The Wellington brewery won three gold medals in the 2018 New World Beer and Cider Awards. ParrotDog brewery is the classic backyard to big business success story. It was only the label that people were loyal to. "So the same technology was basically making the same beer at both breweries, and most people who remember that era would say the beer was virtually indistinguishable in some ways. He says it was even worse than that because the big two also shared a beer-making system developed by DB called continuous fermentation. People wouldn't have been drinking it for flavour."ĭonaldson says things were also pretty grim in the mid-1970s when DB and Lion effectively had a duopoly on beer because all other breweries had either closed or been bought and closed. "In 1868, the main purpose of beer would have been intoxication. "There would probably have been some pretty funky flavours going on - as we'd describe it now," Donaldson says. Truth is, those early breweries likely often produced plenty of awful beer.īeer is best made clean and sold fresh, both hard to achieve on a gold field. The old one-drink-suits-all beer culture has disappeared in New Zealand.Īll that hair-splitting age debate probably matters little to today's beer drinkers, even if a little atmosphere of tradition helps make some brands more attractive to some. In his opinion, if being the oldest brewery matters, then it would be non-craft brewery Speights of Dunedin.
There's enough truth in it all for a creative campaign to be hung on it and plenty of other breweries and distillers crank out the heritage stories to give their products a sense of belonging in New Zealand.īut for beer history purists such as Donaldson, beer judge and author of Beer Nation – the Art and Heart of Kiwi Beer, Monteith's, a fine brewery, began in 1990. West Coast historian Glenn Johnston told DB that was rubbish and DB moved Monteith's establishment date to a compromise 1868. It renamed Westland Monteith's in 1990 and settled on an establishment date of 1858. The argument is likely one only beer nerds and historians might get excited about, but it does highlight how much beer is woven into the fabric of our culture, and it hints at how much it matters to have a winning niche in the booming beer scene.ĭB bought the Westland Brewing Co in Greymouth in 1969, which had swallowed up the old Phoenix Brewery of Stuart Monteith, and launched a craft brewery on the site. There is a thread of a kind that connects Monteith's now to the wild West Coast of 150 years ago if you look through squinting eyes and after a couple of pints. Speight's 1876 start date in Dunedin makes it the oldest beer in the country, says Michael Donaldson.
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