Thursday, September 25, 2014

September 25, 2014

Speakeasy Visit... Lord Almighty... Rules from Australia... More from Australia... Surf Rock Saturday... Pacific Beer Expo News...

Speakeasy Visit

Brandon Nash from the Speakeasy Brewery in San Francisco is in Wellington next week. We've only just confirmed all the details but we're now able to announce and invite bookings for a tasting of the Speakeasy range in the company of Brandon, at Hashigo Zake, next Tuesday.

This is the third in what has been a very enjoyable season of tastings whose primary purpose is to make Hashigo Zake's General Manager, David Wood, wish he'd never gone on holiday.

Tickets can be booked here, at the Cult Beer Store.

Lord Almighty

Many Wellingtonians will remember Dan Lord well. As well as being a tremendous customer of Hashigo Zake, he was one of the initial four partners in Funk Estate. After being relocated to London by his then employer a year or so ago, he got out of Funk Estate and started his own brewing venture - Lord Almighty.

Like Funk Estate, Lord Almighty is, for now a contract brewing operation, and is using facilities in interesting locations such as Yorkshire and, recently, Upper Hutt. Which means that Dan's beer is now available in New Zealand.

Lord Almighty's New Zealand range consists of Dan's Yakima IPA, a highly hopped (with Citra) 6% IPA. And this beer is getting its Southern Hemisphere launch at Hashigo Zake tomorrow (Friday) evening.

Rules from Australia

The small but well organised Australian portion of our customer base have insisted that our TVs be tuned to Victorian sport's biggest day, this Saturday. In other words the AFL grand final, featuring the Hawthorne Hawks and Sydney Swans, will be screened on Saturday afternoon. The nominal kick-off time appears to be 4:30pm NZ time, but really this is barely relevant given the veritable feast of entertainment that the afternoon holds for the dedicated viewer.

More importantly though, this gives us an excuse to dip into our stash of Aussie beer and put on a couple of appropriate choices. So we'll have a Sydney beer in the form of Young Henry's Newtowner. This is a golden ale from the Sydney suburb of Newtown. And in the red corner will be Brewcult's Pepper Steak Porter. Now Brewcult insist that in spite of its name, this is a vegan beer. But in case that lack of meat in the beer disappoints anyone, we'll be offering Pepper Steak pies during the afternoon.

More From Australia

We continue to pay homage to the home of chicken parma and the guernsey on Tuesday, when another new (to us) Australian beer takes the New Release Tuesday slot. It's the highly regarded HUGhE Dunn Brown from Perth's Nail Brewing. Nail isn't so well known this far from Perth, but their status in their home town is, well, huge. They're one of the area's longest established craft breweries and their Clout Stout has a fearsome reputation. And for the last year or two they've been sharing a brewery with none other than Feral. The strategy of sharing a brewhouse enabled both parties to quickly scale up.

HUGhE Dunn Brown Ale won the Cryer Malt Trophy for Best Porter at this year's Australian International Beer Awards. There are some useful details about the beer here at the Crafty Pint. It goes on tap at 5pm on Tuesday.

Surf Rock Saturday

Surf rock peddlers the Vincent Vega Trio return on Saturday night for some thirst-inducing entertainment. From 10pm and at no cost.

*** Correction. Our over-worked and underpaid publicity department got this completely wrong, and this Saturday's gig is in fact JB3, which consists of Shaun "Shandy" Anderson, Daniel "Dank" Hayles and Jake Baxendale teaming up to deliver some bowel-shaking grooves. ***

Pacific Beer Expo News

There was a lot of disappointment last month when shipping delays meant than an order of Australian beer arrived too late to be included in the Beervana festival. In fact the disappointment was probably felt most acutely by Beervana's organisers, since the general consensus has been that 2014 was the best Beervana ever.

Nevertheless a large consignment of some of the best Australian beer in existence arrived in Wellington a few days after Beervana. We've been doing our best to help find good uses for that beer, including a couple that are mentioned above. And a large portion of it will end up at the Pacific Beer Expo.

We'll single out a couple of those Australian beers now. They're from legendary West Australian brewery Feral. They've made fleeting appearances in New Zealand before, so should get some hearts pounding. Specifically:

  • Watermelon Warhead - the legendary watermelon infused Berliner Weisse.
  • Funky Junkie - one of the best known sours in Australasia.

Tickets went on sale about a week ago. There has been a lot demand for Saturday tickets, and we suspect two reasons for this. One is that people are planning to attend the festival on Saturday and the Wrap Party on Sunday night. In this case, we applaud your foresight.

The other theory is that people are overlooking that Sunday the 26th of October is followed by a holiday Monday. If that's the case we encourage customers to consider coming on Sunday.

Tickets can be bought here at Hashigo Zake or at the Cult Beer Store.

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