Craft Beer

For a whole bunch of reasons, New Zealand went from a land with dozens of breweries a century ago, to just two in the period between 1976-81.

A lot of the rationalisation happened in the era after World War Two as the two big breweries – New Zealand Breweries (later to become Lion) and Dominion Breweries (now DB Breweries) – fought tooth and nail for market share.

Those two big breweries bought small, regional breweries around the country and closed most of them so that brewing happened in just five spots. Lion had sites at Newmarket, Christchurch and Dunedin, with Speight’s. DB had breweries in South Auckland and Timaru.

What’s more, the two breweries – for a long time – shared a curious New Zealand technology called Continuous Fermentation invented by brewing legend Morton Coutts, whose family started DB.

Continuous Fermentation was effectively a beer machine that required little human intervention -  raw beer, known as wort, went in at one end and beer came out the other. At that point hop extract, colour and sugar were added to tweak the flavour and look.

It was an effective mechanism for quick beer and a heck of an invention but bore little resemblance to traditional brewing.

The two brewing giants had an effective duopoly. In fact, DB let Lion use the Continuous Fermentation technology in return for a slice of market share – which was allocated via pub ownership. Yes, as well as being the only two producers, the two giants owned all the pubs!

Literally, Kiwis were getting the same beer no matter what it said on the label and had no real choice.

That is until a little battler called Terry McCashin came along and fought the big boys by setting up Mac’s in the Nelson suburb of Stoke.

A former All Black, garbage collector and publican, McCashin went against the two giants because every time he tried to buy a hotel, one of them swooped in and nabbed it. He wanted to run an independent pub but couldn’t.

His brewery was a way of giving a one-fingered salute to the establishment.

And once Mac’s broke the duopoly deadlock, other breweries came along – chancing their arm at cracking what was once a closed market.

Not many of these survived and of those who started in the 1980s, only Sunshine in Gisborne, and Mike’s in Taranaki are still going.

Back in the 80s, no-one used the term craft beer – the preferred moniker was microbrewery.

That was how the newcomers differentiated themselves – they were small and independent – microscopic when compared with the two giants.

And in reality, this is one of the few ways they could distinguish themselves because the truth is many of these microbreweries were making the same kind of beer as Lion and DB just on a smaller, DIY scale.

The reasons for that were a limited choice of ingredients – including malt, hops and yeast. Little breweries could use only what big breweries used as the market wasn’t big enough to have different speciality malts, unique hops or quirky yeasts.

Also, the knowledge base was narrow – as was the consumer palate. If someone had made an IPA in 1985 it would have been an impossible sell.

By the early 1990s things started to change.

First, Kiwis benefited from the microbrewing revolution in the US. 

It’s a strange fact of history that home brewing, while always popular in New Zealand despite other restrictions such as six o’clock closing, was non-existent in America for around 50 years.

When prohibition ended in 1933, the line in the law that made home brewing illegal remained. It was against the law to home brew in the US until President Jimmy Carter repealed that particular hindrance to our happiness in 1978.

As a result, home brewing blossomed and from that sprung a number of cutting-edge American breweries that started dabbling in those forgotten styles of beer. In order to differentiate themselves from the big commercial breweries, these start-up American breweries wanted a point of difference based on more than size.

They reinvented styles such as pale ale, IPA and Imperial Stout. These avant-garde brewers found old recipes and reimagined them in a typically American style – bigger, bolder, brasher.

The other thing they did to differentiate themselves from the likes of Budweiser and Miller was to put the focus on artisanship. They “crafted” their beer.

So slowly, around the turn of the 21st century, craft started to replace micro. And what the Americans did influenced the rest of the world – particularly New Zealand, whose emerging craft brewers started to look to California rather than Britain for inspiration. 

Beer history is full of wondrous stories of madness, invention and good luck. The madness here was the good folk of Pilsen in the Czech Republic dumping barrels of beer because they didn’t like the taste. 

The city started its own brewery, known now as Pilsner Urquell, and hired a German brewer to come up with a recipe that worked. Josef Groll brought a lagering technique from his native Germany, some pale English malt and had the good luck (or knowledge) to understand that Pilsen’s very soft water (low in minerals) suited the making of a light style of beer. Add in some locally-grown spicy Saaz hops and a style was born. 

But what made pilsner a star was the fact it came along in the mid-19th century just as scientists were understanding yeast, clear glassware was coming into vogue and the advent of refrigeration helped create the cool temperatures needed to create this style of lager around the globe. 

Pilsner took the world by a perfect storm. Modern pilsners are some of the best known beers in the world – Stella Artois, Heineken, Becks and of course Pilsner Urquell.

The style arrived in New Zealand at the turn of the 20th century and 100 years later New Zealand breweries are reimagining Pilsner with the generous use of aromatic Kiwi hops which lend tropical fruit notes to the nose rather than the spicier aroma created by traditional “noble” hops

Pale Ale was first brewed in the early 1700s – until then English ale was all porter and stout, made from malts darkened by roasting in wood-fired kilns. The invention of coke – the non-smoking form of coal – meant better temperature control and no smoke, so malsters were able to create a paler malt. 

Beers brewed with this new malt became known as pale ales in as much as they were relatively pale compared to porter and stout. They were also hoppier and as a result gradually came to be known by their taste: hence bitter. 

Pale Ale as we know it today is almost entirely based on the craft brewing movement in the United States – and can be sourced to one brewery. In 1978 US President Jimmy Carter ended the last vestige of the prohibition era when he changed the law which had made homebrewing illegal for half a century. 

Unshackled by fear of breaking the law, those first home brewers became fledging craft brewers. And the leader of the pale ale pack was California’s Sierra Nevada, whose pale ale influenced generations of brewers and is regarded as the jumping off point for 21st pale ales. 

There are a wide variety of pale ales with many New Zealand producers making an APA (American Pale Ale – with American hops) as well as New Zealand-hop dominant pale ale. And lately we’re seeing XPA (for extra pale ale) which usually means a lean malt base, dry finish and lots of hop aroma. 

India Pale Ale (IPA) is the most written about, debated, and divisive style of beer on the planet. So much of its history is shrouded in mystery, marketing and re-imagining of events 400 years ago. 

There is no doubt that British breweries were exporting beer to India and the West Indies in the 1700s and sometime around 1760 it became common practice for these export beers to be more highly hopped than beer brewed for domestic consumption. 

That’s because hops have a preservative quality that helped the beer survive in its wooden casks through warmer temperatures than an English cellar might experience. 

Gradually these beers came to be known, according to historian Martyn Cornell, as “Pale Ale prepared for the East and West India climate'' – and were sometimes referred to as pale India ales – before brewers landed on India Pale Ale. 

Again, it was the adventurous American brewers of the late 20th century who took this hoppy English style and spun the wheel of fortune, gambling on versions bittered with American hops which had more dominant citrus and pine characters than their earthy, herbal English counterparts. 

IPA now comes in every shade imaginable from white to red to black and in styles that vary from country to country. 

English IPA tends to be sweeter and more caramel malt-driven while the US versions are hop-forward with those citrus, pine and stone fruit characters and a savoury minerality followed by robust bitterness. 

New Zealand IPAs tend towards more tropical fruit such as passionfruit and lychee and can appear sweeter and more approachable than their aggressive American cousins. 

As a benchmark a genuine IPA is considered to have an ABV of 5.8 percent or higher. A double IPA is a huge juicy, rich, resinous brew of around 8-10 percent ABV. Brewers are now creating lower ABV versions of IPA that still come with generous hop flavour and bitterness and these are widely known as Session IPAs.

Is it a beer? An orange juice? Or a mango smoothie?  A trend that started by accident has been accelerated by Instagram into the unstoppable beast that is hazy IPA. 

For the best part of a century, beer’s default position was crystal clear – since glass became a popular vessel around 100 years ago, beer-makers have polished their products so they literally sparkle in the glass. But that’s not beer’s natural state – it takes a lot of tools and technology to make beer that way, such as filtration and ice-cold conditioning tanks. 

There are traditional styles, like wheat beers, that are served “cloudy” – with yeast and other particles in suspension – but by and large most popular beer styles over the past century have been clear and bright. 

The craze for haze began at The Alchemist, a small brewery in Vermont, USA, and a beer called Heady Topper, an 8 percent IPA that was unfiltered and unpasteurised. It was also brewed with loads of hops and a rare yeast strain known as Conan, that gives off aromas of peaches and citrus. Heady Topper was incredibly tasty – very fruity thanks to the hops and fruit esters – but also quite cloudy thanks to all the organic material that hadn’t been filtered out. It was not too bitter. In fact, it was almost sweet. 

With no marketing or promotion, the beer got a cult following. When other American brewers decided to copy this mysterious cultish beer, a new style was born – alternately known as New England IPA, Vermont IPA or Hazy IPA. And when people start trying to imitate they also exaggerate and experiment to the point where we now have beers that bear little or no resemblance to the Vermont source material.

And Instagram doesn’t help as everyone loves the photogenetic nature of a hazy beer which just gives more motivation to the makers. To that end, brewers are using ingredients such as wheat, oats and lactose to increase cloudiness and accent sweetness. Throw in some fruit and vanilla and voila you’ve got a Milkshake IPA – so deliciously fruity as to be mistaken for a smoothie. 

Apart from flavour and haziness the other thing that makes these beers so attractive is the colour – ranging from lemon cream through to that rich OJ look.

The difference between a stout and a porter? It’s a line-ball call but for me the addition of roasted barley sets a stout apart from its milder sibling. The roasted barley adds a charry, coffee note that creates a more complex drinking experience – though that’s not a steadfast rule. 

Porters tend to lean towards a softer chocolate flavour while stouts are more robust with flavours of bitter chocolate, leather and coffee. Because of the strong malt profile these styles can handle the addition of cacao, coffee beans and other adjuncts (that’s the official term) such as vanilla or chilli and can be aged on oak barrels to create greater depth of flavour. 

Stouts can also be sweet (milk stout) or dry (Guinness being the prime example of a dry stout). Porters and stouts also lend themselves to taking on a briny note from the addition of shellfish. 

There’s a belief that stouts and porters are higher in alcohol than other beers but a good stout can start at 4 percent and still be packed with flavour. 

Dark lagers – known as schwarzbier in Germany – are often confused with stouts but they are made with a lager yeast so finish dry and clean. 

Another popular style is Imperial Stout, which is the high alcohol version based on the version made for export to Russia in the 19th century.

There’s a booming trend in the beer world to create styles that are best defined as acidic, tart or sour. It’s a broad church of flavours – from traditional wild ales where the beer is “inoculated” by yeasts found in the air or in fruit. 

The best known examples come from Belgium where an ancient tradition has continued in the form of Lambic beers. 

A more modern take is what’s known as kettle-soured beers, where a lactic acid-producing bacteria (just like the ones that make yoghurt) are introduced to the raw beer to create an acidic tart base. Brewers then use a combination of hops and fruits to flavour the beers. Or in the case of Gose (pronounced go-suh) salt is added. 

Other ways to sour beers include aging the beer in wooden barrels where bacteria and yeast in the wood go to work on the beer, creating acidity and adding tannic qualities as well as the flavours from whatever spirit or wine was previously in the barrels.

From chilli to coffee, from coconut to cacao, from mint to tea, to salt and pepper, … flavouring beer with spices, fruits and herbs is an ancient tradition. Some of New Zealand’s most adventurous brewers can take nearly any ingredient you might find in a pantry or fridge and create a beer around it. Avocado? Done. Oysters? Done. Chili and mint? Done. Salt and pepper? Done. Cucumber? Done. Raspberry, blueberry, peach, mango, even tomato? Done. 

Whether these flavour additions work is a matter of personal opinion for drinkers because we all have different palates but even the most out-there ingredients are fair game because this is the way beer was made traditionally – with whatever was on hand to flavour, bitter or acidify the sweet malt.