January 28th, 2016

Munter Halloween?

After years of decline it looks as though the annual celebration of getting drunk in a costume near some rugby 7's is finally dying.
This year's abysmal ticket sales has enabled us to avoid the traditional locking of the doors, and this weekend we'll be open as normal.
Our door staff have strict instructions to deny entry to costumed idiots - so even if there are some wasted Where's Wallys around they won't be in HZ.

Think of us as your safe haven from the 7's zombie apocalypse.

New Release Tuesday: Coronado Coconado

It might seem counter intuitive, but in many arid parts of the world stouts are the main choice of beer drinkers. So Summer must be the perfect time of year to drink big, rich, dark imperial stouts right?

Luckily for us Beer Without Borders' lastest US shipment contained a one-off imperial milk stout from Coronado, cleverly named Coconado.

A little confusion arose from the research around this beer, as many websites list it as an 'imperial chocolate milk stout' and others just as 'imperial milk stout'.
Judging by the keg ring, we're fairly certain this one has cocoa and lactose added. Online reviews seem to back that up, agreeing that it's big, rich and sweet:
"Full bodied, rich, and warm toasty chocolate flavors finished with a sweet-clean roasted smoothness."

We're tapping our keg of Coconado this Tuesday at 5pm, let's hope for a hot sunny day...

San Fran Superbowl L

The teams have been selected and the hype train is at full speed in the lead up to the clash of the Denver Broncos & Carolina Panthers, in the historical 50th Super Bowl on Monday Feb 8th (NZ time).
The 8th is also a public holiday so you won't even have to skip work this year! We'll have the game showing from midday, with all the sound and commentary from the game and more importantly - the half time show.

Usually we'd try and find some beer from one of the team's home state, but we don't have any beer from Colorado (yet...) or North Carolina.
So we're focusing on the venue instead, with San Franciscan beers and food to enjoy along with the game.

We'll be tapping a keg of the wonderful Almanac Saison de Brettaville, which will be matched with the seafood stew Cioppino. Apparently "Cioppino" is a traditional San Franciscan seafood stew, something I'd never heard of 'till Google told us about it. It'll be rich and full of fish, prawns, scallops etc.

If meat aint your thing, our resident vegan American Tori has discovered a brilliant 'murican vegetarian option: BBQ Pulled Jackfruit buns. Think pulled pork buns, but not pork. We'll be matching these with Speakeasy Baby Daddy IPA, another SF native brew.

We'll have a special combo price for these beer/food matches.

January 21st, 2016

Brewed on the Cobra

Our annual homage to Wellingtons amazing brewing scene kicks off tomorrow, when all of our taps are dedicated to locally brewed beer.

Further to last week's info, we've fleshed out the lineup with some pretty exciting beers.
We're kicking off the sour tap tomorrow with Tiamana's new Woodruff Berliner Weisse - Meister Weisse. It's GREEN, sour and looks amazing.
We've just got 20L of the Meister, so following that we've got Te Aro Brewing Rhubarb Berliner Weisse. This is the same batch from Beervana 2015, that has been aging with a few extra bugs since.

The handpumps will be graced with Tiamana's Old Fritze Doppelbock (lager on a handpump!), and the amazing Kereru For Great Justice Coconut Porter, followed by their Old Red Oak Ale. For an extra-Wellingtony aspect, Old Red Oak is aged on oak harvested from the Wellington botanical gardens.

The Wellington lineup starts from opening tomorrow, and stays local till Monday.

Live in the Lounge: King Kreabsley And The Fernets

The band that makes our music booker open his thesaurus is back. King Kreabsley and The Fernets are playing the lounge this Saturday.

Described as: "The young lion of the Welly city Mambo-Jazz guitar scene Paul James and fresh faced skins man Cory Champster. Under the strict and truth be told, somewhat capriciously stochastic guidance of the Solid Statesman of that Nu Jazz Sound Kristofer "King" Kreabsley."

They kick off at 9.30pm in the lounge, to be enjoyed free of charge as always.

Not Just A 'Wheat Beer'!

Wheat beers are fairly divisive among beer drinkers. Most people's first experience of a wheat beer will be a yeasty, banana/bubblegum Weissbier or a clovey, zesty Witbier.
These can be great, but even the great ones won't be to everyone's taste - fair enough.
The problem comes when people apply this flavour profile to every single beer with wheat in it. A hopped up American Wheat Ale is light years away from a traditional Weissbier!

So don't let the 'wheat' in the name fool you. Coronado Wally's Wheat Market isn't your traditional witbier or weissbier - but a hopped up pale ale that contains some wheat for body.

Coronado say it's "Slightly more hoppy than what you'd expect from your typical wheat beer, with a light body, and a crisp refreshing flavor. Easy to drinking, and fun to say."

US brewers seem to have a very loose definition of "session beer" as Wally's Wheat Market weighs in at 4.8%...
We're tapping our first keg of Wally's Wheat Market at 5pm on Tuesday, just after the long weekend.
So reward yourself after your first day back at work with a pint of rare Coronado beer.

Hottest Hundy at Hashigo 

Every year Aussie radio station Triple J holds "The world's biggest musical democracy" when millions of people vote on their favourite songs. The top 100 are played in the annual countdown.

Apparently this is quite the event in Aussie, as it was brought to our attention by a few local expats that no Wellington venue was airing the countdown. Previous year's top 100's had quite a few decent songs, so we decided to make an event of it.

The countdown starts next Tuesday at 2pm our time. We'll be tapping a keg of Te Aro's Aussie Pale Ale, and serving up a special classic Aussie Meat Pie (with tomato sauce of course) to supplement the music.

Low on Charge?

You're out and about, expecting an important call but you've only got 5% battery left!
We often charge people's phones for them behind the bar, but what if that call comes while it's behind the bar?
That's where our new portable power banks come in.

We've now got four 10,000mAh portable charges available to borrow from the bar, meaning you can charge your phone anywhere in the bar, and not miss a thing.
They're also 2.1A output, meaning your phone will charge nice and quick.

We've got a stock of micro USB and Lightning cables available too, so you're good to go (USB-C coming soon).

As collateral we'll just take a credit card/ID/birth certificate, that will be returned to you when we get the charger back. To identify each one we've named them after long serving previous staff members, some of whom conveniently share a name.

So if you're running low, just come up to the bar and grab a charger - free of charge.

Any bets for how long 'till the first one takes a beer bath?

January 15th, 2016

After a holiday break, our weekly news email is back, albeit a day late. Yesterday I was down in Christchurch enjoying the beery pleasures of The Laboratory and Pomeroy's. Expect future updates on Thursdays as usual.

Boogie with the Disco Echidna

It's become a tradition for Wild & Woolly head brewer Llew and his partner Sarah to do an "open till close" at Hashigo during the holiday season.
This generally involves hanging out at the bar all day, playing board games and talking beer with the bar staff.

I was lucky enough to be working during this year's open-close, and got chatting to Llew & Sarah about an interesting new Wild & Woolly beer coming up.
To grow up enough Saison yeast for a full-sized batch of Cucumber saison, a small batch of saison had to be brewed.
But in classic W+W style, Llew decided to brew a 50L batch of saison and blend that with pineapple juice to add extra fermentables and fruity flavours.

This pineapple saison didn't yet have a name, but to continue with the W+W wildlife beer naming tradition we needed to decide what kind of animal a pineapple saison would be.

In the end we settled on the echidna, as pineapples are spiky just like echidna - but more fun, like a disco.
Thus, Wild & Woolly Disco Echidna was born.

Llew describes the beer:
"Disco Echidna is actually a cross between a saison and a funky pineapple-juice cider.
It's got a huge nose of pineapple and other tropical fruit, both from the juice that makes up 50% of the fermentables and from the Galaxy dry hops. The pineapple juice still shows strongly in the flavour, but the yeast character is stronger here than in the aroma, giving plenty of earthy saison-y funk.
It's easy drinking, lightly tart, very dry and super-refreshing. Should appeal to lovers of good beer and cider alike."

We're tapping our one keg of Disco Echidna at 5pm this Tuesday. Don't miss out - only 100L was made and we've got just a single small keg!

Live in the Lounge: Rhino Boogie 

Rhino Boogie return to the HZ lounge tomorrow night, with their unique mix of live performance mixed with the turntables of Uncle Silverback.
The band themselves have promised  to "go deep with live n sweaty funk, hip hop, free jazz dance music" which sounds like fun.

They kick off at 9.30pm in the lounge, and as the band says "free entry, satisfaction guaranteed"

Head of the Cobra!

Just a week or two back at work and we're quickly heading for another long weekend.
It's become a tradition at Hashigo to do a bit of a 'Welly brewer' tap takeover each Wellington Anniversary Weekend, and this year is no different.

When we started doing the Welly takeover, it was a struggle to get just 8 locally brewed beers to fill our taps. Each year it's become easier to do, and this year we can be extra picky.

We've decided to mainly focus on some of the newer or smaller brewers in the region like Choice Bros (brewery coming soon), Tiamana, Wild & Woolly, North End and Baylands.

We've got some special beers coming on over the weekend, like Choice Bro's Peanut Butter & Jelly beer 'On the Brain' & Red IPA w Ginger Reet Petite. 
Tiamana has the German styles covered with Witzig Wheat and Pilzki Pilsner. Wild & Woolly is brining the weird with Lavender Bllonde and Wild and Cucumber Saison (collab with Knave brewing, aka Jesse from R & V).

We'll be filling in the gaps over the next week, including the sour tap and handpumps.

The Wellington goodness will last from Friday next week right through to Monday. So come on down and drink local.