Cheese and…. beer. Who knew?

Last week I was fortunate enough to get my hands on tickets to a beer and cheese matching night at Hallertau put on in collaboration with Kapiti. What was even more fortunate was that I also managed to get myself a sober driver for the evening. When we turned up I was a little...

Let’s go to The Hop, ooh baby

Saturday 21st of April, I awoke with the trembling excitement of a well-behaved child on Christmas morning. From midday, me and the lads would be out sampling tasty brews and rubbing noses with beer geeks from near and afar. In case you missed the memo; the latest addition to Auckland’s burgeoning craft beer scene...

Fill your boots… or maybe just your bottles

The twitter network works! Last Thursday I found out on twitter that the latest addition to Auckland’s craft beer scene had finally opened. The place I’m talking about is Hopscotch Beer Company. Hopscotch has recently obtained their license to sell alcohol and are now selling a great range of beer on fill-your-own taps. I...

Save the drama for your mama

So Christchurch has had close to 6000 quakes since February 2011, but I wonder if they’ve ever experienced a disaster like we had on our last batch of home brew. We have been having trouble with our efficiency and we decided we needed further modifications to the brew kit to sort it out. We...

Bourbon, Beer, BBQ

Bourbon, beer and barbecue. Individually these are all great things to spend a Sunday afternoon indulging in, but bring them all together and you have an inaugural collaborative event put on by Sam Snead and Nigel Kelly of House of Whiskey and Luke Nicholas of Epic Beer. The event consisted of plenty of samples...

Black Santa: an oatmeal stout

The time off over Christmas and New Year’s gave us some extra time to get to know our brew kit so we had to take advantage of it. On our first brew day we discovered our burners may have been mounted a bit high, so to avoid flames lapping out everywhere and melting all...

A taste of Sierra

I imagine if you’re like me, your Christmas/New Year’s break has provided ample opportunity to over-indulge in great beer as well as some not-so-great beer; as provided by uncles and aunties that you only ever see once a year, and very little time hanging around your computer reading or posting blogs. We were fortunate...

On the first day of Xmas…

… one of my favourite brewers gave to me an absolutely fantastic bottle of beer. That brewer being Epic and the beer being the new Epicurean Coffee & Fig Imperial Oatmeal Stout. I had been following this beer rather closely from the moment I heard about it. Coffee, figs and then coconut; all these...

The Sierra Endeavour

A flash of inspiration the week before bottling gave us a name for our first batch of all-grain home brew, a beer based on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. We named it the ‘Sierra Endeva’, and it seemed very appropriate for our first foray into this brewing method. Approaching bottling day, we figured it would...