Friday, December 10, 2010

December 9, 2010

Going Live, Ready or Not.. Bear Republic Brewing Company.. Golden Bear.. Congratulations..

Going Live, Ready or Not

For the last sixteen or so months our website has drawn a variety of reactions. It's strength and weakness is that it was written by a software developer. This means it's low on visual style but can do things like update our beer menu on the fly.

Before returning to the film industry our Creative Director, Sean Golding, designed a few graphical elements for a new website version. Our favourite Glaswegian bartender (and part time website designer) Chris Hogg then refined these into working HTML. Finally our resident geek scavenged the necessary hours to shoe-horn all the original content and functions (and a few new bits) into the new site.

Rather than keep postponing the live date while we refine things more, we're throwing caution to the wind today and launching. So point your browsers at http://www.hashigozake.co.nz from around about now to see our website reskinned.

Features of version 2 are:

  • a news page that consolidates content from the archive of this email, the proprietor's blog and arbitrary pieces of news that we can insert any time.
  • a food page that displays up to date information on the flavours of pie that are available.
  • the same live tap beer menu that we know some of you check religiously.
  • it looks nicer.

Our mobile beer list web page, designed for browsers such as that on an iPhone, remains unchanged. We appreciate that although useful, it has shortcomings. Some day we'll find time to address those.

Bear Republic Brewing Company

Like the other breweries in our upcoming shipment of Californian beer, Bear Republic should cause palpitations and salivation amongst the ratebeer.com-following, notebook-carrying segment of our customers. Their lineup includes an IPA whose name is one of the most recognisable in North American brewing (and is ratebeer's 14th highest rated IPA) and a rye Imperial IPA that is so distinctive it probably distorts people's perception of rye beers.

Bear Republic are the only brewery in this shipment not from San Diego. Instead they are from yet another hot bed of brewing - Sonoma County in Northern California, a mere twenty minutes drive from Russian River.

So in addition to Racer 5 IPA and Hop Rod Rye, you can expect to find soon XP Pale Ale, Red Rocket Ale, Pete Brown Tribute Ale, Big Bear Stout and Apex Imperial IPA.

They should start appearing in bottles and on tap just before or just after Christmas. We recommend cancelling out of town holidays.

Golden Bear

It's fitting to mention Golden Bear brewing next to Bear Republic. Golden Bear is the creation of the enigmatic Jim Matranga, a Californian who set up his brewpub in Mapua, Nelson.

We've been impressed with just about every beer we've had access to from Golden Bear, but brewpubs are notoriously difficult to secure a regular supply from as their own outlet takes priority. Jim must have been busy lately though, because we've been able to pick up several of their beers including our favourite - Patriot's Pale Ale. (Not to be confused with Croucher's recent black IPA with a similar name.) So look out for Golden Bear making it back onto our taps over the next few days and nights.

Congratulations

You're probably tired of us reporting on compliments and awards that we've either had bestowed or were begging for votes for. So this time we can congratulate a few friends in the brewing industry for some milestones.

First there's Rotorua's Croucher, brewers of a triumvirate of great beers that we regularly pour - namely their pilsner, hefeweizen and pale ale. This week the Croucher Pale Ale was named champion beer in Capital Times' Beer Necessities survey.

Secondly Søren Erikson's 8 Wired Brewing just had a shipment of beer arrive in Denmark, imported by none other than the brewer Mikkeller. It's a fantastic landmark for Søren, and further evidence of the export potential of New Zealand craft beer.

Finally we note with satisfaction that James Franklin of the Black Caps (the team we have in lieu of a national cricket team) has hit a rich vein of batting form since celebrating his 30th a few weeks ago on our premises.

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