The inside story on Desperate Glory
How the champion beer at the New World Beer & Cider Awards was created. Dave Dobbyn's influence on the New World Top 30. Osama Bin Lager a "most wanted" target. A lesson pouring beer aggressively.
Happy Friday Beer Friends!
This week we’re swerving hard into the New World Beer & Cider Awards. The Top 30 were announced on Monday and I’ve been waiting to talk these beers for a while now. As chair of judges for the awards, I’m privy to the winners from the final day of judging back in March, so not talking abut them for two months has been a test!
If you haven’t yet checked out the Top 30, here’s my run-down with a brief set of tasting notes.
Over the next four weeks of the promotion I’ll be looking at different aspects of the competition, and my colleague Tim Newman will be taking a deep dive into the IPAs — both clear and hazy.
But I wanted to start this week by talking about the supreme winner, Desperate Glory.
This collaboration between 8 Wired and Small Gods, is just sublime. I’ve said it a couple of times this week — this is a beer I reckon everyone has to try at least once. It’s based on the Belgian Oud Bruin style, or Flanders Brown Ale, but it takes some liberties with established style.
The backstory to the beer and how it got its name is quite detailed and you can read all about that in the link below.
But in short, the base beer was a Belgian Amber Ale, released by Small Gods as Three On A Match in 2021. Of the original batch, half was put into barrels at 8 Wired’s Matakana Barrel Room for a year where it was aged with the addition of Chinese Keemun tea, which is slightly smoky.
The result — if you forgive my oxymoron — is richly tart. It’s sweet, acidic, tannic, fruity, a teeny bit smoky and wonderfully life-affirming in its intensity.
Soren Eriksen of 8 Wired noted there’s a flavour of cherry in it, even though no cherries came anywhere near it!
Glory To Desperate Glory — NWBCA Supreme Winner | Pursuit of Hoppiness
And remember, the Top 30 are getting a strong push so dive into your local New World store to check them out.
Beer of the Week No 1
Since we’re talking about Small Gods. It’s worth noting that the brewery now has its own taproom with the Fridge & Flagon in Auckland’s Eden Terrace, changing its name this week to Small Gods, a reflection of the fact that most of the beers on tap at the venue are from Small Gods and the brewery and taproom have common ownership through Beer Jerk founder Luke White. Anyway … Fafnir's Hoard is a New Zealand-hopped Hopfenweisse featuring Pacifica, Rakau, and Motueka hops.
The Hefeweizen yeast strain brings the predictable, but nicely articulated, banana and pear aromas and then the hops kick in for a genuine old-fashioned fruit salad vibe with peach and apricot and lick of citrus. Loved it.
How the mighty have fallen … an update
Lately, in this missive, we’ve been keeping a cursory eye on the handful of big-name breweries in the US and Australia that are closing or retrenching — such as the owners of Ballast Point closing that brand’s physical brewery because it could no longer produce the required volumes to sustain the operation.
Now, Good Beer Hunting reports, Lagunitas (owned by Heineken these days) is closing its 300,000-square-foot Chicago facility on August 1, shutting down operations in the brewery as well as the taproom. It’s the latest sign that all is not well for the pioneering craft brewery, which saw production volumes decline 20% from 2019-2022, from 1.07 million barrels to 860,000 barrels, according to Brewers Association data. The Chicago plant opened in 2014.
Lagunitas says moving all production to it’s Petaluma, California, home base will “allow for a more efficient and flexible supply chain, with a greater focus on innovation and the acceleration of more sustainable brewing practices.” It’s also a cost-saving move amid slumping sales for the brewery’s core brands: Lagunitas IPA was down about -9% in chain retail sales volume in the first quarter of 2024 against the same timeframe in 2023.
As Kate Bernot notes in her report for Good Beer Hunting:
While some of Lagunitas’ struggles are particular to the company and its corporate parent, a closure of this scale is also a notable signpost on the craft beer industry’s maturation timeline.
Lagunitas opened its Chicago brewery at nearly the height of growth in U.S. craft beer; today, the industry as a whole has more unused capacity than at any other time in its modern history, according to Bart Watson, chief economist and vice president of strategy for the Brewers Association trade group. Watson pegged craft beer’s unused capacity at 41% earlier this year.
Up in Smoke — Lagunitas to Close Chicago Plant as Brand Continues to Wobble — Good Beer Hunting
Dusty’s Beer of the Week
The G.O.A.T goes gold again at the New World Beer & Cider awards — pretty easy to see why in this 7.9% doppelbock from Nelson locals Sprig & Fern. Rich chocolatey and nutty upfront with a super smooth mouthfeel followed by crusty bready notes with hints of floral on a gentle carb, finishing with an earthy dark chocolate finish. An absolute pleasure to drink.
Dave Dobbyn well-represented in Top 30
It’s quirky fact, but there are two beers in the New World Beer & Cider Awards Top 30 that pay homage to legendary songwriter Dave Dobbyn.
Garage Project are there will Bliss, a super-smooth lager that pays tribute to that classic 1980s drinking anthem of the same name by Th’ Dudes.
And Beer Baroness jumped into the Dobbyn catalogue for Slice Of Heaven, a New Zealand-style IPA, which (to riff off a song from another musician, Martin Phillipps) could be equally described as heavenly hop hit!
Osama Bin Lager — a “most-wanted” beer
A British beer named after Osama Bin Laden sold out after going viral on social media, the BBC reports.
Staff at Mitchell Brewing Co had to unplug phones and close their website temporarily because of demand for Osama Bin Lager.
The Lincolnshire company also brews Kim Jong Ale and Putin Porter.
“They're all tongue-in-cheek names — a nicer outlook on some horrible dictators,” co-owner Luke Mitchell said.
Millions of people have seen a picture of the beer — named after the former al-Qaeda leader who died in 2011 — posted on social media.
Husband and wife Luke and Catherine Mitchell run the brewery and a pub.
“We've woken up the last couple of mornings with thousands and thousands and thousands of notifications,” Luke said.
“It's been crazy,” Catherine added. “The phone just hasn't stopped for the last 48 hours.”
Luke says no-one has yet complained about the names and the brewery donates £10 from each barrel of Osama Bin Lager to a charity that supports victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Tim’s Beer of the Week
After a brush with Covid last week, I’ll need to stick to flavours that I’m confident will make it past my potentially impaired taste buds. Step up once again Urbanaut’s tiny can range, with another flavour that’s going to get through, no matter what: Raspberry Lamington Imperial Stout (11%abv).
Beautifully ripe, juicy raspberry leads the aroma, flowing into toasted coconut and roasty malt. The palate gently meanders between all its lamington-derived influences before coming to rest on the huge cushion of its 11% malt base. It’s a slow, languid taste that takes its time arriving at its eventual, wonderfully balanced and just mildly bitter finish.
For my take, dessert stouts like this have to walk a narrow line of just crazy enough so that their outlandish flavours remain interesting, but don’t stray into ‘too sweet’ on one side, or ‘dominated by X flavour’ on the other. Here, Urbanaut has navigated the path superbly. I can’t believe I’m asking for this, but if they could just find some lactose and cocoa we could almost have a Jelly-Tip stout on our hands. — Tim Newman
America’s best-selling craft brands revealed
We can talk all we like about ratings on Untappd and awards won but when it comes to the business of beer, it’s what gets exchanged for cold hard cash that ensures brewers make a living.
So, I was fascinated to read the list of America’s top 10 “best-selling” craft beer brands for 2023.
The data comes from Chicago media company Circana, which measured sales for the 52 weeks leading up to January 28, 2024.
Circana compiled the sales data into a list revealing the top 10 best-selling craft beer brands going into 2024. So we’re talking right now, not over time.
What piqued my interest is how stately the list is. Stately is the best word I can think of for brands like Sierra Nevada, Samuel Adams, Lagunitas (despite their woes mentioned above), New Belgium, Blue Moon, Founders, Elysian, Firestone Walker … it’s like a mahogany row of craft (and some of them are arguably not even truly “craft” brands by definition).
The 10 Best-Selling Craft Beer Brands of 2024 | VinePair
Beer of the Week No 2
Heyday in Wellington are on a roll right now with a regular lager-sour series. Every month they bring out a new lager and a new sour. For May they have an intriguing Burnt Orange and Dandelion Spritz as the sour release, but I went straight for the Dunkel as it’s a style I love. This is beautifully presented and comes at you with a gentle wash of caramel, warm toast, chocolate and a well-pitched just-bitter finish. A very smooth, light, autumn-night brew.
Are you pouring your beer wrong?
I saw this video on Instagram and had to reshare, even though the messaging (to me, anyway) might fall into the “teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs” category
I’ve been pouring my beer the “direct” way for a while, and definitely since I did this story a couple of years back with Craig Cooper of Bach Brewing on the “slow pour” which is actually a fast pour:
Are You Pouring Your Beer Wrong? | Pursuit of Hoppiness
Beer of the Week No 3
Outside Wellington, Abandoned Brewery seem to be in the hard-to-find department but I’ve always loved their branding and whenever I have their beer it’s always good.
This Red IPA is no different. It’s a gorgeous colour to start with, a genuine ruby red, and in many ways falls into that now over-used expression “old school” (and I’m responsible for a lot of that over-use!). It reminds of Liberty’s gone but not forgotten Yakima Scarlet, in that it delivers a rich, but tight malt base and then overlays it with big citrus bitterness. There’s an almost dusty quality to the finish, and I mean that in a good way, making sure you know the emphasis here is on the “IPA” part of the equation rather than the “red” bit.
Saving the planet with beer
I’ll finish this week with a longer read from our friends across the Tasman at The Crafty Pint, and look at project sparked by Stone & Wood, called Good Grain.
You often hear the phrase "beer for good", or variations on the theme, bandied about. And with good reason too.
Beer has been used for countless fundraisers, to bring attention to important causes, to support organisations in all corners of the country. The rise of craft beer has created new community hubs in regional towns and suburbs, sparked all manner of new businesses working alongside brewers, and encouraged the development of new techniques, ingredients and flavours, while breathing fresh life into some that had seemingly been lost to time.
At the same time, making beer is a notably energy-intensive process – hence the considerable time, money and resource pumped into making it more sustainable: covering breweries in solar panels; capturing and reusing byproducts from the brewing process; developing reusable and biodegradable packaging; and so on. What's more, used irresponsibly, like any form of alcohol it can lead to harmful consequences.
So it might seem a little rich to hear people claiming beer could help change the world. Not just be a force for good, but possessing the ability to help humanity avert the climate crisis.
Yet those people exist, there's a growing number of them, and they're not tinfoil hat-wearing fringe-dwellers but some of the key players in the Australian beer scene.
Can beer regenerate the planet — Crafty Pint
Thanks as always for coming along for the ride, and catch you next week.
Michael