the pros and cons territory (the con being ethanol) and maybe there’s more upside to beer than downside. Well, that’s what I’m saying.
Beer of the Week No 2
Given the name and the hop regime, I’m tempted to think of McLeod’s Cyclone Swell as an unfiltered version of their popular Tropical Cyclone Double IPA. Both are a vortex of flavours and both use an American-Kiwi hop combo to get that pine-meets-ripe-fruit quality. Cyclone Swell is 7% versus Tropical Cyclone’s 8% and just as well, to be honest, because the unfiltered nature of Cyclone Swell delivers plenty of oomph and body — any more alcohol would have tipped it over into too-cloying territory. Simcoe, Zythos and Pacifica hops deliver the perfect combo of sweetened lemon juice and orange zest, with softer mandarin and peaches in support. Gentle bitterness, but a tight finish make this a “more, more, more” beer.
NZ Beer Awards coverage on Seven Sharp
The annual New Zealand Beer Awards have just been judged, with results to be announced early next month in Auckland.
Seven Sharp sent along a reporter to do a story and it’s an entertaining stroll through the judging, although it wouldn’t have hurt then to get some names in the captions!
The 2024 New Zealand Beer Awards Are Here | TVNZ+
Beer of the Week No 3
Around 10 years ago, Hot Water Brewing — in the Coromandel town of Whenuakite — were a real talking point. They had famed brewer Dave Kurth on board having learned his trade at West Coast Brewing (now the home of Shortjaw), and had the added provenance of being inside a camping ground. Dave left to follow his true calling as a maker of extraordinary burgers with his Serial Griller food truck now transformed into a proper takeout joint in Taranaki.
Anyway, Hot Water Brewing had cooled off a little but has recently been given a make-over under new ownership.
Two families, the Hortons and Watsons — bought the Seabreeze Holiday Park, Hot Water Brewing and the on-site restaurant & cafe in 2022. They spent months renovating and updating the venue and it opened late last year.
And kudos to them: the can art on the beers is second-to-none. Beautiful. And the beers I tried, the KPA (Kiwi Pale Ale) and the Hazy IPA (below) were well-executed, tasty, examples.
It turns out they are made under contract at (relatively) nearby Lumberjack as the old kit that was used for the original Hot Water Brewing beers was just a little too worn-out to make top-quality beer.
One for the golf nuts
Here in New Zealand the golf-beer connection is largely restricted to the post-round libation — the one exception I can think of being Emporium Brewing in Kaikoura with their mini golf set-up. Certainly no-one (that I know of) has a brewery on a golf course! But it turns out there are a few in America …
Linking Up: Craft Beer & Golf - CraftBeer.com
And I think that’s enough of a segue for me to talk about my own golf passion project!
I’ve done a few golf books in the past. Previously, I co-authored caddie Steve Williams' autobiography Out of the Rough and wrote the early years of Lydia Ko's biography in Portrait of a Teen Golf Sensation and I did a coffee table book called Country Courses. All of those were published by Penguin Random House.
This is a different venture as we are self-publishing (and we’ve gone high-end with it). And nothing says golf tragic like self-publishing a book about golf courses. But that’s exactly what I’ve done alongside my good friend Phil Hamilton.
Sweet Spot - 36 Iconic Golf Courses that Celebrate the Best of New Zealand.
It comes in two volumes, North Island and South Island, presented in a unique slipcase and the book contains intricate course maps, lively course descriptions, and detailed histories of New Zealand's best courses.
As former touring pro Greg Turner notes in his foreword, Michael and Phil "have done a great job of providing an informative stroll around New Zealand's golf landscape, and, when coupled with such insightful photography and historical context, the outcome is a real treat".
If I say so myself, it’s beautifully designed and celebrates the art, beauty and design of Aotearoa’s spectacular golfing terrain like never before.
Perfect for Father’s Day of course, or a belated Mother’s Day offering as well!
Thanks for indulging me and have a great weekend!
