Yeastie Boys back in town

A deeper dive into NZ Beer Awards: who were the 100 per centers? Rest home brewery a hit. Beer as a supplement for distance runners. The beer connection to NZ's best toastie. And a pint-loving pony.

Hello beer lovers and especially those of you with one weekend left to run in Dry July.

This issue of Friday Night Beers is high on the cute-story count — just one of those weeks, I guess — but offset with some number-crunching from the New Zealand Beer Awards last week.

First up, though, in long-awaited news, Yeastie Boys, the self-described “smallest multi-national” in the world, is back in New Zealand after a break of a couple of years. The NZ part of the NZ-UK-Aust brew brand briefly disappeared from Aotearoa for a couple of reasons: they pulled back to focus on the UK operations, which now seem well-established, plus their brew partner here, Urbanaut, got too busy with their own business.

The yeastieboys.co.nz website is up and running with a shop for online orders. The beers are now being made at bStudio in Napier.

Right now you can only get two beers: Lazy Slam Hazy Pale Ale and Superfresh Helles lager. Still to come are the return of the much-missed Gunnamatta Earl Grey Tea IPA and that will re-launch alongside a “juicy” IPA called Soft Bomb. There’s no Pot Kettle Black or White Noise ... yet.

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Good as gold

A little follow up on The New Zealand Beer Awards from last week.

Naturally a lot of the noise goes to the trophy winners, but basically if you win a gold medal you’re in the upper echelon of beer in NZ for 2022 (at least …). On that note, a reminder judging can be capricious — for instance last year’s Juicy/Hazy trophy winner, Waitoa Afterglow, didn’t get a medal this year. But every other trophy winner from last year that re-entered got a medal of some description.

At these awards there were 64 golds from 828 entries (making them the top 7.7%).

The golds were distributed as follows (a handy reference chart for your next purchase):

9 — Garage Project (Chance Luck & Magic 2020 and 2021, Raspberry Cabaret, Rua, Snug, Pernicious Weed, Mega Mecha Hop Mosaic, Four Legs Good, White Mischief)
5 — Behemoth (Half Way Down, Time Hop, Who Used All The Mosaic, Pickle Nick!, Jaffa Invasion).
3 — Three Boys (Lager, Belgian Blonde, Prunus Stave), Emerson’s (Old 95, Bird Dog, Taieri George 20th Edition), 8 Wired (Mahu Lager, Oude Imperiale, Hop Salad), Three Sisters (Kaitake HB, Rumours in the Dark, Scatterbomb).
2 — Altitude (Starlight Highway, Snowdance), North End (Super Alpha, Sphere of the Winds), Kainui (Rose Saison, Summer Love Saison), McLeod’s (Paradise Pale Ale, Rauchbier), Bach (Bad to the Cone, Juicy AF), Good George (Haze of Glory, Cold IPA), Test Lab (Sublime Coffee Stout, Lights Out Stout), Shining Peak (Scrub Scutter, Gung Ho! Fresh Hop).
1 — Badass Hefe Metal, Baylands Slope Shredder, Beer Baroness Sunshine & Spaceships, Brave Stay Gold, Brood Fermentation Feijoa & Rye, Cassels Dry-Hopped Pils, Eddyline Happy Camper, Epic 15, Fortune Favours MMXX, Heyday Land of Dreams, Liberty Citra, Lion (Rhieneck), Lumberjack From The Woods Saison, Mount Brewing Lemongrass Pale Ale, Panhead The Vandal, Pomeroys Puddle Jumper, Sawmill The Doctor, Sunshine No Access, Waitoa Gone Bush, Whistling Sisters Dry Irish Stout, Wigram Ace Smokey Porter, Zeelandt Brunhilde’s Fate.

Other little stats…

Only two beers doubled-up on a New World Beer & Cider Awards Top-30 and NZ Beer Awards Gold: Garage Project Pernicious Weed & Beer Baroness Sunshine & Spaceships Hazy IPA.

I also like seeing who had a 100 per cent hit-rate of medals across multiple entries because to do that means a brewery is doing a lot of things right. Judging is such a lottery that any brewery who can have all their beers get positive feedback is doing impressive work. So kudos:

Beer Baroness, of Christchurch, who got hardware for 13 out of 13 entries — outstanding! Wellington’s Heyday (6 from 6), Alibi from Waiheke Island (6 from 6), Little Creatures (5 from 5), and Burkes from Tekapo (3 from 3, including a colab with Three Boys). And there were some one-and-done entries: Brood Fermentation, Volstead, Puhoi, State of Play.

A special shout-out to Nelson’s Test Lab. They are relatively new as a brewery, although brewer Nigel Jerrard has been in the game for decades. They got two golds and a bronze from four entries.

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Beer of the week No 1

Good George have taken their time bringing their Virtual Reality non-alcoholic hazy IPA to market. They entered it in last year’s New Zealand Beer Awards where it failed to medal in the Speciality & Experimental class. They continued to tinker it with, putting on iterations in their Hamilton taproom before coming up with the packaged product. And it was worth the wait. This one for me sits between Bach All Day Hazy Non-Alcoholic IPA and Garage Project Tiny. It’s got a lovely hazy aroma, has great mouthfeel and a balanced finished. There’s a small, distracting, ferment character, more noticeable as the beer warms, but you can forgive it for the overall flavour. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And to confirm my assessment, I see it picked up a silver at the NZ Beer Awards in the new Reduced Alcohol category.