Eriksen is using his non-brewery-owning freedom to be more experimental and as we spoke he was on the verge of putting an imperial stout into oak, as well as starting to play around with a Belgian pale ale and tripel.
While he has been making beers considered big by New Zealand standards, Eriksen is also keeping true to local form. He’s most excited about a project to try and get as much flavor as he can into a beer that’s less than 2 percent alcohol. Describing it as a 2 percent amber IPA, he is using a high percentage of crystal malts to try to get the flavor up while keeping the alcohol down. In a play on words for his flagship Hopwired, he plans to call this one Underwired.
You’ve Got to Fight for Your Right
Another cuckoo interested in drawing as much flavor as possible out of smaller, more sessionable beers is Stu McKinlay.
As a homebrewer and beer geek, McKinlay would each year volunteer to work at BrewNZ, the country’s largest beer festival, giving him a chance to get up close with the New Zealand scene. “I would go home after BrewNZ and try my homebrew and think, ‘these are crap’,” McKinlay recounts. “Until one year I went home and tried them and thought ‘these are as good as anything there’.”
Stu McKinlay
Wanting to brew but having a young family, a good job and professing to be risk averse, McKinlay and his brewing partner Sam Possenniskie went another way. McKinlay called a friend from the Invercargill Brewery who he knew had plenty of spare capacity. He agreed to their plans and their brand, Yeastie Boys, was born.
When McKinlay says that his beer was as good as anything at BrewNZ, it wasn’t a bout of self-delusion. Yeastie Boys’ first beer, a U.S.-inspired porter called Pot Kettle Black, took the category trophy at the 2009 national awards, launching their brewery and their reputation.
Like their beers, whose names all stem from musical and pop culture references, their “brewery’s” name is a play on the Beastie Boys, but also referencing what McKinlay considers beer’s most under-appreciated ingredients. Their use of other breweries’ equipment has given the fledgling Yeastie outfit the freedom to make the beers they want to make first without worrying about whether they will move pallets of them.
We wanted to start off doing one-off beers rather than a regular range of beers such as a pilsener, a pale ale and a porter like most breweries,” McKinlay says. “We’ve never had a business plan or thought about business, it’s just been a hobby that has to continue making money so that we can keep doing it.
If you have bought lots of stainless you can’t think that way, you need to think things like, ‘I need to sell this amount of beer to pay for the brewery and for the rent and for marketing.’
All we have to do is think is, ‘What are we going to charge to get our money back to get enough money to brew our next beer?’”
This nonconformist approach has seen them brew a range of one-off seasonals that casts a scattergun pattern across the beer-style map, with an emphasis on flavor and balance, but with few ABVs above 5 percent. They have thrown up amongst others Punkadiddle, a 3.7 percent red English Ale; Nerdherder, a New Zealand-style pale ale at 4.8 percent; Plan K, a Belgian pale ale at 4.6 percent; and their now-permanent Pot Kettle Black, a U.S.-style porter.
The important thing is that their approach is working and their beers are selling on reputation with demand far outstripping supply. It also fits in with McKinlay’s view that in New Zealand, the ultra-micro brewery is the future.
In a small market I think a greater diversity of beers is the way forward, rather than all breweries going in one direction,” he says. “There’s a couple of guys around now who have little commercial breweries under 200 liters and I think that’s where the future is.”
He could be right and if the New Zealand scene shows anything, small is beautiful.
