Sawmill Brewery's team with their trophy at the Brewers Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards on Saturday night.
Sawmill Brewery's team with their trophy at the Brewers Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards on Saturday night.
Matakana brewery makes history with latest award win.
The NZ Brewers Guild Beer Awards were held over the weekend at the Hilton Hotel in central Auckland, bringing together industry players to celebrate the production of top-notch pints and innovative industry practices.
There were over 700 entries, judged by a stacked panel of 26 judges, 24 stewards, and six trainee judges.
The panel spent time in Christchurch evaluating and judging all of the entries early last month, working over two-and-a-half days to taste and critique the Kiwi-brewed beers.
And on Saturday night, during the guilds’ gala dinner, one Matakana-based brewery managed to sweep a highly prized award for the fifth year in a row – making history as the longest-running winning streak at the Beer Awards.
Sawmill Brewery, an independently owned brewery north of Auckland, was handed the Brewing Sustainability Award, with the judges saying the team’s “consistent dedication and growth in their sustainability journey continues to pay off.”
With the Sustainability Award open to all businesses innovating “throughout the grain to glass” supply chain – including growers, suppliers, and bars – the brewery has achieved an impressive feat by taking it out for the fifth year in a row.
“We were thrilled to win again,” said Kirsty Mckay, who co-owns Sawmill Brewery with her partner Mike Sutherland.
“There isn’t really an end to this kind of work, you keep asking what can be done differently all the time.”
Since the award’s inception in 2019, Sawmill Brewery has managed to snag the top spot every year since.
The Sawmill Brewery and Smoko Room in Matakana.
So far, Sawmill Brewery has reduced its weekly landfill waste to 9kg (the average Kiwi household creates more than double that in a week), installed solar panels alongside a heat recovery system that saves over 1.5 million litres of water a year and worked with the community to regenerate the bush and waterways around the brewery.
The award acknowledges the brewery as an industry leader that “continues to strive for excellence in sustainability”, but its dedicated team has never stopped looking for more ways to innovate and improve its processes, hence its smashing success in the sustainability space.
“Breweries are big resource users so that means we have plenty of opportunity to make a measurable difference by improving the way we make beer,” said Mckay.
“We are a relatively small brewery, we don’t operate this way as a marketing gimmick, we do it because it makes good business sense.
“So if we can show that innovation leads to having a better business we think that’s good for our whole industry and actually manufacturing generally.”
McKay added that sustainability for Sawmill Brewery is about being “brave enough to do things differently”, rather than trying to do the “right” thing, which isn’t as clear-cut as some might believe.
Judges cited more recent initiatives undertaken by the brewery in this year’s awards, including running a bottle return service trial with the Auckland Council and engaging in industry webinars to share their acquired knowledge with other brewers.
In February, Sawmill Brewery was also recertified as a B-Corp business and remains the first and only brewery in New Zealand to be accredited with the certification.
B-Corp certification requires a business to meet rigorous standards of “verified performance, accountability, and transparency” across all areas of the company.
Sawmill Brewery's production team at their brewery in Matakana.
Certification attests to a company’s commitment to continuously improving industry practices, and only 6000 businesses have managed to become certified globally, which Sutherland said shows they’ve made tangible progress in sustainably growing their business and planning for the future.
“It is challenging to get certified, and you do have to be operating at the very top of your industry – but the critical part for us and for consumers is the continuous improvement and the measuring of this,” he said in a statement.
“As a manufacturer we use a lot of resources, especially water and power, and so we have to constantly be doing better.”
Looking forward, McKay said they were installing a wastewater system that would capture biogas to be used as process heat in the brewery, setting yet another first for Aotearoa’s breweries.
And as the brewery celebrates its 20-year anniversary, McKay and Sutherland will continue delivering the beer they’re so well-known for.
