It’s been a night of Kiwi success at the Australian International Beer Awards … and a heads-up, this is not a cut-and-paste of last year’s results despite 2024 being almost a mirror-image of 2023! That’s because, for the second year in a row the champion large, medium and small international breweries, respectively, are exactly the same: Garage Project. Behemoth. Three Sisters. The AIBAs, organised by Melbourne Royal, featured nearly 3,000 entries from 400 exhibitors across 21 countries. The competition was judged by a panel of 75 experts from Australia and overseas, making it one of the most ..read more

You thought you were safe.  You thought fresh hop season was over, but it just keeps on going… This one really is special though, I promise.  Garstonstein is joint release from Wanaka Beerworks and Christchurch’s Beers is unique in that its Nelson Sauvin fresh hops are not from Nelson, but all the way down in Southland, grown by the up-and-coming Garston Hops. Immediately there’s a noticeable difference in aroma from the Nelson-grown fresh hop Sauvins this year.  The characteristic sharpness and pungency take on a gentler form, with juicy lemon/lime citrus and ripe estery apples ..read more

In the first of a new series, Joshua Lee aka Hazzy Hunter goes head-to-head with John Morawski from Laughing Bones. Hazzy Hunter: John tell me how Laughing Bones came to be? John: Gosh first of all welcome it’s good to have you here! As we put right on our can, it came from a lifelong love affair with beer — I’ve just always been into it. I did a master’s degree in food chemistry and part of that was studying saccharomyces [yeast], the whole process of brewing, in which case I had to brew beer which at that time was illegal in the United States but under the umbrella of university research I ..read more

Some beers are simply born for a fresh hop version, and Pacific Coast Tapawera Sunrise, a Double NZ Pilsner (6%) out of Mangawhai is one of them.  Its dank and meandering herbaceous notes were primed for an injection of fresh hop magic to really make them come alive.  The fresh hop on display here is Pacific Sunrise from Hop Revolution, a very rarely planted variety that has only recently begun to gain more interest.   Gentle aromas of pine, rockmelon and mango lead the nose, with a deeply green and resinous undertow of fresh herbal character.  Mellow and juicy on the ..read more

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