Verbatim: Waiheke Island Baroona Pale Ale. 16/5/08, 330ml, $4.5, at work, auditioning. Gorgeous curvy bottle; good honest stuff. Nothing too unique. Bubbles vanish quickly. Drinkable and very marketable. If the contract wasn’t fucked, it’d make a great guest.

Afterthoughts, October 2010: Is that really the first instance of ‘bad language’ in the Diary? That doesn’t seem like me. But man, that contract really was fucked. The previously-mentioned genuinely-mad new owner set me to the task of sorting out a beer list, and only after a few days of figuring (and auditions like this and the previous entry), did I discover (from someone else), that she’d signed an exclusive contract with one of the Big Breweries, Lion. So all my work was for naught. Shit like that made me give up.

As for the beer itself, though, this is another small brewery that just can’t get its positioning and descriptions to make any sort of sense. It’s named as a pale ale, but then goes and describes itself as “German-style”, which is horribly confused. For the record, it’s the former bit that’s accurate.