Beer: A Bit More than Speights these Days
Gidday. I’m Michael Donaldson and I’m living the dream … I write about beer for a job. No joke, but it’s a harder job than you think, as I’ll explain further down this article.
A little more about me. I started out in sports journalism back in the 1980s when we still used typewriters and you were considered a bit weird if you drank Speight’s outside of Dunedin.
After working at newspapers in New Zealand, I ended up in Australia for a stint before coming back to Auckland in 2005 to work at the Sunday Star-Times. It was there I wrote my first beer column – I was a home brewer with an interest in the burgeoning craft beer scene. That column led to a book called Beer Nation – The Art & Heart of Kiwi Beer. And then a book about home brewing, and some beer judging. So now I’m the chair of judges at the New World Beer & Cider Awards and I own a specialist beer magazine called Pursuit of Hoppiness, written for a dedicated audience of beer drinkers and brewers alike.
When I started out writing about beer there were probably 50 to 70 breweries in New Zealand and it was possible to drink two or three from each one every year and keep up with all the trends and what was good. Each brewery made a handful of beers – maybe five or six was common. And they all came in 500ml glass bottles – something you hardly see these days as everyone is moving to cans (for a whole lot of reasons we can discuss another day).
Now there are north of 200 breweries in New Zealand – some small enough to fit into a garage – and literally thousands of beers brewed every year. If I wanted to keep up with every beer being made in New Zealand now I would be permanently worse for wear and totally broke. The likes of Garage Project and Behemoth, to name a couple, pride themselves on releasing one or two new beers every week.
We’re a long way from the old Lion Red commercial that had the tagline: “There’s only one beer we drink around here, mate.”
Craft beer started out as a revolution against the so-called bland, uniform, styles produced by our biggest breweries – where nearly everything tasted the same. But what started out as a counter-point – an exploration of new flavours and diverse styles – has exploded into an untamed beast.
Beer drinkers always want something new, something different – and breweries have responded by creating lots of low-volume, one-off beers that are available for a short time and often only from the brewery’s website or in certain bars and specialist bottle shops. I can’t keep up with the new releases, no-one can. They are there for the deeply embedded craft geeks looking for niche products. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the choice and, if you’re like me, you can suffer a bit of FOMO when a new beer is sold-out before you’ve even heard of it.
A good way to get a sense of this market is to go to a craft beer festival like Beervana, held in Wellington in August, and try all the weird and whacky one-off brews.
This onslaught of new, new, new (there’s even a brewery in Dunedin called New New New) has had the opposite effect at the supermarkets. Sure the shelves are still stacked with lots of new releases but because supermarkets increasingly have all their beer come through a central distribution channel, there is a limit on what they call New Product Development. They, like me, couldn’t keep up with a dozen new beers coming in the door every week.
So, what you see at supermarkets are the “core range” products – most likely in 330ml six-packs and 12-packs – these are the biggest sellers from the biggest craft breweries and as a rule are reliably good quality. A lot of people I know these days will pick up a 6-pack for their fridge filler during the week and then buy one or two more upmarket 440ml cans. These are usually more expensive, or a bit specialist but a good way to try something new without investing too heavily.
Written by Michael Donaldson