The Moa IPO

October 13, 2012 Phil 47 Comments

Moa's confused-looking Suits, possibly wondering where their glassware has gone — Moa’s confused-looking Suits, possibly wondering where their glassware has gone

This was one of the least surprising developments in the local beer industry. Moa started out cloaked in faux-exclusivity, long before they leapt into bed with arch-brandwanker Geoff Ross (of 42 Below vodka fame). He, and much of his old team, integrated pretty seamlessly with the company’s image-first approach, gave it a polish-and-makeover, and have set about making their money. Though not by selling beer, as such.¹ These guys — and they are guys — don’t lower themselves to anything so unfashionable as that. They’re in the business of selling businesses and of building brands rather than inherently-worthy products.

So here they are launching their IPO. If it all goes as planned, they’ll raise ~$15M, while retaining control for everyone who’s already involved in ownership and management. Which is unremarkable, of course, but the really predictable part — depressingly so, in fact — is the tone of the document itself. It is needlessly, aggressively, and pointlessly gendered and bursting with wank. You wonder how they didn’t have second thoughts at some point before sending it off to the printers, but they’ve got such an ‘impressive’ record of homophobia, misogyny and tired marketing blather that they must just mutter this shit in their sleep, these days.

The cover of an IPO document for a footwear or clothing (or staircase?) manufacturer, presumably

The IPO document is explicitly aimed at men, and Geoff Ross also can’t seem to manage to speak in gender-neutral terms to the press. They seem to entirely dismiss half the population, and completely discount the idea that women might a) drink their beer, b) want to invest in their company, or c) exist as anything other than ornament for shallow motherfuckers in expensive suits.

The subtitle of the whole document is “Your Guide to Owning a Brewery and Other Tips for Modern Manhood”, and the gendered references flow freely: “The relationship men form with beer is staunch” and their “aspiring drinkers” are “those in the super-premium end of modern manhood” (p48). The cut-away sections on angling, tailoring and pistol duels (of all things), are all targeted solely at “gentlemen”, and the one giving ‘advice’ on opening doors for other people is pitched entirely at men and the subject of the door-opening is always female, but for one throwaway homophobic jab. The only mention of women as consumers of their products is in the section on cider (p91), which — for anyone actually involved in the industry, or who bothers to attend a beer festival or go to a beer bar — is so ludiciously laughable and out of date that it begins to explain why they retreated to an aesthetic from decades ago.

Poor suggestions for serving craft beer, and for beer-and-cigar matching — Moa offer poor suggestions for serving craft beer (use a glass!), *and* for beer-and-cigar matching (try a darker, heavier beer than that)

Geoff Ross explicitly notes the connection to Mad Men as a reference that informed the ‘look’ of the document. But it’s all so hopelessly contrived and fake. Surely, if you are trying to be Don Draper, you are necessarily failing to be Don Draper.² And if you missed the dark undertones of the actual series — that a life of form over substance is hollow and bleak, and that basically all the promises of the vaunted ‘Golden Age of Advertising’ were always complete bullshit — then you really should pay some fucking attention. Like so many others, they completely fail to understand the basic difference between sexy and sexist. And it’s so desperately artificial that they don’t come across with any confidence or swagger; the Suits just look like a tragically insecure bunch.

All they can brag about is that their IPO document has ads in it, and might be the first to do so — as if anyone could be fucked raising their hands for a single clap to that milestone, if it indeed is one.³ The advertisers they’ve chosen ring as hollow as the rest of it: Aston Martin, Working Style, Ecoya — precisely the same brand-first, style-over-substance conspicuous consumption horseshit that Moa are transforming otherwise-often-worthy beer into. It’s all just part of the con, but I can never tell if the Moa executives are just trying to trick their potential customers and investors or if they’ve fallen into the sad trap of fooling themselves.

The incessant drone is that they make “super-premium” beer, a term they invented for themselves and invoke nauseatingly often.⁴ But they never even commit to their points of difference. The interestingly unique beer once universally-known as Moa ‘Original’ was moved off the front line and a blander, more mainstream-friendly pale lager was re-named ‘Original’ in its place — to better hoodwink the Heineken Drinker, one assumes. Bottle-conditioning, which they misleadingly associate with wine-making and falsely portray as ‘unique’, isn’t used on as many bottle sizes or varieties as it initially was. Their hefty 375ml bottles were once touted as a unique feature, but Moa recently took them out of circulation for another whole ‘tier’ of their range to save a fraction of cash per unit. And there’s something dreadfully uncomfortable about presenting a ‘super-premium’ beer being drunk from the bottle by their executives (and one of the models)⁵ in the IPO. These guys are the very definition of being ‘all hat, no cattle’ — and it’s not even a very nice hat, on closer inspection; it’s a gaudy, blinged-up knockoff.

The figures and discussions of money are at least stale enough to not stink of the wank that pervades the rest of the document, and feature some interesting data. Right now, Moa owe one million dollars cash to the BNZ (p110). That’s basically their overdraft, they’ve maxed it out, and they plan to use a chunk of the IPO just to pay it back — so one out of every fifteen average new investors can feel the glow of pride of merely being used to service existing debt. Another one from each hypothetical fifteen are being used purely to pay the damn-near-innumerable fees and bits of gravy-taking that launching something like this entails. The financials are a little opaque, to me, but were the subject of heaping quantities of derision and scorn from people I know who know better. They’re not pretty, certainly; Moa are running a stonking great big seven-figure loss, and have no real plan to do otherwise for a long while yet.

And for all they like to crow about having a small, nimble team with the ability to leverage low-cost high-result marketing (and all that guff), they’re looking to plow more than a million bucks a year into that department (p109), and plan to ape the boring old strategy of handing over dirty-great wodges of cash to bars to just buy branding and pouring rights outright.⁶ But worse than that, they’re utterly fucking shameless about their history of ginning up (pseudo-)controversy, duping the media into giving them free coverage⁷ — and seem happy to signal that such nonsense, even of the blatantly race-baiting or pathetically-bigoted kinds, will continue. Sunil Unka, the Marketing Manager, is quoted (p81) as having a “What’s the worst that can happen?” mantra when justifying his tactics.

Moa's General Manager Gareth Hughes — Moa General Manager Gareth Hughes’ now-infamous Ashtray Photo⁸

But there’s just the merest hint of hope that this shit has finally outstayed its welcome; the blow-back online has been pure joy to watch. The lampoonings of their rather desperate “moments of manhood” language has, in particular, produced gold. Hadyn Green’s excellent piece on Public Address yesterday was circulated deservedly widely, Emma Hart posted an insightful follow-up as I was writing this, and the mainstream press made (fairly gentle) mention of the critical response — though Geoff Ross didn’t think (or feel obliged) to do anything other than double-down on their needlessly and explicitly gendered approach.

For the last day or so, certainly, Moa have been unusually quiet on channels where they’re usually chatty and boastful.⁹ Indeed, the only communication I’ve seen from anyone at all related to their camp was intemperate criticism of my writing style by someone personally connected to the Moa executive (but not professionally involved with the company).¹⁰ They are, it’s fair to say, hardly being their defiant and proud selves. Maybe, just goddamn maybe, there are conversations going on about whether they’ve fucked up this time. Honestly, though, I doubt it. These guys seem committed to this bullshit; it is, in Geoff Ross’ wank-tastic phrase¹¹ “their vernacular, their mentality”.

I just can’t join in the (heartwarmingly relatively faint) chorus of “it’s not to my taste, but more power to them”. To employ the obvious metaphor — rather than, you know, spending thousands of dollars on suits, cigars, and a photoshoot only to have the attempted aesthetic misfire and make me look like a complete poser — I’m looking forward to this Moa going as extinct as its namesake. Go read about them, instead. They’re vastly more worthy of your time.

Postscript, 14 October, 9:05pm: This piece has just attracted a rather vile and hateful comment. I’m in two minds about whether to leave it up or delete it (for its tone and bigoted language, not for merely ‘disagreeing’ with me) but am leaving it up for now. The advice often given on the internet is “don’t read the comments”, lest you see the level to which some people sink to and how far civilisation has yet to go. Reader discretion is therefore strongly advised, but I think the comment is illustrative of an attitude that still exists in greater frequency than we might hope.

1: Absolutely mandatory caveat: the guy who actually does make the beer — Dave Nicholls; no matter how much their ‘brand story’ relies on Josh Scott being cast as the ‘executive brewer’ (whatever that might even be), Dave’s the actual brewer — is talented and a genuinely awesome dude. He makes some great beers (and plenty that aren’t to my personal tastes, not that that matters a damn), and has had more than a few sensible things to say about the problem of excessive marketing. He’s not the rat-pack type that the IPO document has him dressed up as — unlike every other Moa staffer I’ve met.
2: Thanks to George for the pop-culture consult on this one. I’m told that the sharper reference is to point out that the Moa Suits have just made themselves all into Pete Campbell.
3: And it’s hardly inkeeping with the rules on IPO documents being concise and limited into their use of brand imagery and irrelevancies, as the NBR noted.
4: At least twenty times in the IPO document, and jarringly often in the “business description” section.
5: Of all the images from the IPO photoshoot, just one of the Moa beers appears in a glass — with the model from the Ashtray Photo, as she perches on the edge of a table (p46). She swigs from the bottle in another shot, however (p16).
6: Ignoring their own Tip No. 10: “You can’t become a leader by following someone else. Most businesses are convinced this is not true.” Instead, they’re copying tactics from the Mainstream Big Two, and marketing themselves just like 42 Below did. Yawn. Where’s that much-vaunted ‘creativity’?
7: The write-up on Moa ‘Breakfast’ (p48) naturally fails to mention that their ‘trailblazing’ product was just a re-naming of an existing beer, ‘Harvest’. The “launch” was transparently a scam, and way too many people fell for it.
8: The setup turns out to be, presumably intentionally, a reference to a cigar ad of the Mad Men / Golden Age era. Which, of course, amounts to no kind of excuse. And that’s not some runaway photoshoot director’s inappropriate imagery; the General Manager himself posed for that.
9: Maybe they — finally — took the advice of their epically-smug Tips, No. 6 of which advises that you close your social media accounts and pre-emptively shut the fuck up (p15).
10: This section — and the original contents of this footnote — have been provisionally edited, after a discussion with the person involved. A barb about the idiosyncratic overuse of italics in my ‘Hello again’ post was published on Twitter, but during the writing of this piece (which was, after all, foreshadowed in the previous), its author silently deleted it. The text of this section initially named them and explained their close (but undeclared) connection to the Moa executive. Soon after the publication of this post, that person contacted me directly, asking that I delete the reference. Since the post was already ‘out there’, I offered instead to include their explanation in this footnote, but they pleaded extenuating circumstances, and (against my usual stickler nature on matters editorial) I’ve anonymised the reference. It feels weird to be magnanimous toward the Moa camp, broadly defined, but these things happen; never be afraid to try new things.
11: He seems unaware of how dated the reference to Shed 5 sounds; it’s hardly the prestigious or fashionable venue it once was (not that I give a fuck about that, but he clearly does). Also, they don’t serve Moa. Indeed, 85% of their beer list is just mass-market lager.

Metablogging

On blogging, and not blogging, and such

October 12, 2012 Phil 4 Comments

James Squires / Mad Brewers 'Ginger Chops' — Mad Brewers (a.k.a. James Squires) ‘Ginger Chops’; a recent nightcap

Well now. It has been a while.

I’ve said that kind of thing more than a few times in the course of this ongoing Beer Diary project, and here I am again. I was probably due a bit of a break, but I’ve been meaning to get back to hacking away at my keyboard again for a few weeks now. I just haven’t found the time — by which I mean not just the amount, but also the right kind of time with the right mood and everything else that goes with it. It seems just to be a brute genetic oddity that my most-productive writing hours are those between midnight and four a.m.. Perfect when you’re bartending; not quite so convenient when you have beer to sell, to keg, and to move around during daylight hours.¹ So there’s that. Plus, it’s belatedly occurred to me that writing — anywhere on the spectrum from Effusive Praise to Heapful Scorn — became a way to pfftrp a little pressure out of the Work Stress Valve. A change of scene, a bunch of new things to learn, fresh ponderings to ponder, and a whole swag of interesting new tasks with which to fill my working hours has pushed me more toward being one of those contended souls who comes home to mooch and relax and settle into some state halfway-between vegging out and geeking out.²

But never entirely. I do love to write, and I’m delighted that a not-at-all insignificant number of people ask me why I’m not, when I’m not. And there’s been a bunch to talk about, since I was last here — in roughly equal doses of things that inspire Praise and Scorn, as is always the case. I’ve had some utterly marvellous beer-related experiences in the past few weeks, and it’s with continual regret and wishes for more writing time that I condemn them to the perpetual pile of things to be written about later. Though with the way my memory works — i.e., alarmingly poorly — I always, at least, get to look forward to discovering these things almost-anew through my own notes and photographs before sharing them with the rest of you. Then, oh yes, the Scorn. I was dead keen to rant about the multiply-confused clusterfuck that is the approximately-annual “Am I getting a proper pint?” Misguided Consumer Whingefest & Misinformed ‘Did You Know’ Piece In The Paper, which re-appeared recently and in a few different ways. Then there were the multiple contemptible elements wrapped into John Key’s appearance at the official launch of the new Tuatara Brewery H.Q. — him, of the pseudo-craft necked from the bottle, taking the chance to continue the Usual Denigration of beer (as opposed to classy and not ever problematic at all wine, of course) and to swing a needless swipe at his opposite ideology and promote the myth of the entirely self-starting business (in a country where our gorgeously distinctive hops, used to fantastic effect by the brewery at which he stood, were developed by publicly-funded science). I’ll come back to those, I’m sure.

8 Wired 'C4 Double Brown' — 8 Wired ‘C4 Double Brown’, from a jar

On introspection,³ an element of my ‘holiday’ has also been a hesitation about opening up the rant valve while I’m also settling into my new job. It was never an issue in my former gig, so I suppose I’m being overly change-wary, but I can get over that, and it’s time to. I’m a fanatical stickler for disclosures of merely-potential conflicts of interest — and I thought things were improving in this little writing-about-beer niche of ours, but I’ve seen things slipping again in too-many quarters; I’ll have to make another fuss (he says, putting another rant on the To Rant Pile) — so I’ll always be sure to do so early and often. This is me; my name’s in the freakin’ URL. If anyone was endorsing this or — heaven forbid — funding it, they’d tell you (and so would I). Inevitably, though, it’s a rant that’ll get me back into the swing of things. A little high-amplitude warm-up for the vocal chords (or, I suppose, whatever the relevant keyboard-striking muscles of the fingers are called) to blow out the cobwebs. Moa, arch-peddler of brandwank and perpetually-disappointing habitual engine of bland and obnoxious stereotypes that they are, are at it again. So we have them to thank for knocking me out of my slumber, I suppose. I just wanted to say Hello again before I took a run-up and threw myself bodily at their multiply-depressing IPO document.

Hello!

1: Not that I have any grounds to complain; I’m not brewing — they seem to all (including Garage Project’s Pete) start at Truly Absurd O’clock in the morning. My hours are still mercifully gentle, given my Genetic Nocturnality. There are very-occasional pre-10-a.m. meetings, but mostly I can still time-shift by a few hours.
2: I’m a Big Nerd, after all; I don’t often properly veg, in Stephenson’s sense. Re-watching the West Wing in its entirety while poring over minutiae of the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election has accounted for a chunk of my leisure time, lately. And if you needed three words and a number to sum up a bunch of the rest of it, you could do a lot worse than “Skyrim” and “Mass Effect 3”.
3: I did a Philosophy degree, after all. Introspection is one of the few things we’re actually qualified for.

Rambles and rants

Get More From Your Beer

August 26, 2012 Phil 4 Comments

I had the good fortune, this year, to be invited to present a little seminar at Beervana. Given the title Get More From Your Beer, the idea was to help wrap up the final (Saturday evening) session with a bit of a ramble on making the most of your beer-drinking experience with a few notes on commonly-confusing topics like “proper” glassware and temperature. There’s a lot of beer-drinking advice out in the wild, so I wanted to distill some of the best of it down, and simplify things a little, trying to empower people to resist some of the worst bits of snobbery and taking things way too seriously. For me, it amounts to this: drink beer with your brain engaged.

I made a few simple slides, and thought I should put a version of the seminar (which really is far too formal a word for drinking a few beers and rambling for a while) up here. It’s a little lengthy — I apparently speak at a fair rate of words-per-minute — but I offer it in the hopes it’ll help.

— The Fundamentals

Another catch-up session for 'Diary' entries stuck on coasters — Transcribing notes from random coasters into the *Diary* itself

Embrace subjectivity: Beer, like all matters of taste, is a subjective experience and you should absolutely embrace it as one of life’s rare opportunities where you are guaranteed to not be wrong. If you like it, you like it; if you don’t, you don’t. No one can peer into the inner workings of your noggin and tell you otherwise.

Understand its limits: But there’s a world of difference between you liking something and it being good — in fact it’s hard to find a genuine sense in which the latter can be objectively true in a domain such as this. So don’t browbeat people with tastes unlike your own, and don’t ever put up with a disdainful look shot in your direction over a mere difference in subjective experience.

Arm yourself with a little knowledge: Beer’s a richly varied and fractally interesting thing, but it’s always struck me (as against, say, wine or literature or technological gadgetry) as a subject which disproportionately rewards even a little knowledge. A good-enough familiarity with the canonical styles will let you decide whether you think the beer “does what it says on the tin” — as close to a criteria for objective goodness as we’ll ever get — and some idea of their usual intended timings and pairings will help you judge a beer on its best form.¹ Some thought given to glassware and temperature will also be surprisingly effective at improving the experience (but we’ll get to that in a second) and it’s always worth having a quick look at the brewers’ own suggestions or what your fellow drinkers have to say — as long as you don’t let their words become Commandments.

Experiment, and pay attention: If, in the end, you enjoy something ‘abnormally’ and against the usual recommendations, that’s fine. You still bought the damn beer; it’s yours, and the brewery benefits from the sale no matter what the hell you do with their product.² You just have to keep track of what you like, and how you like it. That’s possibly easy for people with memories that function within the bounds of Human Normal, but I had to resort to taking notes — and I can’t be the only one, and it’s a task made massively easier by the ubiquity of smartphones and websites like RateBeer and Untappd, if you think pen-and-paper just way too passé. (And if all other memory-aids fail, start a blog. I’ve had heaps of fun with this one.)

— Glassware

Boston glasses all stacked up at Hashigo

Rule Number One: Use a glass. It really is that simple. In my bartending days, the frequency and smugness with which all-too-many people would turn down a glass for their bottled beer with the worn-out joke “it’s already in a glass” was deeply depressing. This is a basic confusion of adjectives for nouns,³ and anyone making it should be sentenced to spend a week back in primary school, trying to bend themselves into fitting those teeny little desks and chairs. Giving up on a glass is giving up on seeing your beer basically at all, and on getting its aroma in anything but the weakest hint of a waft. You have more than one sense, and it’d be a shame to not put them to use.

Rule #2 & #3 to Rule #∞: From here, things threaten to get massively complicated. There’s a dizzying array of glassware varieties available and no danger of a global shortage on advice of what “must” go in what. But I don’t have the memory to keep them all straight, nor do I have the money to make sure I own a few of each. And it really needn’t be that difficult:

Tall-ish glasses for beers which are: lighter (pale colours shine brighter), livelier (carbonation will be emphasised and you’ll get better head retention), simpler and more focused on being thirst-quenching — like pilsners and other pale lagers, most wheat beers and pale ales at the easier end of the spectrum.
Wide-ish glasses for beer which are: heavier (the beer will be able to warm a bit…), more complex (swirling in a nicely bulbed glass will really bring out aroma), slower and more of a sit-and-sip affair — like bigger pale ales, porter / stout, darker Belgians, etc..

That’ll serve you really well for starters, and won’t amount to a cause of stress on mind or wallet. There’s also lot of specialty and/or branded glassware around, and it’s nice to slowly assemble a collection, but they’re mostly just for fun. Some of them probably aren’t even “right” for their own beers: a chunky hexagonal Hoegaarden tumbler is rather striking but rubbish at preserving the beer’s soft bubbly head and the classic heavy beer-hall mass doesn’t do pale German lager any real favours — the size of them is more about ease of serving seven million litres of beer to as many people over Oktoberfest; their heft and handle are meagre concessions against having your beer go warm and gross as you drink.

Three Boys Golden Ale, one of *many* I’ve had

Three Boys Golden Ale, serving suggestions

As a Test Beer, we had a Three Boys Golden; a thing of pure marvellousness and an illustrative borderline case. Golden ales could go either way, depending on your mood and where they land on the spectrum — you could have one as a “lawnmower beer”⁴ or in a more contemplative mood. The one in the photo is also in a “Boston glass”, which is pretty standard in bars around here (and descends from half of a cocktail shaker, weirdly). They — like most beer festival glassware — are just exercises in compromise, really; usually both tall-ish enough and sufficiently wide-ish for most purposes. Finally, I think it’s a great case of how you should listen to — but not uncritically accept — the brewers’ suggestions: the label is bang on with its advice about how to store your bottles and with its plea that you drink like a grown-up, but I think that 8-11°C is way too warm for this beer…⁵

— Temperature

There’s no crucially important Rule Number One, here, comparable to the one there was with glassware. Once you’ve been convinced to pour your beer into a glass, and hopefully a vaguely suitable — and clean — one at that, you’re way ahead of the game and temperature will only be a secondary consideration. That said, there are two crappy suggestions worth dynamiting for good:

Boundary Road ‘Celsius’

Very, very cold indeed: Mainstream beers (and pale lagers especially) will often imply or outright declare that their beer is best damn near freezing point. Embarrassingly-many beer brands offer an elaborately-dispensed “Extra Cold” variant, but you just can’t physiologically taste much of anything down around zero degrees.⁶ Which is, of course, mostly the (unspoken) point; these are brands, not beers — they’ve given up on competing on flavour, concentrating instead on nonsense like product x being for Proper Southern Men and product y being for Urban Sophisticates.
Surprisingly warm: You can’t tend bar in the Antipodes for long without being lectured at length by a Briton who is adamant that the beer’s too cold and that proper beer (particularly “real ale”) should be dispensed at “room temperature”. This was never the case and overlooks the historical reality of beer being stored at cellar temperature — i.e., closer to 12° than the 22°-ish usually considered ideal ambient room temperature. If you or your friends live at cellar temperature, you are probably considered “in poverty” and eligible for government assistance, and perhaps shouldn’t be wittering your money away on luxuries like real ale.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and could generously be signposted as 4°-14° ish, broadly with lower temperatures for refreshing lighter beers and warmer ones for darker and more brooding sippers — quite nicely analogous and aligned, in a helpful coincidence, to the split outlined above for glassware. In general, thanks to various bits of physics you might remember from school, warmer temperatures will bring out more aroma and allow more carbonation to escape (i.e., the beer will feel flatter to drink) and will enhance (or just reveal) more flavour/s. Human sensitivity to sweetness and bitterness, particularly, increases with temperature and it’s not completely mad to say that beer is about the interplay of those two main basic tastes — so beers with depth and complexity will benefit enormously from a few more degrees Celsius. But more of everything will come out, including the fumey volatility that some higher-strength beers possess and the various faults the brewing process can kick up, so it’s very much a try-it-and-see situation.

For our Test Beer, here, we had Moa’s bloody-terrific Imperial Stout. It’s a brilliant behemoth of a thing, at 10+% and aged in Pinot Noir barrels. I think they’re going too far to suggest it be served “just below room temperature”, but it’s true that it has masses more character when served warmer, but so much so that some people preferred it cold. As with everything else: to each their own. And the beer’s a nice reminder that you should keep experimenting, and keep an open mind; Moa do a lot, marketing-wise, to enrage me — but they can still make a beer of real genius, one worthy of setting aside your anti-brandwank principles and not letting them turn into a complete boycott.

Again, the point is to keep the basic spectrum in mind, but not to stress out too much. Much-mourned beer-writing legend Michael Jackson (i.e., not one of the other ones) wrote about a five-category range of ideal serving temperatures, but the first three steps were separated by only a single degree Celsius each. Which is madness. I have plenty of gadgets, but a thermometer isn’t among them, and hardly anyone knows the precise temperature of their fridge — and if you’re drinking remotely-normal quantities in even-only-vaguely-normal conditions, your beer will slip between brackets on that scale as you drink. In my experience, taking a beer out of the fridge for a few minutes before opening it makes it nicely ‘cool’ but not too cold — and putting a beer in the fridge for a few minutes after storing it in a dark cupboard nicely approximates “cellar temperature”.⁷ Again; muck about, pay attention, and see how you go.

— Back to Fundamentals

Embrace subjectivity, within its proper limits. Arm yourself with a little knowledge — about styles, timing, glassware and temperature, but especially about what you yourself happen to enjoy. And if you’re in a bar and your desired way of doing things isn’t their usual way of doing things — if you want your beer warmer, cooler, or in a different glass than the bartender is reaching for — then you should damn-well feel entitled to say so. If they’re snobbish or uncooperative in response, find yourself another, better bar.

1: If you happen to not like a certain barleywine, for example, and you were tasting it at nine in the morning or while eating and explosively-hot curry (or, heaven forbid, both) then that’s probably more your fault than its, for dragging it so far from its ecological niche. (But, equally, if that’s how you like your barleywine… then by all means go nuts. Weirdo.)
2: Since there’s some considerable crossover among the fans of malted-barley-based beverages, I’ll happily say the same heretical thing about whisky. If you like yours with ice, or with Coke — or served in a Man’s hat, in which floats a single plum — I really don’t care. I usually take mine with a touch of water, or maybe a little ice cube, and I’d probably say that a subtle single malt is just money wasted if you’re mixing yours with sugary soda. But a sale is a sale, and brewing and distilling are precarious businesses which can use your cash to survive and keep snobbier drinkers supplied with booze.
3: It’s in a bottle made of glass. Similarly, I don’t live in “a wood”; I live in a house made of wood.
4: The usual nickname for the style is “Thinking Man’s Lager”, which is a) horribly snobbish, b) needlessly gendered, but still c) fairly close to the truth.
5: But again; if you like yours that warm, or warmer — go nuts.
6: The evidence also seems to be that if you’re actually exhausted — rather than just the sort of person to whom the “brand story” appeals — then drinks under around 4° are less refreshing. So the brandwank isn’t just lame, it’s unusually counterproductive.
7: Only use the freezer in emergencies and if you have excellent task memory / a timer of some kind handy; frozen beer is basically irretrievably fucked and won’t thaw back to normal.

Metablogging

An acceptance speech — and a welcome

August 21, 2012 Phil 10 Comments

Brewers' Guild Beer Awards 2012: Beer Writer of the Year — My surprising piece of new silverware

This is always a great time of year to be a beer geek. Beervana and its satellite events are like Woodstock meets Comic-Con meets some kind of secular-and-sudsy pilgrimage. But my week, hectic and exhausting as it undoubtedly was, took a turn for the surreal on Thursday night when I was sitting down at the Brewers’ Guild Awards dinner.

Formal proceedings of any kind aren’t usually My Thing — I don’t own a tie, any kind of proper grown-up clothes, or even a pair of shoes that aren’t my scuffed-and-trusty work boots. But I’ll make an exception for the weddings of friends, and for this. Beer People are My People, and Te Radar (our genuinely-excellent host) was right when he applauded the very real enthusiasm with which the whole room congratulated the individual who got the gong in each category.¹On its best days — which are mercifully in the majority — the craft beer community exemplifies that “rising tide lifts all boats” spirit, and the awards night demonstrated that.

Brewers Guild Awards 2012: Flavoured and Mucked-about-with — Garage Project’s trophy for ‘Dark Arts’ — and our newest-and-smallest piece of brewing equipment

Earlier in the year, the Brewers’ Guild had announced that they were adding a Beer Writer of the Year award to the lineup, and — on the suggestion of a few flatteringly-insistent people — I’d thrown my name in that proverbial hat. Halfway through the evening, my new colleagues at the Garage Project won an award, in what my unreliable memory has come to call the Flavoured And Mucked-About With category for ‘Dark Arts’ (a rather-lovely coffee bock, if I do say so), and I was admiring the surprisingly-functional trophy when James (from the Crafty Pint) began his spiel, quite-rightly praising the work of Alice Galletly (of the marathon and marvellous Beer for a Year blog) and Michael Donaldson (of the Sunday Star-Times, and author of the new Beer Nation book).

Then he mentioned that the possibly-somewhat-left-field winner’s work had entertained him with tales of Kegtris² and I had a head-spinning realisation and much-appreciated few-moments’ notice before he read my name out. In something of daze, I recall making a few thanks on the night — there are photos of me, and I look like I’m rambling something appropriate, at least — but I’ll take the chance to repeat myself / elaborate:

Brewers Guild Awards 2012: My ramble — Trying to thank all those who needed to be thanked

We punch way above our weight, here in the Little Country. Our craft beer is better than it should be, and so are the things that surround it; the bars, the design work, and the writing. We’ve got a fantastic little-but-growing community of people who give a damn and comment on the scene in various ways. Geoff Griggs, Neil Miller, Kieran Haslett-Moore, Michael Donaldson and a growing collection of bloggers all keep me entertained and informed on a regular basis — and I want to give particular mention to Alice Galletly for her tremendously inspiring project and to Jed Soane for his fantastic photography and his work documenting all aspects of the beer industry; both of them encouraged me to always try to lift my game and always reminded me of the fun of this rather-weird hobby of ours. I desperately wanted to say that it was an “honour just to be nominated” in their company, but the awards were such that they required us to nominate ourselves, which was itself an indescribably weird experience.

Standing in a room full of them, I also wanted to thank all the brewers — whether I liked their beers, or not. Plenty of the latter were in attendance, but it would be quite-literally impossible to write about beer if no one was making it, and I’m well aware that there’s plenty of hard work in each day at a brewery even if things go awry somehow with the end product or if the marketing department go and do something stupid so as to fire up my twitchy rage gland. Special mention must absolutely go to Epic’s Luke Nicholas, Liberty’s Joseph Wood and Yeastie Boys’ Stu McKinlay; three who were particular sources of encouragement (and of web traffic) from the early days.

Then finally: not-habitual-enough thanks are owed to my family and friends; especially George — my podcast partner in crime (and producer extraordinaire), the purchaser of the original Beer Diary itself, and my friend since before I can properly remember³ — and the marvellously-distracting Emma — a spotter of many typos, and tutor in better camera technique, in addition to being a brilliant accomplice in many day off and holiday beers. Taking home that trophy was a genuinely surreal and appreciated moment; I’ll do my best to live up to it, as it looms and leers at me from my bookcase.

And welcome along, new readers! Grab a beer,⁴ have a flip through the back catalogue and dip into the podcast if you like. I’m sure it’ll take me a while to catch up — it always does —with Beervana, its related events and their beers.⁵ But there’s always something deliriously good, or grumble-inducingly bad, going on in this business; I’ve never struggled for material despite occasionally fighting to find time.

1: Especially when it was Liberty’s Joseph Wood, collecting a hugely-deserved trophy in the US Ale Styles category for Yakima Monster. He damn-near got a standing ovation, in a hotly-contested class, and accepted his award in his own style: having just swallowed a spoonful of murderous hot sauce.
2: A word I use a lot — and possibly even coined, such is my fondness for the activity itself.
3: Which might not sound like much, coming from me. But you get the idea.
4: Or a cup of tea, or whatever. I don’t only write this thing with a beer at hand, and though many are recommended, none are mandatory.
5: Not that there are terrifically many, when you’re working during these things, it turns out.

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast s02e04: Reintroduction / Recap

August 14, 2012 Phil 9 Comments

There was a flurry of New Day Job productivity here, but the ramp-up to Beervana evidently derailed that somewhat. It’s an awesome time of year to be a beer geek, and I’ve got a brilliantly-enjoyable new gig in the beer business, but my best writing hours have always been from midnight to four — it’s probably genetic, for all I know — and I just haven’t found the time. That should begin to swing back, on the far side of this weekend.

So, with apologies for the delay, we here present an unintentionally-apt reintroduction and recap podcast episode, with less of a Topic For Discussion and more just two guys sitting down over a few beers. George and I hadn’t caught up for a while, and now — collectively — we haven’t seen you lot in some time, either. But nevermind that; welcome back and hello again. In his travels, George picked up a seriously neat new little recording gizmo, and it here makes its début. One immediate effect is that we suddenly go all stereo. We kind of like the effect, but if it drives you all mad — or just annoys some statistically-significant subset of you — we can smoosh it back to mono. We’ll also soon première some on-location footage that the New Gizmo gave us the opportunity to record, out and about. Feedback is always welcome — but even moreso when we go changing things a little.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface.

Show notes:

(0.45) Just to give them some top-of-the-list credit, the music is from the Split! EP by The Coconut Monkeyrocket and Martinibomb.
(1.05) It has been a long time, for which I repeat my apology (above).
(1.20) Fun fact: Magellan didn’t circumnagivate the globe. He only made it just past half way — only (some of) his expedition (eventually) got all the way home. I think the “wonders” in Civilization confused my younger self.
(1.30) Full disclosure is always good.
(4.20) See? (Above.)
(5.00) Beer of the Week #1: Tribute. Which didn’t even have to come all this way; I’ve seen it on the shelves at Thorndon New World. (Referring to the band as The Motherfuckin’ D is something George and I have done since reading Y: The Last Man.)
(8.50) No photos yet, sorry. I’ll hassle George.
(10.50) I was nervous that I was being confused by Cedric the Sparkly Vampire, but no, he really is Ron Pattinson — and his blog is wonderfully wonk-tastic reading.
(12.15) That’s how topical this one isn’t; the Olympics have mercifully ended.
(13.30) Yep. That’s about right: the output of the Boston Beer Company (usually known just as Sam Adams) roughly equals the entire beer production of New Zealand — something in the order of 300M litres.
(14.00) I was being inadvertently high-brow, there: McSorley’s is a famous pub, for historical and painterly reasons. (To double up on the comic book references, it’s possible it’s in my brain thanks to Preacher.)
(15.00) Indeed; it seems the Americans seized the clean-slate provided by the repeal of Prohibition, and basically prevented tied houses from re-appearing.
(16.00) This is my distorted view from the Pacific, I think; Sierra Nevada is only about a third the size of Sam Adams / Boston Beer, in production terms.
(18.20) Not even remotely kidding. Yerk.
(19.00) George’s U.S. Recommendations: Cape Cod Beer and Carolina Brewery. Plus, the Warren Tavern and the Pony Bar, Hell’s Kitchen.
(23.10) Beer of the Week #2: Long Trail Coffee Stout. Vermont does indeed have needlessly-weird terminology for such things, as seems to be U.S. tradition. Also, just as a note to marketers and label designers: if I’m already holding the bottle, you don’t need to tell me how to find it. I forgot to get a photo of it, but The Google can be relied upon to come to the rescue.
(27.50) Unrecommendation: Croucher Coffee Stout / Ethiopean Pale Ale.
(31.00) Captain Parker’s Pub’s website is worth visiting…
(34.50) I have a very involved anti-tipping rant, if anyone’s keen to hear it.
(35.30) “Sleeped”? Getting up in the mornings really has broken me.
(36.30) Listener demographics. Because the internet will drown you in statistics, if you let it. And bonjour, our Mysterious Listener(s) in Poitou-Charentes. Also, I’m not kidding: I totally support D.C. Statehood; no taxation without representation, amirite?
(38.50) “News” will largely be “olds”, since I’m so far behind in posting this. Sorry about that (again, again). Though, fittingly, I’m drinking a Deep Creek ‘Dusty Gringo’ as I type up these notes. Alice did finish the 365 and ring in her own personal new year — and mark its extra day with a homebrew named “Stickler”, just for good form. Although, surprisingly topically, Liberty 365 will get it’s Wellington launch at Hashigo this Thursday (i.e., the 16th).
(42.50) This is a busy time of year. Hence the delay (sorry; again, again, again). IPA Challenge and Matariki have been and gone — but we recorded footage at both, which we’ll post soon. And the “Matariki” trademark is pretty freakin’ bogus, but it seems that the winery does own the marks in the relevant classes — which just means a) they’re over-registering bastards, and b) the Trademark Office dropped the ball, again.
(43.30) Beervana’s now less than a week away, of course. We’ll have the new recording gizmo with us there, too, and will hopefully get some interviews and such.
(45.20) Recommendation: Three Boys Best Bitter. Seriously; have some. And Dale’s Doppelbock, which was delightful winter fuel. And I do love the Thirsty Boys’ haiku.
(50.10) On the Beer List: Ben (“Yahtzee”) Crowshaw. His ‘Zero Punctuation’ is an absolute thing of genius. The “grumpy ones” I refer to here were D.B Export Beer and Hofbrau Maibock ones — my Day Job Productivity Increase was de-railed shortly thereafter by said day job getting busy to ramp up toward Beervana. (And there we go: three comic book references. You should seriously read Transmetropolitan. And incidentally, the author just put up a mournful rant about the Olympics Closing Ceremony which gets just the tone I mean.)
(54.30) Go to Beervana! (There will still be — some — tickets available.)
(55.30) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both. And I still have Tenacious D’s ‘Tribute’ stuck in my head, by the way.

Rambles and rants

‘Porter Noir’

July 26, 2012 Phil 19 Comments

Monteith's 'Single Source' — Monteith’s ‘Single Source’; the only one of their beers in my Diary

So Monteith’s — i.e., D.B. (i.e., Asia Pacific Breweries) — has re-commissioned the Greymouth brewery that they, in a near-unprecedented display of tin-eared-ness, originally decided to close back in 2001. It was essentially a museum for several years, but they’ve decided to spark it up again, to produce a range of (self-described) craft beers throughout the year. The first out the doors were, apparently an unfiltered apricot wheat beer and an IPA, which I really will have to try because a) the apricot wheat thing from their rival Speight’s (i.e., Lion) still reigns as the worst beer I’ve ever tasted (and I don’t imagine for a moment the problem was merely that it, unlike this new one, was filtered), and b) a quote-unquote “IPA” from the company who make Tui could frankly be anything. They freely use those initials on a New Zealand Draught / Amber Lager, after all, so who knows whatever-the-fuck they’ve just made in Greymouth. A company so apparently-unafraid of the Consumer Guarantees and Fair Trading Acts could’ve put anything in a bottle with that on the label; a saison, an actual radler — or apple juice, or 330ml of rainbows. I am, I’ll admit, morbidly curious.

But most interesting to the local craft beer community — the real one — is the news that they’ll be releasing a “porter noir”. A few seconds with The Google will confirm that basically no-one has used that phrase in regards beer other than the much-loved Hallertau brewpub outside Auckland. And there’s very good reason for that: “noir” (i.e., “black”) is ordinarily redundant if you’re talking porter — they’re already black (or at least very-dark-brown). Hallertau’s offering is aged in Pinot Noir barrels, so for them, it’s an instance of the longstanding pun / portmanteau tradition in beer naming. For the record, I freakin’ adore Hallertau’s “Porter Noir”; you should try it, if you haven’t, and I’m frankly rather embarrassed it’s not in my Diary. Since the barrels retain plenty of wine flavours and are dosed with / already home to Brettanomyces, the beer acquires a gorgeously tart-and-funky character. I recently had a sample from a two-year-old bottle, and it ages stupendously well.

Hallertau Saison (from sufficiently long-ago that the photo was taken with my old camera — my new one would’ve managed the focus considerably better than this; sorry)

What, though, could the name mean to Monteith’s / D.B.? Like I said, noir is redundant. Unless, perhaps, you’re intentionally tweaking Hallertau.⁴ Despite the beer being produced for several years now, the phrase was never registered as a trademark — and I’d be up for arguing that a good sign of the health of a real craft brewery lies in the paucity of their trademark portfolio — although it seems they’ve applied today.¹During what is surely by now known as The Radler Fiasco, one of the often-overlooked little titbits was that D.B. also held the trademark on “Saison”, a word which is just as straightforwardly an unregistrable style term as “radler” ever was.² Surprisingly sensibly, they quietly abandoned the mark and entirely neglected to take a swipe at Hallertau for producing a saison — and calling it such — while D.B. “owned” the word.³ Maybe they’ve held a grudge all this time, and this is their petty little way of having the last word years later, like some insufficiently-witty sap who thinks of the perfect sharp-tongued comeback in the car on the way home. This should be fascinating to watch play out. Pass the popcorn — and the Porter Noir.

Finally, on a Small World / Personal History note, I recently discovered that the current brand manager for Monteith’s is a former colleague of mine from way back in my first-ever bar job, a decade and a half ago. We haven’t spoken since, but I do like the weirdness of both of us winding up — via long and circuitous arcs — in different (and, let’s face it, opposed) corners of the the beer business. Perhaps it’s time for a catch-up.

Epilogue, 31 July: Hallertau put up a message on Twitter today, saying D.B. have claimed that they didn’t realise the name “Porter Noir” was in use and were undertaking to take the N-word (so to speak) off the label — after Beervana.

D.B.’s undertaking as to timing is, for a start, a dick move. The beer hasn’t been released yet, so the good-form thing to do upon discovering an innocent mistake like this (taking them, provisionally, at their word) is to re-do the labels anyway. That’s precisely what the Yeastie Boys did when it was brought to their attention that the planned logo for a new company, Hops Valley, was coincidentally rather-similar to the one they’d had designed for Gunnamatta. This case is even plainer, because Porter Noir has existed for ages.

Which, if you think about it, is the bigger problem for D.B.. Their claim of innocence in the matter of standing all over an existing product is equivalent to an admission of complete cluelessness in the business of craft beer — Porter Noir has existed for ages. There really isn’t a middle path, no way for D.B. / Monteith’s to chart a course between Badness and Dumbness without touching the sides. Since Badness tends to be more legally actionable, it’s not surprising which bank they veered towards, but it’s a revealing ‘resolution’ to the #porternoirsaga all the same.

It’s a sprawling enough organisation that they’ll always be able to piece together plausible deniability, but — given their history of brandwank, distortion and the potential relevance of the old “Saison” trademark — I remain unconvinced.

Post-epilogue, 1 August: There’s a really good write-up of the whole affair in today’s paper. Beer-related stories are still all-too-often abysmally written and under-researched, but that piece is fair, goes into enough background, and doesn’t shy away from pointing out how embarrassing this is / should be for D.B..

But I just can’t agree that the answer to this kind of drama is more trademarks. It’d be unrealistic and would amount to a nagging disincentive if breweries large and small were expected to pay IPONZ (and probably a lawyer) each time they came up with a new beer — and if everything was filed that way, we’d quickly amass a back-catalogue of untouchable but rusting and unused names pointlessly locked away or worse, we’d encourage speculative registration-squatting and name hoarding.

It is absolutely not Steve Plowman’s fault that D.B. were poised to steal his beer’s name, inadvertently or not; he’s way too generous in saying that, to the point where I hope he doesn’t believe it and is just exercising restraint and being political — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in moderation. The Google isn’t hard to use, and someone at D.B. / Monteith’s should’ve exercised the merest possible give-a-damn and checked. And if they did find Hallertau’s beer, or did already know about it, the fact it was unregistered shouldn’t matter. Civil behaviour, even in business, isn’t complicated: don’t be a dick.

1: The website for IPONZ (the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand) is fatally and inexcusably stupid in the way it ‘times out’ your session and doesn’t allow the bookmarking or linking of individual reports. But if you go and search “Porter Noir”, you’ll find a submission dated 26 July 2012 (i.e., today) from “Pacific Brew Limited”, which seems to be the official company name for Hallertau.
2: In the main run, spirit and original intent of trademark law, at least. And, you know, in my own honest opinion. Ahem.
3: IPONZ, in their history of the mark, note that it was cancelled per an email of 7 September 2009. That photo, above, is of a Hallertau Saison I was drinking in July of that year.
4: It belatedly occurs to me — he says, writing on the 27th, hence the out-of-sequence footnote — that I should explicitly allow for the possibility that Monteith’s are also planning to Pinot-up their porter. I discounted that in my initial run of writing, assuming (perhaps too generously) that a) the newspaper write-up would’ve leapt all over / at least mentioned a detail like that and b) there just hasn’t been time to barrel something out of the new brewery — but then: this company might be willing to simply dose the beer with Barrel Essence and a goon-bag of Dollar-store Pinot Flavoured Wine Substitute (he says, firmly in the spirit of satire, if the lawyers are still reading). Then it just becomes a question of whether they’re intentionally tweaking Hallertau by lifting the name, whether they’re sufficiently-removed from the real craft beer scene that they’d never heard of it (Dux de Lux, for example, Pinot’ed a porter and called it “Pinot Porter”; other names are possible), or whether it really was an honest mistake and they’ll now — Hallertau have written to them to arrange a meeting next week — back down. Given D.B.’s history, they’ll have to just excuse me if I can’t be so generous as to assume the latter is the case.

Actual Diary entries

Dieu du Ciel! ‘Rigor Mortis’ Abt and Invercargill ‘Men’n Skurrts’

July 24, 2012 Phil Leave a comment

Back when I was less behind in my posting of Diary entries — before I reached a full-calendar-year transcendental state of lateness — there were frequent strange moments of sitting in the sun writing about a moody winter beer, or vice versa.¹ But not right now. Here I sit, drinking a rather-charming Fuller’s Double Stout on a drizzly, cold evening and looking back over notes from somewhen similar and two differently-seasonal beers enjoyed in succession.

In combination with the weather, the fact it was my Canadian friend Jillian’s birthday prompted me to grab a Quebecker beer from the Hashigo fridge that I’d been eyeing up for a while — especially after a positive experience with one of its stablemates.² I didn’t know it at the time, but there are evidently a whole slew of Rigor Mortises — or Rigor Mortii, or Rigors Mortis, or however-the-fuck that should take the plural — but this one, the “Abt” / Quadrupel seems to be the most common. It’s wintery and huge, and I can’t tell if it’s an Adorable Snowman dressed as the Abominable kind, or the other way around. It doesn’t feel like it’s 10.5%; there’s no hot or fumey booze to it, it’s just all deliciously decadent warm, dark, fruity gorgeousness. But maybe that’s just its game; to entice you to drink pint after pint (or oddly-volumed bottle after oddly-volumed bottle)³ until it justifies its ominous name.

And then, something that looked vaguely similar in the glass, but which has a rather different character, a strikingly different history, and its origins in one of the most different things to come along in a good while. At the time — i.e., today, last year — the story of ‘Men’n Skurrts’ was one of those weird middle-ground “open secrets” that you get in a close-knit minority-sector community like that which surrounds craft beer: Yeastie Boys’ ‘Rex Attitude’, brewed — like all their beers — at Invercargill Brewery, had so tainted the system with its gloriously / glaringly smoky flavour that it peatified⁴ the next brew through the pipes, namely Pink Elephant’s ‘Mammoth’.⁵ It frustrated me that everyone involved wasn’t just more open about it; there’s no shame in the “mistake”, it hardly being a mistake at all, and literally no point in opening the valves and dumping a few-thousand litres of perfectly-delicious beer down the municipal pipes. So it wasn’t what it originally set out to be — very many good things aren’t.⁶ In the intervening year, everyone’s been getting better at this, at just owning up to these random mutations and embracing them honestly. But there’s still a long way to go. I’m firmly of the belief that more information is more good, and that — done properly — letting consumers in on these things will only help increase their engagement and grow the community.

Anyway.⁷ The World is richer for having ‘Men’n Skurrts’ in it, however the beer was begat. It’s got a wonderfully relaxing kind of subtle, rewarding complexity to it; big warming malt flavours (without too much strength) and a winning hint of soft smoke. If you were sitting in your big, comfy chair, reading an enthralling book and slowly drinking this — it’d make up for the fact that your cold-but-charming house doesn’t have a fireplace.

Original Diary entries: Dieu du Ciel! ‘Rigor Mortis’ 24/7/11 — Happy Birthday Jillian! — $11ish from HZ 341ml (crazy Quebeckers) 10.5% which it doesn’t taste like. It’s a softer, less-tart Trois Pistoles. Similarly hugely, only warmingly boozy; not fumey or instantly hot. Although actually succumbing to the temptation to have pints might be fatal, and justify the scary name. Pleasantly a little sweet.

Invercargill ‘Men’n Skurrts’ 24/7/11 $8-ish 330ml from HZ Apparently, you know, rumor has it, this is a Rex Attitude side-effect. We’re told that the next beer was still so heavily peatified, it became this instead. And it’s really good fun. You can taste a cold-smokey sideline, but nevermind the story, it’s a worthy thing.

Diary II entry #125, Dieu du Ciel! 'Rigor Mortis'

Diary II entry #126, Invercargill 'Men'n Skurrts'

1: Admittedly, I wasn’t necessarily a whole season out of synch; Wellington’s famously idiosyncratic weather played a large role.
2: And, just because I’m like that, I can’t help but notice that I’ve here referred back to a beer a had immediately after 8 Wired’s ‘Tall Poppy’ — to which I harked back in the blog post before this one. If you keep detailed enough notes, and have Just One Of Those Brains, nice little coincidences are everywhere.
3: 341ml? Really? Three hundred and forty-one? It doesn’t even translate to a sensible amount of ounces; it’s eleven and a half. (Although, admittedly, I’d be angrier if they wrote “11.5 floz” on the label. Something about decimal points in non-metric measurements gives me spasms.)
4: Now that I actually type that word out — rather than just hear it in my own brain — it occurs to me that you could pronounce it to rhyme with “beatified”, which would fit nicely with the reverential attitude some people have to those wonderfully sharp phenols.
5: Which, coincidentally, Alice Galletly wrote about recently. Another pleasant coincidence.^a
— a: See above, n1.
6: Possibly my favourite example: Dr. Strangelove was written as a thriller, not a dark, satirical farce.
7: If you did want more, I recommend the write-up on the subject by my friend and former Malthouse colleague, Jono Galuszka — which he wrote the same night^b I speculated (incorrectly, it turns out) that Moo Brew’s lovely new ‘Belgo’ might be another Happy Accident.
— b: And another. See above, n1 and n5.

Actual Diary entries

Croucher ‘Double D’ and Raindogs ‘Apothecary’

July 23, 2012 Phil Leave a comment

It is, for some reason, traditional that here in Wellington trans-Tasman flights arrive Eastward around midnight and depart Westward just before sunrise. I suppose it makes its own kind of sense, but it does mandate some bleary-eyed mornings and lead to the occasional un-bookable blank evening if you’re excitably waiting for a plane to land. On this particular day, Emma was inbound for a holiday and I was parked up at Hashigo with her High School friend and former flatmate Joaquin — who, for reasons of pronunciation and my weird sense of humour, I simply refer to (not just in my notes) as “The Spaniard” — while we waited for the time to head to the airport to meet her late-night arrival.

My first beer, Croucher’s take on a Hoppy Red / India Red Ale, is apparently named after their two junior brewers — Dave and Dave — rather than anything, you know, boob-ish.¹ It didn’t have the vibrantly glowing redness of Bright Brewery’s ‘Resistance Red’, instead appearing more like a somewhat-paler version of that hazy crimson in the prototype batch of 8 Wired’s ‘Tall Poppy’, which was a minor-league disappointment. Overall, the beer was enjoyable, for sure, with nicely fresh fruitiness about it — but I just couldn’t shake the oddness of a slightly minerally / flinty note. In addition to a slightly-too-thin body, I just kept being reminded of tonic water² and became gripped by thoughts of an equally-red gin to go with it. Which is madness of a kind that I can’t entirely blame on the beer, certainly, though I should stress that I subscribe to the belief that gin is amazing — and so anything that puts it to my mind is work a look. ‘Double D’ tastes like a First Draft, but one that’s well on its way to its goal.

Raindogs 'Apothecary', on the pump — Raindogs 'Apothecary'

It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, and I found myself with time to spare, so I had another. And I spent some time struggling to figure out what to have next before noticing the ‘Apothecary’ Amber badge on the handpull right in front of my face. I’ve had a few Raindogs beers — including one during the podcast recorded between this Diary entry and the previous — and they’ve all been solid so far. This was no exception, and succeeded in being just the right beer for the moment. Perched on the handpull for the photo, it was appropriately “Amber”, but under the lights and sitting on the white Daily Menu it managed to seem redder than the intended red thing before it. It suited the (sparkler-ed) handpull really nicely, pouring with a smooth off-white head that made it look like a (widget-ed) Kilkenny, while tasting more like one from a neighbouring, much more exciting alternate universe than the stuff we’ve got here in our World. It was velvety and sessionable, with a really delicious burnt-toffee finishes that goes on for ages and ages. Or at least long enough to bide your time with, until you’re due at the airport.

Original Diary entry: Croucher ‘Double D’ 7/6/12 (6%, $11, 425ml) @ Hashigo with the Spaniard while Emma’s in the air. Hoppy red ale, but not sirenny like Bright’s. Hazy ruddy amber. Nicely odd nose + taste. Flinty? Like tonic water in that minerally fruitiness. Makes me want red gin, not that that’s a thing. And then a Raindogs ‘Apothecary’ Amber (4.9%, $8, 380ml) which is nearly as “red”. Lovely and smooth and easy, like Kilkenny from a non-boring alternate universe. Lovely burnt-toffee note and a long finish. Just what I wanted.

Diary II entry #223.1, Croucher 'Double D'

Diary II entry #223.2, Croucher 'Double D'

1: They’re obviously also going for the bra-size-pun, of course. But the fact that they do have two Daves on staff and the fact that they also drop a Dr. Seuss reference entirely excuses the laddish humour — in this case — if you ask me.
2: Speaking (as I was) of 8 Wired, prototypes, red beers and tonic water — Søren’s experimental low-alcohol ‘Underwired’ had a similar note and a similar cast, so there might be something in the water chemistry or something about that red malt that kicks up that minerally taste, to me.

Actual Diary entries

Liberty / Galbraith’s ‘Yakima Monster’

July 22, 2012 Phil 10 Comments

That right there is a real contender to win the Outstanding Achievement of Awesomeness in Tap Badge Design award.¹ It’s fair to say the craft beer scene in our little nation punches well above its weight, but it’s worth also pausing to celebrate the easily-arguable notion we’re also rather spoiled in the design department.² Beer’s a weird thing, art-assets-wise; it’s some peculiar mix of the bland, the offensively naff, the apparently-homemade, the fine-but-boring, the showy and overblown — with, at the top end, plenty of cleverly-done and extremely effective designs and occasional moments of pure freakin’ genius.³ Liberty’s main run is definitely of the clever-and-effective sort, and this comes from that final bracket of brilliance.

I’m a comic-book nerd from way back, and I just love how this takes the larger format of a pumpclip (compared to a tap badge) and crams the space full of a shambling horde of wonderfully classic-looking hideous beasts, who are familiar and yet not just copyright-infringingly lifted from somewhere else. If you were so inclined, you could stretch that into a nice metaphor for the beer itself, since — in this incarnation as the most-recent installment of Galbraith’s utterly-genius cask ale series — it’s assuringly recognisable and excitingly different at the same time. And you can enjoy that interplay from either direction, depending on whether your default position is closer to the world of handpulled pints in a nice quiet pub (making this nicely supercharged) or bigger and brasher U.S.-style hoppy pale ale (in which case, the low-carbonation delivery makes this one quite charmingly sedate).

The beer’s big, but it’s definitely a friendly giant — just like the brewer, if you were keen to needlessly pile on metaphors purely because they work. The booze is high — relative, particularly, to things usually served off the pump — and the hops are plentiful, but the way they’re put together makes the whole thing lush, fat and delicious. The fullness of it and the fruitiness of the flavours made me think of pineapple barley sugars — if such things exist; are the yellow ones intended to be pineapple? I can never quite tell — and it made for an incredibly satisfying pint on a lovely night at the pub. “Queen’s Birthday weekend”⁴ makes for a predictably-quieter-than-usual Friday evening in town and that, to me, is a marvellous thing. There was a veritable boatload of Liberty on tap in addition to this thing — which also existed in a cask-conditioned gravity-pour version, perched on the bartop.

I don’t have the kind of hyper-palate that found the cask and handpump versions massively different. That said, I only had a little sample of the former, which proved queue-inspiringly popular when it was tapped, though now I wish I’d taken the chance to side-by-side pints of the two. I was definitely at the bar in a celebratory rather than investigatory mood; my notes went largely neglected as I just enjoyed the company and the beer. The quieter-than-average night and the Liberty-packed taps upped the proportion of “beer people” in the room, and it was great — like an End-of-Week Bumper Edition of Tuesday’s long-standing Beer Geek Church. Jo seemed to be having a great time, and was definitely in fine form when George and I sat down with him (and Mike, from Tuatara) to record a podcast the next day.

The local craft beer community is fortunate to have Jo; he seems really generous with his time and his expertise (which includes wonderfully-minute details of brewing and engineering), and he’s possessed of a worryingly unique sense of humour. And the beer-drinking public is damn lucky to have his beers on the market. I can’t remember ever having one that seemed naff or wide of its target. There’s a very-credible rumour — though no official confirmation, yet — that there are soon to be much great numbers of Yakima Monsters roaming the world, with a vastly-more-voluminous contract brew coming up.

Yakima Monster was born, together with Yeastie Boys’ Motueka Monster, out of a nice little meta-competition run between their brewers alongside Malthouse’s long-running West Coast IPA Challenge. The two pit American- against locally-grown hops, and the latter has already been promoted to full-scaled production as ‘Digital IPA’.* That beer has a regular place in my cupboards and provided the perfect ‘occasion beer’ with which to mark my own nerdy observance of Alan Turing’s centenary. If I can readily stock my beer-stash with bottles of Yakima Monster, my house will be even more of a home.

* Correction, the next morning: As Joe (with an -e!) notes in the comments below, Digital IPA wasn’t originally Motueka Monster, it was Motueka Warrior — the Yeastie Boys half of their head-to-head from a different year’s IPA Challenge.

Original Diary entry: Liberty / Galbraith’s ‘Yakima Monster’ 1/6/12 6% on handpull, and a smidge from the cask on the bar, thanks to Steph. After a day in the Garage with Joe⁵ + Mike, now hanging with Hadyn⁶ + Narelle. Oodles of Liberty! It’s everywhere. So is Joe. This is lush. Not scary at all. Like pineapple barley sugars. Fat and delicious. Not a huge difference from the cask — just a little more apparent bitterness, maybe? It’s a quiet-ish evening (“Queen’s Birthday” weekend), but a lovely night at the pub. And suddenly there’s a Yakima Scarlet in front of me. Huzzah.

Three-of-many Liberty tap badges — Three (of many) Liberty tap badges

Diary II entry #222, Liberty 'Yakima Monster'

Yeastie Boys 'Digital' IPA, on Turing's Centenary

1: Which admittedly doesn’t yet exist, but should.
2: Thanks to the work of — among many others — Barry Hannah, Anton Hart, and the folks at Deflux.
3: Examples? Off the top of my head, per category: 1) The Peak beers or Stoke’s main range, 2) anything from Pumpclip Parade, and possibly things like Wanaka Beerworks’ ‘Lady’ and the Bennett’s beers, 3) Mussel Inn (though not, in that case, in a bad way; it suits them, charmingly-odd hippies that they are), 4) Sprig & Fern, maybe, 5) Moa, naturally — and 6) Three Boys, Renaissance, Yeastie Boys and Hallertau’s Main Range / Numbered Four, then 7) things like Garage Project’s ‘Day of the Dead’^a and especially Hallertau’s ‘Heroic’ Range, i.e., the big 750ml bottles with the mock-classical relief art. I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and I honestly think ‘Stuntman’ might just be the Best Beer Label Ever, Anywhere; it’s gorgeous, classy, and understatedly hilarious at the same time.
— a: Again: disclosures, disclosures.
4: Scare-quotes made necessary by a) it not being the actual birthday of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and b) by me being the sort of Republican (in the philosophical / small-r / non-U.S. party political history sense) who’d rather not celebrate these things at all.
5: It wasn’t until I was writing up the podcast we recorded the next day that I checked around online and found that the preferred / consensus abbreviation for Joseph is, in this case, just “Jo”.
6: Hadyn’s got an uncommon-but-not-unheard-of spelling for his name, and I occasionally blank out on just how it goes. I’m rather pleased with the little trick I came up with, in my handwritten notes, to split the difference between my two best guesses.

Rambles and rants

Boundary Road’s ‘The Resident’

July 18, 2012 Phil 25 Comments

First, let’s just go ahead and stipulate that Brian — ‘Spike’ — Buckowski is a totally stand-up dude and a talented brewer. I’ve heard absolutely nothing to the contrary and it was pretty clear from the blog of his travels that he was an open-minded and enthusiastic traveler to our little country at the bottom of the World and I’ve had Terrapin (his home brewery) recommended to me rather highly. I genuinely wish I’d bumped into him and been able to share a beer. Second, I’ll emphasise that I haven’t — yet — tried the beers that resulted from his ‘residency’ at “Boundary Road Brewery” / Independent Liquor. Maybe they’re great. I sure hope they are, because my curiosity simply won’t let me not try them.

For now, the brewer and his beers aren’t the point. I’ll even readily concede that the ‘residency’ itself was a good idea. Boundary Road’s beers are pants; on their best day they’re bland and uninteresting mega-scale buckets of cheap swill — and at their worst, they’re weapons-grade vileness of the sort you’d hurl at the footsoldiers of an oppressive regime. Maybe the whole project started in the mind of someone with sincere and genuine intent. But it doesn’t look that way anymore, after the marketing department had their way with it. The problem here — say it with me now — is brandwank.

The Brewery blurb — The "Brewery" blurb on theresident.co.nz

It’s not even a real brewery, for fuck’s sake. The “Boundary Road Brewery” is a recently-developed imprint of Independent Liquor, an outfit for whom I think the phrase Industrial Alcoholic Beverages Manufacturer is a far better fit than “brewery”, given that they also make a bewildering array of RTDs and will sell you some in a three litre box — among other reasons I chronicled in my ‘Chosen One’ write-up not so very long ago. They’ve also got some pretty-amazing gall if they can straight-face the claim that “here the great tradition of independent New Zealand brewing continues…”, given that they’re now a subsidiary of Asahi — a buy-out which is the only reason they’ve got the scratch to fund this kind of stunt in the first place. They’re on a well-resourced mission to take up a seat beside Lion and D.B. in the local market (in more ways than one), but they’re trying to pretend they’re just another humble-and-battling little guy. Hell, there’s even a small suggestion that Spike didn’t realise the real nature of the “brewery” until he walked in the door.

And then it’s all introduced with a surprising degree of wank and implied insult to the already-existing and honestly-independent parts of the local scene with a slickly-produced video that’s well worth a close viewing:

The halo around the gate is partly to obscure the reality of “Independent” as a sprawling industrial site, not some cutesy little place “nestled in the foothills of the Hunua Ranges”.
“A brewer the likes of which this country had never seen” is pretty fucking outrageously insulting to the talents of the locals, frankly. And if you just want to be pedantic and claim they didn’t mean a slight on the quality of local brewers — just on their mere local-ness — then I can point to Sam Caligione, anyway. Another renowned American brewer,¹ he came here a few years ago for an honest-to-goodness collaboration with Epic.
Athens, Georgia is the home of REM. Which is a fine and worthy thing to be. I’ve never — until now — heard anyone call it the home of craft brewing.
Other than a few give-away shots, the editor really does deserve credit for keeping up the illusion of “Boundary Road” as a little self-existing thing, rather than a column in the balance sheet of something humongous.
The pilot-batch recipe for Resident IPA does seem to have a decent whack (what, 5g/L?) of New Zealand hops — particularly Sauvin and NZ Cascade — and so could be good fun. Depending on the faults / recipe changes the big-batch brings, of course…

Garage Project 'L'il Red Rye' tap badge — Garage Project ‘L’il Red Rye’ tap badge

That, and despite their enthusiastic claims, red rye beers aren’t “new to this market”. Granted, the only one that springs immediately to my mind is Garage Project’s short-run ‘L’il Red Rye’,² but if Independent are going to go to all this effort to lecture the local craft beer industry, we’re probably entitled to have them pay attention. Given that their stated “project” is “to introduce new ideas and recipes into the NZ craft beer world” and their other two ‘resident’ beers are a pilsner and an IPA, they did kind-of oblige themselves to hype it up, but The Google isn’t exactly difficult to use, is it? The worst bit of that, though, is how — when their error was brought to their attention after a few people pointed it out today, myself included — they just cheerfully threw Spike under the bus and blamed him for not knowing, rather than apologising for not checking. It’s all just a bit sad.

And aggravating. Because there’s a lot of money behind this, and going by what I hear from the front lines of retail, they’re reaching a lot of people. More than a few voices in the beer community are just glad to see someone other than the Big Two doing well, and are optimistic that this’ll expand the reach of the craft sector. The Lion / D.B. duopoly justifiably draws a lot of ire, but “Boundary Road” / Independent aren’t trying to kick that over in any laudable way; they’re just here to take their slice. Their price point makes it clear that they’re aggressively pursuing people who aren’t ordinarily “craft beer” consumers, and they’re targeting them with a) massive distortions riddled with cynical bullshit and b) beer that’s often just fault-riven and dire. Neither horn of that dilemma should be any comfort to anyone fond of good beer and interested in the long-run growth of the sector. And the people who push this stuff are so practiced at it — and our media so lazy / overworked (depending on your sympathies) — that the odds of any kind of reality-check in the inevitable, free, and uncritical coverage these stunts get is essentially nil.

Again: the “Resident” range might be worthy, as beer. I’m looking forward to finding out, and will do my level best to try it fairly. But the project remains a con. This is one of the real problems with relentless brandwank; even when the product itself is praiseworthy, it can perpetuate a whole bunch of truly depressing trends. Try as you might, you can’t attach an explanatory note to the money you hand over when you buy this stuff and there doesn’t exist a line-item veto over which aspects of the company budget your money supports. If you’re in, you’re in — as much as you’d perhaps prefer to side-step the marketing department and just pay the brewer directly.

1: Moreso, if anything — no offence meant to Spike, but Sam and Dogfish Head are legendary on a whole ’nother scale. And you’d think the ad-men might’ve known about that, given that Dogfish Head brewery was one of the dummy answers for their multiple-choice quiz’s question on where Spike came from.
2: Which I had back in January of this year, while I was still a Malthouse employee, sitting at Hashigo Zake on my night off. Now, I’m an employee of the people who made it and the place I drank it. Things change. But I suppose it’s worth noting that I’m not on the clock (for anyone) right now, and wasn’t when all this came to my notice.

— The Fundamentals

— Glassware

— Temperature

— Back to Fundamentals

Show notes:

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot