Tall tALES: Beer Festivals

Mmmmmmmm beer festivals. Now let me begin with I have been to many beer festivals over the years. I have always greatly looked forward to them months in advance. I remember the first beervana I ever went to was at the Wellington town hall. This is the first time I ever tried the Emerson's Taieri George Spiced Ale and fell in love, it is a hotcross bun in a bottle, think cinnamon, nutmeg, citrus zest, it is slightly different every year, it ages amazingly (it is the only beer I have ever kept for 18 months before drinking).

That same year my second favorite beer was the Martinborough White Rock Wheatbeer from the now defunct Martinborough Brewing Co, I loved such lovely yeast spice characteristics.That brewery was completely inconsistent and when it was good it was good and when it was bad it was bad.

Now there have been many other festivals over the years. Brief overview: worst beer festival experience was a NZ beer festival at Waitangi park. It was pissing with rain, drunk people were sliding in the mud, it was nuts! the bad part was only when afterwards when I myself was not the most sober, I was tackled into the concrete by someone and I bruised the cartilage under my knee cap, putting a rather large damper for the 10km race I was training for, took about 3 months of physio to fix.

Now the best ones! Everyone that I have volunteered at! all two of them. Beervana 2011 was awesome, I got to be the first person to pour an 8-wired the night after they won best brewery in New Zealand. So I was quite a busy man. Of course the free session afterwards was great, amazing beers, good people and of course amazing beer. What was great about this year is that the food was INCREDIBLE! which was a great change from previous years!

This came after I had volunteered for the awards night the night before, pouring pints. The funny thing was that there were some quality craft beers we were pouring then there was a Monteiths Black (owned by the big and quite evil DB) and only 5 or so beers from the whole keg was drunk, this was free beer, great to see.

Two weeks previous to this I volunteered at the judging for the BeerNZ awards. Two days of incredibly tiring but furfilling work. Both pouring beers for the judges, washing glasses, running up and down stairs, carrying kegs etc. I look forward to doing it again this year.

This bring me to The Matariki Winter Ale Festival. I worked on the food stand. It was quite literally a life changing night. The food was made by the hop garden. Lovely food. At the end we got to try some amazing food. This night I told a influential beer person/well known beer drinker around town that I wanted to make beer my life. She promptly volunteered me for the events just talked about above. So the reason for this post is so I could talk about and post some pictures from Marchfest in Nelson this year. This is a picture from very late in the evening (Im pretty sure that is David Wood, one of my most favorite of beer nerds pretending to chock me out).

Anyway I went with Simon Cook. Simon works at Little Beer Quarter, one of my very favorite beer bars, that place has the vibe that I would want if I was to open a Brewpub. Simon is a keen homebrewer and likes making some crazy brews like I do, he has started the Massy University Brewing Society and all round GC. He had won an a bunch of free tickets so we just needed to pay for the ferry and a nights accommodation. This trip turned out to be well a little bit nuts. First of one of the dude we were going with slept in. Missed the ferry and have to fly to nelson. We got to one of the sunniest places in New Zealand and the weather was shit. But we started the trip with a couple of homebrews from each of us on the ferry.

We got to the beautiful Founders park and it was like being in Wellington, all the beery folk were there. I got there and had a Moa Smoked mussel stout, it was beautiful and inspired me a little for my Paua Stout (was going to do it anyway but a bit of smoked malt would be a nice touch). Turns out the brewer was behind me and said, its good you should get a full pint. But we found that the half pint was the more economical way to do it, which is the case with most festivals.

Soren from 8 wired talking about brewing

We went to several talks about brewing and beer in the media. Was good to see the difference between brewing scale and techniques between Moa and 8-wired. Good to hear and comment about beer in the media (I may have become a bit more opinionated after having a few me-thinks).

But was definatly not as opinionated/ really rude as one drunk brewer who shall remain nameless. So the festival was great despite the crappy weather, there was a competition to name all the secret ingredients in all the beers, that lasted about 30 mins until we got too busy drinking and chatting to people. The lines were crazy long but me and a couple of other people found some good line shortening techniques.... *they underestimated my sneakiness*

After we ran out of tokens/had tried everything we wanted to try. Some of us headed to the Sprig and Fern Brew pub. They brew an incredible amount of there own beers, I had an oatmeal stout which was great and scotch ale which was really a more sessionable version of the stonecutter scotch ale. Talked to some Tuatara folk and Hasigo Zake folk then it was off to the freehouse... now this is a beerpub! wow! a converted church which additional space for the yurt in the front yard.... great local beers, beer on hand pump that you would never expect to see there. Everyone was very merry by this stage (some other people will off getting into trouble else where which makes for a great story, but not one to be put online haha).

Dave Waugh and me, geeez Dave haha

So I will leave you with some photos of the day. I will talk about the awesome X-ale festival in another post then well I have heaps to write about, I should write this thing more often but well, I am too busy doing the things that I am write about to write about them. But there is a lot of big things to talk about so stay tuned.