Beer drinkers indulge in a selection of quality beers and ciders from 83 breweries.
Beer drinkers indulge in a selection of quality beers and ciders from 83 breweries.
New Zealand is enjoying a golden era of variety and quality in beer - earning comparisons with the growth and passion of the much-lauded boutique winemaking industry.
With about 150 craft beer brands popping up around New Zealand, New World Beer and Cider Awards 2016 has, in its second year, drawn a whopping 458 different beers and ciders from 83 breweries.
In New World stores, the craft beer portfolio is up 20 per cent year on year and demand for new offerings by smaller independent craft breweries is 30 per cent up on last year. The demand is climbing despite craft beer being more expensive than the large breweries' standard products and the national downward trend in volume of beer and alcohol consumption.
New World's North Island merchandise manager Brendon Lawry notes that some who switch to craft beer have swapped volume for a more premium experience, spending the same amount. Craft beer is also drawing people who would not have otherwise visited the beer department, including women, who are interested in more floral, sweeter products, as opposed to the bitter and dry.
People also look for specific beers to match with different foods, as with wines - and brewers are unleashing their creative juices on traditional styles, with adventurous flavours such as tamarillo, boysenberry, hay and honey, pineapple and even milk chocolate the latest in craft beers.
In the 2016 awards, the 15 judges - led by beer writer and author Michael Donaldson - taste 'blind' to assess an entry's qualities, balance and drinkability.
"We wanted to give consumers an easier introduction to a whole range of new-look beers and taste profiles, tasted and signed off by the Who's Who of the brewing community as being best in class," says Lawry.
Winners in a range of styles included international producers, mainstream craft brewers who export to Asia and the United States and brewers who own their brand but may use another company's plant to brew to the recipe.
Beer drinkers swap quality for quantity to pair specific beers with different foods. Photo / Supplied
"I just brew beers that interest me," says South Auckland's Adam Sparks who, after one year as a full-time brewer, won the gold medal in the stout porter and black beer class for his Sparks Brewing Outlander Extra Stout; he was also awarded best in class European-style ale for his Sparks Brewing Prospectors Farmhouse Ale.
Donaldson's tasting notes say Sparks' stout "gives burnt coffee on the nose and layers of milk chocolate and leather before finishing with an intense vanilla/spice twang."
As for the ale, it is about putting a local spin on an old-world Belgian ale by using barley grown on the Canterbury Plains, Nelson hops and a private strain of Belgian yeast. Donaldson says its body is "richly spritzy with a strong tropical fruit character from the distinctive New Zealand hop oils."
Sparks says: "Brewers have a huge palette of flavours they can work with. There are hundreds of types of malt you can put together to make beers tasting like sweet pastry or roasted coffee and then you have a hop, which can add another totally different dimension of fruit, spice and wood.
"Then you have the yeast and that adds a whole dimension as well with its own character, fruity and spicy, or it can take the flavours you have put together and change them into something new."
Blenheim's Moa Breweries won best in class, wheat and other grain beer, for its Southern Alps White IPA. Donaldson praises it for meshing two distinct styles - a traditional Belgian wheat beer with new-age Kiwi-American aromatic IPAs, giving "dominant aromas of coriander and lemon grass, laced with honey sweetness and a peppery note."
Moa head brewer David Nicholls, who has 27 years' commercial experience, says that style of beer would have been unheard of a decade ago: "Now you get these fusion beers of different styles that are really interesting and challenging. They are not only for the beer aficionado but also mass appeal, which is great."
Knowing the ingredients well is essential for a brewer, for example, the magic tricks of hop varieties Nelson sauvin and American citra. Nicholls says: "They smack you round the chops - nothing subtle about them...they are the rock stars of the hop world."
From Upper Hutt, Kereru Brewing's Kereru Imperial Nibs was best in class for experimental, fruit and flavoured beer, described by judge Donaldson as "a dessert-lover's delight that caresses your senses."
Co-owner Chris Mills says the beer tastes like chocolate cake - a deliberate feat which involved infusing the beer with cacao nibs (roasted and crushed) to get intense chocolate flavours. At one stage the beer is passed through a bed of toasted coconut, still warm from the manuka wood-fired oven of the local pizzeria.
