Take a walk on the wild side

Special video trip inside Garage Project's Wild Workshop. Are we in for a hard landing: the wider beer world is struggling but New Zealand so far has felt immune. Will it last?

Welcome to Friday Night Beers everyone, and I reckon I’ve got a real treat for you tonight (as well as some grim stuff later!)

First, I sweet-talked the team at Garage Project to share a video they did inside their Wild Workshop. Not many people have seen this, only a handful, so I’m rapt to be able to share it with you.

Some context first: if you’re into spontaneously-fermented, or wild, beers there’s a cool event happening at the same time in both Wellington and Auckland tomorrow.

I reckon this might have been under-played by Garage Project, or I’m over-estimating the amount of people into this kind of beer! The events are on simultaneously in Garage Project’s Wild Workshop in Wellington and their taproom in Kingsland, Auckland, with a showcase of spontaneous beers from both GP and the brilliant Gueuzerie Tilquin from Belgium — a rare opportunity to try these by the glass.

 Tilquin Beers being poured are: 

1. Oude Guezo Cuvee 

2. Oude Sureau

3. Oude Gewurtz 

4. Oude Pinot Noir 

5. Oude Qetsche 

Wild Workshop Beers being poured for flights and off-prem:

1. Chance Luck and Magic Kriek (unreleased beer)

2. Chance Luck & Magic 2021

3. A tea-infused spon (unreleased beer)

If funk and wild and tart are your thing it’ll be worth a visit. It’s on from 2-8pm at both venues on Saturday only.

And to get you in the mood, or just for some Friday night fun, here’s the video from Pete Gillespie and team about spon night at Wild Workshop:

And the reason Pete is reading a bedtime story to Wild Workshop brewer Dave Bell at the end? On spon night, Dave sleeps in the brewery!

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Beer of the week No 1

To give you more of a sense of FOMO, I went to a spontaneous beer tasting at Garage Project Kingsland during the week hosted by the uber-knowledgable David Moynagh. It was a dress rehearsal for the event this weekend, if you like. The highlight for me was a Kriek version of Chance, Luck & Magic, their multi-award winning spontaneously fermented, blended beer. In this case they’ve chosen some of the barrels that weren’t used for any of the 2020, 2021 or (soon to be released) 2022 vintages. Those barrels were blended with each other and some sour cherries from Oamaru. The final result is tomato juice-red beer (the pic below doesn’t do it justice) that’s not as sour as you’d expect, in fact it wasn’t that sour at all, tastes of marzipan and and cranberry juice and is texturally soft and smooth. It was a delight — so look out when it’s available.

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Are we in for a hard landing

I didn’t intend to go down this path but the news from the around the world this week just kept coming with a negative spin — about brewery closures, malt producers closing, consumption down…

And it got me thinking. There’s been waves of brewery closures in Britain and Australia, with the latest being a Melbourne operation called Fury & Son.

One of America’s leading craft malsters Skagit Valley Malt, suddenly went out of business last month, shocking the beer industry and raising questions about the future of “craft” malt.

The Beervana Blog also carried this story entitled “At that Point, Beer was the Hottest Thing” about the failure of a brewery called Platform in Cleveland which launched, exploded in popularity, sold out to AB InBev, collapsed and folded — all in the space of a decade

And to cap it, I read on Slate that America has fallen out of love with beer.

Sales are down. Market share is shrinking. Spirits-based drinks are ascendant. And for breweries, a storm is coming.

Beer sales decline: Why it’s happening, and which beers are getting hit the worst. (slate.com)

So you get the drift.

Why isn’t it happening here? I’ve been told that supermarket scan data shows sales are down the across the board for craft beer, and another source noted that at least one of our major banks has classified craft beer as a risk category and will not lend for investment in that sector.

There’s long been talk of a rationalise here, that there will be fewer major players on the supermarket shelves, that there’s no room for any more breweries. And yet, breweries are still starting up.

My view is that New Zealand remains a unique market. We don’t have a huge number of (relatively) big craft breweries — the vast majority of breweries in this country are small, regional, with their own taprooms (although that’s no guarantee to success).

Big breweries will always be OK (volume is a great insulator) but it’s the middle, growing tier where the problems could lie. They may have off loans they took to invest in stainless steel, canning lines, or even sales staff. But when growth slows and interest rates rise and other products can under-cut you, or shelf space is reduced … then you’re in trouble.

With consumers wary about how they spend their discretionary income, and with prices for everything from malt to carbon dioxide, from excise to packaging, going up breweries, are as one brewer told: “Between a big rock and very hard place — it’s a nasty placc to be”.

Another good thing about New Zealand apart from lots of smaller, flexible, not-heavily-invested breweries, is that things that hit the wider can take a while to impact us and many brewers have been looking to the US and Australia, seen what’s happening and have taken precautions, or done their best to insulate themselves from the coming storm.

And it is coming. But we’re talking about an industry that went ballistic for about a decade and is now slowing down. It’s like a space craft re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, there’s some deceleration and a lot of heat, but hopefully it’s not a hard landing.