New American Beer Tasting
Our formal welcome to a number of new American beers takes place next Wednesday evening. The core of the tasting will be the Southern Tier beers that we just brought in, but we'll augment those with a few beers that we got for the first time from other suppliers.
It's just $35 to take part and you can book a place at the bar or at the Cult Beer Store.
Aussie Rules and Other Televised Entertainment
We're offering a couple of alternative forms of afternoon entertainment in the coming weeks. First up, in collaboration with Craft Beer College, come the combined "Aussie Rules" tasting and ritual Grand Final viewing this Saturday. Apparently good bars screening the AFL Grand Final are thin on the ground in Wellington (who'd have thought?) so this year ex-pat Victorian Steph made it her mission to create a fitting occasion to watch the big game. To this end she has inaugurated a New Zealand vs Australia beer and pie tasting, starting at 2:30pm, leading into the match itself at 4pm.
More details are at http://hashigozake.co.nz/rules.pdf.
Now it has come to our attention that a rare trip by our national rugby team to South America will result in the staging of a test at the ungodly time of midday on a Sunday. Fortunately this coincides with our normal opening time so it will be little or no effort for us to show the game. And by the way, daylight saving starts earlier on Sunday morning.
Seven days later it will be a slightly different story. We'll be screening a very different kind of entertainment on the afternoon of October 7 - a live debate between comedian Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly, Fox News' purveyor of (generally daft) opinions. It will be coming over a series of tubes rather than a Sky channel, so we're looking forward to getting good use from our state of the art fibre connection to the outside world. And it looks as though the aforementioned daylight saving change means that this will start at 2pm rather than 1pm as previously stated.
Darren Watson Returns
Darren Watson and his Underground Blues Band return to our lounge for another evening of "Doity old blues played filthily", to quote Darren's own facebook page. Intrigued? Get in nice and early. The filth starts at 10pm on Saturday.
Garage Project Also Returns
When we served the first beer in Garage Project's season of 24 More a few weeks ago, we may have neglected to make a point about 24 More. Which is that Garage Project are making no commitment to release these beers at an actual or even an average rate of one per week. Hence the gap of a few weeks before the next experiment, which will turn up on Tuesday.
But s24e02 will be along next Tuesday and it should grab everyone's attention. It's a preview of sorts of a future barrel aged strong golden rye ale. Except that a small amount didn't make it into a barrel and instead spent some quality time with a few luscious, whole raspberries. It was, reportedly, a "bastard" to brew, which is pretty normal for rye, and so the working title of this beer is Bastard Rye (Raspberry Edition).
And did we mention that it weighs in at 11% ABV? No doubt someone will still complain when we don't serve it in an imperial pint.
On Tap Soon
It seems that now is the time to be revisiting some of the most interesting releases of the last few months (or earlier). For instance:
- Garage Project Aro Noir and Golden Brown - two big successes of 24/24 return having been brewed on Garage Project's large system for the first time.
- Our final keg of Emerson's magnificent Extra Stout.
- Three Boys Coconut Milk Stout, which we now know is a milk stout made with coconut, not a stout made with coconut milk.
- ParrotDog DeadCanary Pale Ale.
Then there's a new Yeastie Boys release. In a detailed email to outlets this week Stu explained that we must call it "Belgian-style Table Beer", because "Belgian-style Golden Mild" won't sell. The low-down is that it's a session beer (3.8% ABV) with a variety of Weyermann malts and Nelson Sauvin hops, fermented with the Rochefort yeast and it's called Plan B.
What Stu forgets is that the crucial words that help sell a beer aren't "mild" or "Belgian" but "Yeastie" and "Boys".
Pacific Beer Expo News
We like to keep up a steady flow of information about the lineup on Labour Weekend. But at the time of writing we have 20 or 30 beers that are in the probable category as they're either on their way to New Zealand or are still being brewed. Naming beers that aren't sitting in our cool-store right now seems like tempting fate. So here, for now, are a couple that are waiting in our cool-store and we can be 100% confident about.
From San Diego's Ballast Point comes a fruit beer that seems to be dividing critics. It gets comments on ratebeer like "Sweet and sticky, tough to drink, way too boozy", but is in the 98th percentile for its style. All of which makes it a perfect festival beer. It's called Old Barmy Ale and is made with apricots and caramelised honey.
We don't want too many extreme beers, so we're expecting far less fuss from a new (to us) beer from Coronado, called Nutter Brown, which is a brown ale.
Details regarding tickets are the same as before - you can buy them here at the bar or from the Cult Beer Store. Anyone preferring to come on Saturday the 20th might want to get their ticket sooner rather than later.
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