Enter the Cuckoo
All this isn’t to say that there aren’t brewers edging the brewing dial up to 11, though another of the distinctive elements of the New Zealand scene is that some of the most interesting brewers don’t actually have their own breweries. A number of New Zealand’s new wave have opted for what some may call contract brewing, though this isn’t necessarily the best description. The term ‘cuckoo brewers’ might be more apt, named after the bird that lays its eggs in another’s nest. Unlike some forms of contract brewing, most of these brewers do the brewing themselves, just in another brewer’s plant.
One of the newest of their number has come to typify the breed. Soren Eriksen is an intriguing character; a native Dane, he married a New Zealand girl and came to New Zealand via Australia. While in Australia to finish his masters degree in biochemistry, he became enamored with Little Creatures Pale Ale—a hoppy and aromatic beer in the mold of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
Soren Eriksen
Seeing his growing love for flavorsome beer, his wife presented him with an extract homebrew kit as a Christmas present in 2005. He quickly progressed to using specialty grains and then all-grain, soon deciding that brewing was where his future lay. His career-change was sealed during a road trip through the U.S. where he stopped at every brewpub that he came to. “My wife and I decided we wanted to start a brewpub in New Zealand somewhere and so I got a job at Renaissance Brewery on New Zealand’s south island to gain some commercial experience,” he says. “I planned to stay three months, but we quickly realized that a brewpub has its challenges, especially financial ones, and it was a very risky venture in such a small market.”
Instead he chose to test the waters and build his brand first by using his employer’s spare capacity to brew under his own label. He reasoned that this route meant he wouldn’t have to compromise the beers he wanted to make in order to achieve volume. “You need to make a lot of beer to sustain the overhead of owning a brewery,” he explains. “The hardest thing with making beers in a small market is that I’m not trying to please everybody, so we’re definitely aiming for a smaller niche in the market, and probably even a small niche in the craft beer market.”
I look at a brewery like Dogfish Head, which has grown huge compared to a New Zealand brewery. You just couldn’t do their beers yet in New Zealand and sell more than a few hundred liters a month because the market is so small.” So, utilizing his employer’s excess capacity, he’s set out to build a business and has immediately made a name for himself. The first beer through his 8 Wired Brewing Co. was his version of a West Coast IPA, brewed with New Zealand hops. Called Hopwired, Eriksen believes it is the hoppiest beer on the New Zealand market.
Immediately identifiable as a big IPA, its signature New Zealand hops explode on the nose. New Zealand hops are even more complex than American hops or European hops, with a more broad range of tropical fruitiness,” Eriksen claims. “Though this can come with a few drawbacks as they can be a bit sulphury, or petrolly, so you must be a little careful using them. It’s easy to overdo the use of New Zealand hops—it’s a hard hop to use a lot of and still keep the balance in the beer.”
