CRAFT BEER - THE WEST'S NEW WINE

The winemakers are leaving

West Auckland’s winemakers’ footprints are still scattered across West Auckland, but they are fading fast. You can still see some stainless-steel tanks and vineyards around Henderson Valley, but the fact is, most winemakers have either moved out or on as the encroaching city bolstered by 2016’s Unitary Plan rezones swathes of once productive Henderson wine making country.

The craft brewers are coming

Growing grapes for making wine needs large blocks of land and the country’s biggest city, oddly situated on the country’s narrowest part, puts pressure on winemaking landowners to sell for housing development, retail or in Lincoln Road’s case, a slew of fast-food outlets, turning its former reputation as Auckland’s fruit bowl diametrically on its head.  The ‘pressure’ we speak of course is tempered somewhat, usually by a generous dose of cash from the land developer to the winemakers, assuming they owned the land.

Craft beer brewing on the other hand is less land intensive and a small but influential group of artisan beer brewers has already opened for business in Auckland’s North West. Craft beer as a retail ‘category’ has probably only existed for about 5 years but in that time, has significantly changed how we drink beer. We are far less likely to be satisfied with a 6-pack of mass produced international beer brewed by a global brewing behemoth.  

Given the influence of the Trusts around alcohol retailing in West Auckland, Trusts owned West Liquor stores are in a unique position to comment on craft beer uptake out west. Angela Hurst, West Liquor marketing manager says, “Craft beer sales are going incredibly and on an upwards trend. Some stores have upwards of a 30% mix of craft beer out of total beer sales, which is extraordinary from a category that didn’t really exist 5 years ago”.

Hard craft

Back in the 1980s, West Auckland’s pioneering winemakers helped educate local wine palates, helped by a generation of returning OE Kiwis from Europe who brought back a taste for Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs. Now a new wave of craft brewers is doing the same for craft beer, broadening tastes and opening people up to a new world of traditional, innovative and hoppy locally brewed beers.  

The cluster of West Auckland craft brewers in the Nor West is small but gaining national recognition.

Helensville based Liberty Brewing Company is an award-winning brewer that has earned a reputation for great IPA (India Pale Ale and APAs (American Pale Ales). In Riverhead, Hallertau has all but reinvented the family brewpub-meets-restaurant-with-beer garden model and raised the bar for anyone wanting to open one. Keeping it ‘street’ in Kelston, Black Sands Brewing Company and Weezledog are producing beers that go beyond the diet of mass produced fizzy lagers and ales that hitherto dominated supermarkets and West Auckland outlets.    

A gutsy westie spirit underpins what Liberty does. Founder and director Joseph Wood is a Kaipara local with innate brew craft matched by entrepreneurial chutzpah and together with wife Christina, they have commercial nous. Three things that frequently don’t go together but when they align in this case, it helps take Liberty’s beers on the journey from Joseph’s head to the supermarket shelf.

Along with wife Christina (they met at Kaipara College) they plough their own ‘craft’ furrow eschewing conventional marketing tactics. Their ‘consumer statement’ is: ‘Flip that’s good beer’ (except it doesn’t say ‘flip’). Which encapsulates Liberty’s craft punk attitude in a sentence.  

I met Joseph and Joseph and Christina up at the Helensville brewery. Joseph is a straight talking, grounded chap with an insatiable desire to experiment and create innovative beers which are putting Helensville on the craft map. The brand is a drawcard in the supermarket chiller now and in vogue but more importantly the beer is good. Such are expectations now, Liberty’s business rests on producing outstanding beer every time. This is beer we’re talking about – the customers are frequently supermarkets and net margins are as slim as Kate Moss on a low-carb diet which means that producing at maximum ‘volume’ is crucial. As is quality, all day and every day.

This is achieved while a low-level supermarket shelf space war is waged among craft brewers with big brewers competing for limited space. The craft business is great fun say both Joseph and Christina, but it would be a mistake for anyone wishing to enter it, to regard it as being all beer and skittles. It’s much more than just brewing quality beer.  

Kelston’s own Black Sands and Weezledog

Kelston based Black Sands Brewing Company directors, Ian Hebblethwaite and Mark Jackman brew a range of IPAs, pilsners and ales that are gaining recognition in the market. Like many, Ian was a keen home brewer and a former consumer marketer for Unilever before starting up a health food business. He turned the brewing hobby into a business, teamed up with Black Sands head brewer and co-director Mark Jackman who also brews his own Weezledog brand at the Kelston brewery. The Black Sands brewery is on the site of the former Scotts Brewing, which moved to Oamaru.

When I visited Black Sands, they had just launched their latest beer, Rooibos Browns Bay Tea Party, (say: royboss). Says Ian, “We launched it in Browns Bay and it’s getting good response.” Rooibos is a South African tea famed for its health properties. 

Ian is proud of Auckland’s growing reputation as a producer of quality craft beers and while aware that the craft industry was historically driven by a Wellington centric collective, Ian now points to a shifting of the sands as craft brewers seeking volume sales move North, to be closer to the money biggest market. Ian explains, “Untapped [an international beer ratings app] shows that most of New Zealand’s top-rated beers are from Auckland.” Ian concurs that Wellington has a great environment for drinking craft, “It’s real craft beer culture down there because of its compactness whereas Auckland is spread out with pockets of activity in places like Grey Lynn, Ponsonby and Mt Eden.”

Blanc (RIP)

For a few years a beacon of craft beer light illuminated Lincoln Road in a heavenly fashion. That light was Blanc and craft beer enthusiasts saw that it was good. Blanc was a retail arm of Lincoln Wines’ long-established winemaking business, founded by the Fredatovich family from Dalmatia. The family’s part in making West Auckland, New Zealand's first major wine producing region cannot be understated.

I caught up with fourth generation Peter Fredatovich at the North West Centre in Westgate one chilly morning. He described how Blanc opened and successfully navigated the tightly controlled licensing parameters, where on and off-premise sales are largely dominated by The Trusts.

Peter explained, “If you produce wine on-site, you can sell what you like and while we no longer had an active winery [at Lincoln Road] we still produced port and altar wines there.” Blanc opened principally to compete with West Liquor around imported wines which Peter and his father (also Peter, generation 3) felt was limited in scope. Their thinking was that Blanc, as a single store could respond to local demand as a business more nimbly than West Liquor with its multiple outlets and the incumbent structure of their operational scale.

Blanc regulars might recall the big beer fridge on the right at the back of the store. They have trade Me to thank for kicking off Lincoln Road’s craft beer awakening. Peter Jnr spotted it on Trade Me and long story short, bought it, “We started selling craft beers sourced through Beer NZ and it just took off, so we began to put real focus on craft beer,” Peter says.

This was another crucial point of difference for Blanc compared to the Trusts’ retail offering. Quickly and organically word spread, and Blanc became a destination for beer and wine tastings, daytime events, refills and for stocking an unrivalled range of craft beer, as big as anywhere in Auckland.  

In its pomp Blanc gave West Auckland, probably for the first and maybe even last time, a sophisticated place where you could try, buy and consume craft beers in a pleasant environment surrounded by knowledgeable and welcoming staff. Blanc was one of a kind and its seminal role creating a craft beer culture in West Auckland cannot go unrecorded. It was so much more than a grog shop, more a place where craft enthusiasts converged and were understood as well as catered to.    

People sat outside in the small outdoor seated area and enjoyed a glass of wine or beer on a weekend and things appeared to be going just great, but suddenly come late summer 2016 it closed and is now gone but certainly not forgotten.