As we mentioned in the last podcast, we’ve got a few Lost Episodes in our proverbial back pocket. They’ve become little exercises in time travel, but we didn’t want them to languish forever, so I’ll be uploading them over the next few weeks. This conversation was recorded on 17 September 2015.

We sat down for a few beers ‘on the record’ with our friends Dave Wood and Denise Garland. Dave is the general manager of Wellington beer bar Hashigo Zake as well as the current President of SOBA (the Society of Beer Advocates) and Denise is a journalist — and both have long been key members of the beer community. They talk about the rapid evolution of the local scene, their introductions to it and their ‘epiphany’ beers, the simple pleasures of everday beers in their right place, and the joys of making your own homebrew. We also discuss the bar business, SOBA festivals, women-in-beer groups like Beerded Ladies and Pink Boots, lament the general lack of brown ales and have a few dated-but-foreboding words to say about company takeovers — Dave idly ponders a Ballast Point buyout that was just a few weeks in the future.

As always, a direct download of this episode is available, should that better-suit your listening habits. We’re on iTunes and there’s also a podcast-specific RSS feed you can follow through whatever app or gadget you listen to these things with. For handy reference, you can direct people to podcast.beerdiary.nz, and you should feel free to contact us — via this very page, the podcast’s Twitter account, or on Facebook — with any feedback, corrections, suggestions, or whatnot. Cheers!

— Show notes:

• (2.20) Beer Of The Week #1: Townshend ‘Black Arrow’, brewed at Tuatara. The eponymous rocket wasn’t a total failure, and Kerbal Space Program can teach you just how hard rocketry is. But it seems that we’re ironically speaking too soon, here: keg production of Townshend beers looks to’ve reverted entirely back to HQ, though I think bottles might still be being made at Tuatara.
• (3.40) SOBA, here, is the acronym. We’ll get back to that.
• (15.00) If my point isn’t clear here, I owe you all a ramble about “wheat beer” — and how the beer business did customers a disservice by lumping things together (German Hefe, Belgian Wit) under that banner which are actually made similar by a different factor (i.e., yeast character, relative lack of bitterness). So now, with American Wheat Ales and Berliner Weisses on the market, we’ve sown more confusion than knowledge.
• (17.00) Here’s my first encounter with Duvel.
• (29.00) I’m SOBA member #418, for the record. Way late to the party.
• (39.20) Beer Of The Week #2: ‘Beetnik’, brewed in honour of the Queensland Rugby League team, of all things.
• (1.00.00) Beer Of The Week #3: Garage Project ‘Golden Brown’ (Original Recipe), which was #9 of 24/24. Which (naturally) causes us to lament the lack of brown ales in the world.
• (1.08.10) Recommendations: Ballast Point ‘Grunion’, says Dave; ParrotDog ‘Dogg’ and North End ‘Baby Grand’, for Denise (with apologies to Dylan for the overused “crisp” adjective). North End ‘Field Way’ APA, says George; and for me it’s Garage Project ‘Dirty Boots’ or ‘Artful Dodger’, which had neat little lives after the events they were created for.
• (1.19.00) Garage Project ‘GP Draught’ was entered into the beer awards, but sadly didn’t take the trophy — though it did get a silver medal.
• (1.20.00) The awards rule-change was covered here.
• (1.22.30) The livestream was a wonderful thing, and is archived online.
• (1.24.20) This is how outdated we are. Jason’s no longer even an 8 Wired employee. But both him and Andrew do seem to be recovering well — slowly, inevitably, but well.
• (1.25.40) Takeovers. Again, we’re in the Old News department since this is a Lost Episode — the buyout of Ballast Point was still a few weeks in the future as we were raving about Grunion, which has turned into an interesting test of principles for Hashigo (who dropped them) and Beer Without Borders (who didn’t).
• (1.32.20) Ladies and gentlemen: Dave Wood, depressed psychic.
• (1.33.10) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both.