July 13, 2017

Anniversaries

Beervana just announced their brewery lineup for this year and there’s less than a month until New Zealand’s highest profile beer festival. It was around the time of Beervana, way back in 2009, that we started trading here at Hashigo Zake. So every Beervana is a kind of anniversary for us.

From this year it’s also the anniversary of something slightly less joyous – the time someone tried to burn us down, on August the 5th, the Friday before Beervana 2016.

It seems that we’ll never know whether the culprit was attempting a little petty vandalism with the paper towel dispenser in the gents or actually wanted to burn the building down and kill all our customers and staff. And perhaps if the arsonist was under the legal purchase age for alcohol then the case would have been quickly solved and we’d know the truth.

But hey, no-one was injured, we got to know how a gender-neutral bathroom works and most of the gents bathroom repairs were funded by insurance, so… no harm, no foul??

And now by glorious coincidence our friends at Graphic Brewing have a new beer to launch. And it’s called… My City Is On Fire. It’s a smoked porter. So on August the 1st we’re launching My City Is On Fire and simultaneously waving extended digits at our unindicted arsonist.

New Release Tuesday, Cook Strait Crossing Permitting

Once again Oamaru’s Craftwork have given (well, sold) us the rare gift of kegged beer.

Crikey Dick is described as a “bretty, hoppy pale ale” and a small keg of it is on its way. In theory it will make it in plenty of time to be next week’s New Release Tuesday. But the odds of it making it here by Tuesday are diminishing by the hour thanks to those fresh breezes we’re enjoying right now.

Is this a good time to remind everyone that there's no weather underground?

On Tap Now

• Wheaty Brewing Corps/Hawkers Baklava Brown Ale
• Deep Creek Black Tamarillo Gose
• Kowloon Bay / Black Kite / Hong Kong Beer Co. CBAHK Wei(zen) The Dragon
• Willie Smiths Cerasus Sour
• Fitzpatrick's Fitzy's Special
• North End Iron Sands Stout (Handpump)
• Townshend Lioness Pilsner
• Baird Rising Sun Pale Ale
• Beer Baroness Rye-ot Grrrl Rye IPA
• Oskar Blues Ten Fidy Imperial Stout
• Townshend Sutton Hoo (Handpump)

Highlights

A few goodies remain from last Friday’s Smash ‘n’ GABS, when we featured a very carefully selected set of GABS leftovers. Amazingly there’s even some of the mouth-tingling, szechuan-infused Wei(zen) The Dragon left.

This week’s new release – Deep Creek’s Black Tamarillo Gose is still there as well.

Bottle Pour Saturday

This Saturday we’re doing a bottle pour made up of two recent, local barrel-aged releases. The first is Garage Project’s Rebel County, their collaboration with the Jameson distillery. GP made a beer inspired by Jameson’s whiskey, with Irish malt, maize, honey, hazelnuts, vanilla and dried apricots (although, curiously, no coconut), then aged it in Jameson whiskey barrels. The result is Rebel County.

Alongside that will be Kereru’s Night Spirit. This is an Imperial Stout aged in New Zealand Whiskey Co barrels.

Bottles of both of these beers constitute substantial investments for the adventurous drinker, but on Saturday we’re offering a taste of each for a very reasonable price.

Music!

The Saturday after next sees the Vincent Vega Trio return with their distinctive surf rock (or perhaps that's surf RnB).

Next month we'll again have an extra live gig to help entertain patrons on both evenings of Beervana (August 11 and 12). We'll host the Cosmonauts on the Thursday and the Nick Granville Funk Trio on the Saturday.

Our events calendar can be viewed any time here.

Finally...

It's a while since we bashed New Zealand's industrial brewers in this newsletter, but an opportunity has appeared that's too good to turn down.

One of DB's sibling subsidiaries of Heineken just got slapped with a nice big fine for doing what DB (and Lion) do here better than anyone - behaving anti-competitively. Sadly this ruling was on the other side of the world.

Those of a like mind to us can savour the news here.