Thursday, July 19, 2012

July 19, 2012

New Release Tuesday... Bruce... Craft Beer College... Music This Saturday... Silly Season...

New Release Tuesday

Next week's release is an experiment by local start-up Funk Estate, made in collaboration with Motel's Tom Egerton. They've taken a small amount of their recently released Coconut Stout and added rum-infused pineapple pieces. It's going to be called Pintacolada and it could be one of the riskiest acts of beer-doctoring ever.

As usual this will come on tap at 5pm.

Bruce

As foreshadowed last week a consignment of South Australian beer is on its way to us, including the much-anticipated Yeastie Boys / Lobethal collaboration called Bruce. In the spirit of the ANZACs, CER and John Clarke we're planning a coordinated launch of Bruce with legendary Adelaide beer bar The Wheatsheaf very soon. We're very close to agreeing on a date. Then in the spirit of underarm bowling we'll hold ours the night before.

To get everyone in the mood, and because we haven't yet checked why this beer is called Bruce, some of you might enjoy watching some Python.

As hinted above, a veritable collective noun's worth of other South Australian beers are making the trip from Adelaide with Bruce. And Alistair Turnbull of Lobethal Bierhaus, co-brewer of Bruce, is visiting Wellington for Beervana. So on August the 18th, the Saturday of Beervana, we'll host a mini festival of South Australian beer here at Hashigo Zake. We'll have several Lobethal beers, maybe one or two other South Australian beers, and Alistair. Fittingly there's a New Zealand vs Australia rugby test that evening as well.

Our programme of events for what is now being called Choice Beer Week has just become a lot more condensed. It's gonna be extraordinary. We'll make a full announcement next week.

Craft Beer College

Jonny Day and Steph Coutts have many claims to fame in Wellington's community of those dedicated to the sensible improvement of beer appreciation. They're regular winners in tasting competitions, occasionally wrangle volunteers at festivals here or offshore, write about and judge beer. And, above all, they're regular customers at Hashigo Zake.

But they're now launching a new venture called Craft Beer College. Plenty of individuals and companies have offered the ability to run educational beer tastings before. We even do ourselves occasionally. But Craft Beer College is setting out to specialise in the field. They're going to run a programmed series of tastings over the coming months but will also offer the ability to turn on such tastings to order. Best of all, they're going to use Hashigo Zake as a training venue.

So we're completely supportive of this endeavour. You can even book for their first season of tastings over the bar here at Hashigo Zake.

Music This Saturday

Our musical programme reaches another watershed this Saturday when we host the composer of the greatest New Zealand song ever. Allegedly. But this Saturday Wayne Mason is bringing a rockabilly band. Our first rockabilly band in fact, called the X-Ray Catz. They take the stage at 10pm.

Silly Season

It's getting harder than ever right now to predict what's going to be on tap from one day to the next. A lot of kegs came away unfinished from last week's SOBA Winter Ale festival, we snapped up all the good stuff that we could and they're making their way onto taps as places become available.

There are luxury leftovers like Emerson's Baltic Porter - in fact we got our own allocation of this as well as the festival leftovers, so there should be plenty to go around. There's the last of the last keg of Waldhaus Jubilaums Dunkel, not to mention a rare keg of 8 Wired iStout.

We'll spice that up with more early releases from the new Garage Project brewery. Like last week we've been sent a 20L keg to check the carbonation - this time on Pernicious Weed. And after the triumphant return of Trip Hop last week we're ordering a fresh keg of that.

Meanwhile we've called up the absolute last keg of Ballast Point Sculpin IPA before our next shipment next month.

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