Urbanaut's massive giveaway
Three Sisters close in on crowd-funding target. Beer makes you smarter — true story. NZ's best Double IPA — cast your vote here.
Happy Friday Beer Friends!
For the first time in a while, there’s no bad news around beer.
So I thought I’d celebrate a couple of good things happening.
First, I can’t quite believe the crew at Urbanaut are doing this, but they’re marketing their new Atlanta Bright IPA by running a competition to win a 6-day “road trip” that takes in Atlanta, Nashville and New Orleans.
It’s the kind of prize that would normally be the domain of much larger beer businesses.
It’s a daring ploy but in an age of direct marketing, the more people they can add to their database for future marketing, the better.
But it’s also about going all-in on a beer they believe in, says Urbanaut co-founder Simon Watson.
“The launch of Atlanta is the first time we’ve put any real marketing effort into launching a beer,” he told me.
“We think there’s lots of opportunity around this, including the beer itself and the wider style so we’re giving it the opportunity to succeed.”
And the “trick” with this, for want of a better word, is that you don’t even have to buy the beer to enter. That’s to do with rules around promoting alcohol, so the competition is a stand-alone that won’t directly impact sales of Atlanta.
Watson said he was able to work with a couple of partners, including Rhythm of the South, who will handle the state-side part of the deal, and Travel USA here in New Zealand, who are providing travel vouchers to cover airfares and spending money.
Even with the partner support, it’s a big spend for a relatively small brewery.
“It’s a little bit the partnerships and whole lot of us sticking our necks out and hoping to sell a bunch of beer over the summer,” Watson says.
The promo of Atlanta — the beer that Pursuit of Hoppiness reviewer Tim Newman called “one of the most devastatingly smashable drops I’ve tasted all year” — is tied into a deal with New World’s North Island stores where the beer will be on special for $19.99 for a 330ml six-pack for 26 weeks.
This is as good a moment as any for me to give a shout-out to the crew at New World, your home of craft beer.
The winner of the competition will be drawn on January 15, 2025. Good luck to anyone who enters, and good luck to the Urbanaut crew for taking such a bold step.
Enter here to win a trip to Atlanta
Three Sisters near minimum target
There’s a week to go if you want to get on board with Three Sisters equity raise.
With nine days to go, the Taranaki brewery is more than 80% funded towards their minimum raise of $500,000, with $415,000 pledged as of Friday afternoon.
If they get to the half-million mark the money will be spent on a new brewhouse, an expansion of the brew bar at 89 Devon Street, a new chiller and a new label maker that will allow for personalised cans.
As previously reported the expansion of the brew house is designed to unblock bottlenecks in the production process to allow them to fulfil export orders to China. And creating more space in the bar should also mean more beer flowing locally.
Unfortunately, I can’t see them getting to the maximum capital raise of $1.6 million which would have seen them put in a golf simulator worth $450,000.
You can get in on an entry-level pledge of $300.
To see the nitty-gritty of the financials you need to register with Pedgeme but one notable fact for me was that, after a few years of net losses, the brewery turned a net profit in the first quarter of the 2024-25 financial year —just on 20,000 based on much lower operating costs compared to the recent previous period.
Three Sisters Brewery Limited | PledgeMe
Beer of the Week No 1
From New Zealand’s Champion Brewery to New Zealand’s Champion Beer — and I can’t say enough good things about McLeod’s Tropical Cyclone.
These days, I don’t reach for an 8% Double IPA as readily as I might have even five years ago. But gosh, this is good.
It’s piney-dank, sweet yet savoury, rich and oily but with a cleansing bitterness.
Drinking this made me want to create a list of New Zealand’s best Double IPAs, and if I did compile such a list this would be somewhere near the top, no doubt.
In fact, off the top of my head I came up with what I’d call the five best-known, still-in-circulation, double/imperial IPAs. I’d love to know which one you love the most!
Beer makes you smarter — true story
I’ve written previously about alcohol’s ability to help us problem-solve — notably after reading the book Drunk (how beer made us human) by Edward Slingerland:
Research also shows that people, uninhibited thanks to a dose of alcohol, are better (faster) problem-solvers, and more creative in their thinking. He cites the Ballmer Peak, attributed to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, which describes enhanced coding skills as a function of blood alcohol concentration (BAC), delivering above-average programming ability in a small BAC window. Anecdotally, there’s Google’s whisky room where coders go to have a wee dram when they’re stuck on a problem.
Further research at Mississippi State University showed mild intoxication can be a helpful state for solving creative problems. The study showed that students with blood alcohol levels near the legal limit were better at solving word puzzles than their sober counterparts.
(Of course this immediately took me back to my early journalism days when a lot of “work” got done at the pub!).
This latest research led London-based branding and design agency Office of Overview to develop a work-friendly, low-strength beer that could be consumed during office hours. They turned to a local low-alcohol specialist brewery called Small Beer Brew Co, who created a 2.1% beer called Creative Juice.
I spent a bit of time trying to decide if this was a stich-up or some kind of piss-take, but it seems to be real. I just don’t know who would buy it, given the headaches it would cause any HR department. Then again, there are probably many HR departments that could benefit from micro-dosing with beer!
Dusty’s Beer of the Week
Been some fabulous reds over the bleaker months and a podium finisher would definitely be Big Red from Raglan’s Workshop Brewing. This 8.2% imperial red ale pours a beautiful mahogany with upfront notes of overripe apricot peach pine resin sitting atop of rich gooey toffee caramel, mouthfeel is soooo smooth tying together an exceptional example of the style, highly recommend this!
Alternatives to Munich for great Euro-beer
It’s that time of the year again — lager time! It seems there’s a relatively new phenomenon of local breweries capturing the spirit of Munich’s Oktoberfest to deliver us what turn out to be some of the best beers of the year as they explore a variety of classic German lagers.
But it’s also a time of year when there’s just a hint of FOMO attached to not being in Europe at the tail-end of summer and enjoying the last of those long twilights.
So, to whet your appetite (and I reckon this will be me next year) here’s some suggestions for great beer cities to visit in Europe.
8 of Europe’s best beer cities beyond Munich (nationalgeographic.com)
Beer of the Week No 2
Continuing my journey through some of the gold medal winners from the recent NZ Beer Awards, I found myself utterly delighted by Eddyline’s Crank Yanker. This is a beer that’s been around for quite some time and a beer that arcs back to Eddyline’s original brewery in Colorado.
Curiously, as I was looking on Untappd to see just when Crank Yanker was created, I came across this comparison of the two versions
They rate almost identically on Untappd at 3.79 (rounded up) but the American version is a massive 7% compared with 6.3% here.
Anyway, the original dates back to 1993 so for the beer to be still “competitive” at an awards night is pretty impressive.
It’s an old-school malty-hoppy combo and the more I have of these throwback westies, the more I miss them. This was just delicious and superbly tweaked to let the hoppy-bitter character outshine the malt sweetness.
Malt producers to feel the pain in US
The decline in American beer sales is well documented, but there’s always a new story arising from the decline. US beer sales are now at the lowest point since the mid-late 1970s, according to Reuters.
And the latest to feel the pinch in this decline are maltsters.
Indisputable evidence comes not from the brewers themselves but from their farmer suppliers who report a glut of malting-quality barley in the Mid West states.
The most-recent U.S. crop report showed the number of acres planted with barley has fallen by 22% compared with a year ago. In North Dakota, the second largest producer behind Idaho, the acreage under barley has nearly halved from a year ago.
What's going on with the US beer industry? (thedrinksbusiness.com)
Tim’s Beer of the Week
Behemoth’s Hop Buddies series of IPAs brings together characters both real and fictional, but of all the (great many) editions, this one is most personal as it harks back the awful day in September 2015 when a brewing accident at the 8 Wired which Behemoth’s Andrew Childs and (soon to be) McLeod’s Jason Bathgate with burns to 40% of their bodies. Aside from sharing a hospital room all those years ago, Andrew and Jason also share a career-long love of West Coast style IPA, and between them they’re probably the most prolific IPA producers in the modern craft beer scene.
Jason and Andrew features a trans-Pacific duo of Nelson Sauvin and Mosaic hops to drive a powerfully ripe aroma of lemon and orange citrus, mango and tinned pineapple. Lush tropical flavours race across the palate with a remarkable alacrity, bounding into a tight, focused and keenly bitter finish.
And 10% of the profits from this release will be donated to the Westpac Rescue Helicopter Auckland, without which we might have lost these two hop buddies.
Three Boys reflect on a decade in business
Australia’s Beer & Brewer magazine had a great interview with Three Boys founder Ralph Bungard in the wake of their second Champion Brewery title at the NZ Beer Awards.
It was a great angle in that the award tied in with Three boys being 20 years old and Ralph looked back on what had changed in those two decades. I found this quote quite intriguing:
“One of the most notable changes has been in what format we see beer leaving the brewery. In the early 2000s, over 80 per cent of our production left the brewery in bottles. In 2024, over 80 per cent of our production leaves in kegs. That is simply a reflection of how we have managed to push into the draught beer market in bars and restaurants and how Three Boys has moved towards looking after local market, rather than trying to capture distribution through the supermarket duopoly.”
NZ Champion Brewery, Three Boys, talks two decades of brewing - Beer & Brewer (beerandbrewer.com)
Beer of the Week No 3
I do like seeing beers that pop up in different competitions and this year Beer Baroness Slice of Heaven made the New World Beer & Cider Top 30 and then won a trophy at the New Zealand Beer Awards, taking out the Juicy/Hazy Pale Ale category (and you may remember a previous post about this in which I noted the NZ Beer Awards worked to the American Brewers Association style guidelines which meant hazies at 6% and under were judged as (strong) pale ales category and those over 6% went in the IPA category
This is right on 6% and it features a heavenly hop hit in the form of Nectaron and Nelson Sauvin. They deliver the tropical punchbowl flavours you want in this kind of beer. Pineapple-passionfruit aroma is followed by a herbal dankness and that distinctive white wine flavour on the palate. A dry finish with a nice level of bitterness rounds out a complex and definitive NZ IPA.
Beer versus wine in Margaret River
I’ll finish up this week with a long weekend read from an Australian wine writer, Edward Cavanagh, who contacted me about publishing an abridged extract from a forthcoming book — working title: “Doctors and Millionaires: Wine, Money, and Glory in Margaret River” — about the history of the Margaret River wine region.
The hook here was beer’s incursion into wine territory and the role played by renowned Kiwi brewing engineer Chris Little, whose evidence in a West Australian administrative court allowed Cheeky Monkey Brewery to set up despite strong protests from the established wine community.
It’s a rollicking tale, so put aside a few minutes to digest it all!
Trouble Brewing in Margaret River | Pursuit of Hoppiness
That’s us for another week and I’ll be back next week with the next installment of the best beers of 2024.
Michael
I wonder if the focus on quantity of beer sales partly over-states the true decline in beer consumption. Most US craft beer bars seem to sell almost entirely rocket fuel, so whereas Bubba might have chugged down six 4% Budweisers in the past, today he only has one or two 6-8% pints. Result: big decline in the volume of beer sales, but not so much in the effective quantity of beer consumption.