Twofold — one of Auckland’s most anticipated new brewpubs — opened its door this week, bringing craft beer to Parnell’s famed restaurant strip and continuing a surge in recent openings in the country’s biggest city. With former Alibi brewer Bernard Neate at the helm, Twofold is sure to draw beer fans to the Parnell Road venue that was formerly home of Woodpecker Hill restaurant and before that The Bog — an Irish bar, which Neate well remembers. “I had my first pint of Guinness here when I was 17,” says Neate. Neate needs no introduction for beer fans, having built an amazing reputation with Al ..read more

Hop Federation Green Limousine is among a (very) small cadre of annual fresh hop releases that I consider having achieved classic status.  This one in particular, with the brewery’s proximity to the growing regions (the fresh Nelson Sauvin cones here spent all of 30 minutes going from bine to brewery), I look to as a marker for the quality of a given year’s crop.  With the quality of the hops harvested this year already widely reported as exceptionally good, it was with high expectations that I cracked into this one. Explosively pungent Nelson Sauvin radiates off the aroma, carrying ..read more

The power couple that is Garage Project and Royalburn Station have released their collab brew Swifty in packaged format. Nadia Lim and her husband Carlos Bagrie bought Wanaka’s Royalburn Station in 2019 after selling their stake in My Food Bag and their life on the farm is the subject of a reality TV show called Nadia’s Farm. Swifty, named for the Swiftburn stream on the property, is out now in Liqourland stores nationwide and soon to be in select New World stores. I think Swifty could turn out to be a big-seller — and it’s as much to do with its provenance as its flavour. Lim’s status as a&nb ..read more

I was in my local coffee spot buying beans when a friend stopped to say gidday. “What’s new in craft beer?” he asked. When I paused for just a moment, he replied for me: “Nothing, right?” One thing craft beer has always done is change things. Its early ethos was outright rebellion. But when every table has been overturned, every window broken, every chair smashed over the head of a bad guy … what happens next? In some ways, craft beer has painted itself into a corner. The one post-pandemic bridge has been non-alcoholic beer and the huge growth it has produced. So, I figured that if there was o ..read more

The Beer Project was conceived in July 2009 as a two-year project to document the 50-odd breweries in New Zealand. Obviously, I missed my deadline, not photographing my 50th brewery, Mata, until 2017. And now, the number of breweries has risen to over 200, which at my current rate will mean I will finish sometime around 2099. There were also a couple of regions I had missed. So, I came up with a simple plan: photograph the breweries of Taranaki and Northland, attend a wedding in Gisborne, and visit as many other breweries as I could on my way around the North Island. A summer road trip!  ..read more

For as much as I’m a champion of fresh hop beers, I’ll be the first to admit they tend to fall into a pretty staid and narrow group of styles.  There’s always good ones and bad ones, but the field itself is typically composed of modern IPAs and pilsners sporting fresh additions of go-to hops such as Riwaka, Nelson Sauvin and Motueka. But Christchurch brewers Two Thumb have pulled a double divergence here by releasing not just an English style IPA, but one fresh-hopped with the legendary (and legendarily unfashionable) Green Bullet hops.  These earthy, spicy and strongly bitter hops a ..read more

Double Vision Brewing are taking fresh hop season to a new level, with a triple treat of collectible, glow-in-the-dark cans, designed to be drunk in a specific order and preferably while reading the companion comic strip. In recent years, DVB have two produced two classic horror character-driven beers (eg Count Dracula and Van Helsing) but this year they’re extending the narrative. It’s also a way of acknowledging the individual hop farms that deliver the key ingredient, says Double Vision co-founder Warren Drahota. “It is super important for us to take the partnership with the hop farmers to ..read more

I was recently brought back a souvenir from a trip to Hobbiton, and uniquely amongst souvenirs, this one was perfect.  A bottle from the range of beers (and ciders) served at that living monument to the Lord of the Rings movie, and crafted to evoke the same quaintly fantastical vibe.  Brewed at nearby Good George, who, with this incredibly savvy marketing move, have done the impossible — found a way to sell British style beer. It’s hilarious (and sad) that the British styles have now found themselves so lamentably unpopular and outcast from the craft brewing market, that a perfectly ..read more

My recent visit to Thief Brewing could hardly be called travel, situated practically on my doorstep amongst the hills and farmland of Tai Tapu, in rural Banks Peninsula.  But nevertheless, as I wound my way up the (perilously narrow) access road that coils up the hillside to where Thief brewery makes its roost, I felt blissfully far from the world.   A stillness and teeming presence of place hung about the hillside expanse. The kilometres of space in every direction thrummed with a vast peace, and I felt at ease in a way that was all too foreign to me.  All of the pressure ..read more

The first beer I fell in love with was something warm and whiffy in a warm and whiffy bar somewhere in London several decades ago. You never forget the first one, they say and when my youngest daughter moved to London recently, I urged her to have a pint for me in one of my old haunts. Which she did eventually and reported back, “The beer was warm and tasted like bread. The pub smelt like a fireplace and a man told me Charles Dickens would be by later.” Which sounds, let’s face it, almost perfect, even if she wasn’t so sure. So, when it came to beginning this column, which will be devoted to s ..read more