Liquor Laws. Rant #1

Yesterday I sat through a meeting at the Wellington City Council at which interested parties made submissions to the Council as they attempt to draft the new Local Alcohol Policy. Some sincere, credible representatives from Police, the District Health Board and one or two other branches of Health made the case for reining in the rights of liquor licence holders. And industry representatives tried to defend their ground. Some messages were hammered home:

• Nothing good happens after 3am. [Police]
• Restricting availability of alcohol reduces abuse. [Health experts]
• It’s their fault. [Hospitality and Retailers, about each other]

Now I have one or two opinions on flaws in the thinking of a few parties to discussions about alcohol, which I’ll come to soon. But with respect to the fate of Wellington’s liquor licensees, it looks as though most of the heat and noise around the policy will come down to a few a lines on maps and times of day. Specifically, what streets will have different maximum closing times and what the various closing times will be.

In particular, the concept of having a designated nightlife zone with different maximum licensing hours seems to have been negotiated in advance between the Council and local representatives of the Hospitality Association. Going by what has been said, the Council envisage an area in Courtenay Place and another area in Cuba St. Jeremy Smith of the Hospitality Association said that they think the zones should be connected. Because there would be better lighting that way or something.

I don’t really care about the details because either way I’m staggered at what a colossal blunder they are conspiring to make. Here is why.

Courtenay Place wasn’t always Wellington’s nightlife centre. In fact it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. To someone brought up in Wellington it’s not that long since Courtenay Place consisted of an ugly bus terminal and some uninspiring shops. And on its side streets were massive wholesale fruit and vegetable markets. The bus terminal and markets have gone and I assume that that evacuation by long standing businesses made the influx by bars and cafes possible. It’s a classic example of the evolution of a city and exactly how nightlife quarters spring up in cities everywhere, from Dublin’s Temple Bar to Tokyo’s Golden Gai.

The trouble is that nightlife districts have a life cycle. They don’t spring up and stay interesting and youthful forever. They stagnate and get superseded by other districts. That stagnation happened about ten years ago in Courtenay Place. It's now a big brewery-controlled, noisy, cigarette smoke-filled (that's right) ghetto. The trouble is that no-one has told the Council or the Hospitality Association. Courtenay Place has become a model for everything that can go wrong in a nightlife district. Do I need to make the case here? I hope not.

It’s no surprise that of the dozen or so craft beer oriented bars that Wellington likes to boast about, only one is in Courtenay Place. If you’re looking for a venue for a new bar like Goldings Free Dive or Rogue & Vagabond, the brief you give a real estate agent is “anywhere in the CBD except Courtenay Place”. As a consequence there are signs that a lively and colourful new nightlife is emerging in the area where these businesses found premises – in back alleys and previously unfashionable streets near, but not on, Cuba Street.

But the Council, who seem to think the scenes in Courtenay Place late on Fridays and Saturdays represent “vibrancy”, and the Hospitality Association, led by individuals who, I believe, own businesses in Courtenay Place, are planning a regime that will penalise anyone trying to establish a business anywhere else – businesses that might give discerning consumers an alternative to the chaos on Courtenay Place. It may not be what the Council intended, but it’s what’s called an unintended consequence. It’s what happens when you draw lines on a map and create differences between the two sides.

Of course not all the results will penalise businesses outside the strip. If you’re a Courtenay Place property owner learning that your tenants have privileges with respect to liquor licensing, you’re going to put their rent up. I look forward to hearing the Hospitality Association complaining about sky-rocketing rents in the street in about a year’s time.

What We Stock – a Rough Guide

An awful lot of time and energy is wasted arguing over a definition of “craft brewing”. The trouble is that the term was first coined for convenience and is inherently qualitative. It was basically coined so that a portion of the market could set themselves apart because they considered themselves different from and better than the majority of swill that was on the market at the time. And it was probably fair and sensible of them at the time. Of course you can’t realistically define a segment of the market as being “good”, so there have been increasingly desperate efforts since then to come up with more rigorous definitions. And now that “faux craft” is increasingly serious business the whole debate is doomed to becoming more and more fractious.

In fact, for a laugh and to make a desperate attempt at getting the final say on this debate, here’s another definition of a craft brewer:

a craft brewer is a brewer who stays out of debates on what a craft brewer is.

But it’s time to change the debate. Rather than flail around trying to retrospectively apply a definition to a term that’s already subject to widespread misuse, it’s time for people who care to state for the record what it is they care about. So here, for the record Hashigo Zake submits a definition of the criteria we use to guide (but not necessarily dictate) our product choices.

1. Fair Competition: Hashigo Zake stocks beer from breweries who compete on price and quality and do not offer incentives to outlets to stock their products and/or exclude others.
2. Brewing-centric: Hashigo Zake stocks beer from breweries who, from inception, have one or more individual brewers intimately and intrinsically involved in planning and building the business.
3. Independence: Hashigo Zake stocks beer from breweries who are not owned by parent companies that are corporate brewers with a market capitalisation greater than $1 billion.
4. Honesty: Hashigo Zake stocks beer from breweries who do not intentionally mislead consumers about their own history or products. Their product information is compatible with internationally recognised definitions of beer styles. They don’t consistently call a beer one style then enter it into competitions as a quite different style. They don’t mislead consumers about where and by whom their beer is brewed. They don’t trademark terms that they didn’t invent.
5. Respectful: Hashigo Zake stocks beer from breweries who do not market their product by insulting, denigrating or exploiting a section of society.
6. Quality: Hashigo Zake stocks beer that we think is good.

If anyone thinks that some aspect of these criteria is misguided - that’s nice, we look forward to seeing you demonstrate your superior grasp of what’s important in your own business venture.

Spectapular Time

The second Great Australasian Beer Spectapular took place over the weekend (May 24-26, 2013). Some crucial things were the same as last year:

• Venue – surely the world’s greatest beer hall. (The Royal Exhibition Hall) What foresight from the residents of 19th century Melbourne.
• The concept – original, festival beers from an enormous number of Australasian breweries.
• Paddles with five 85ml serves in plastic cups.

Some crucial differences:

• Queues – taking the pragmatic step of only offering a subset (around 15) of all the beers on offer at any single bar made all the difference. A little patience was needed during the Saturday afternoon session, but nothing for anyone to get worked up about.
• 50% more festival beers. Up from 59 to 89, a sprinkling of them from outside Australasia.
• Caterers were inside at booths instead of being outside in their caravans.
• There was no VIP lounge.
• Brewery stands where a brewery could serve the rest of their "non-festival" range. 

So what about the beers? It was possible to try them all. In fact a story flew around that a group had managed it in just one session. Apparently they had a paid servant.

As I worked my way through in numerical order (which was effectively alphabetical order by brewery name) being pulled from one radical style to another, completely different style, a particular impression emerged. Now it’s important to allow for the fact that this was a festival of previously unreleased beers, which is an invitation to brewers to be adventurous (with the constraint that they might be left trying to sell the rest of whatever size of batch they made for GABS). So pretty much every beer contained one or more characteristics that were intended to set them apart from their brewery’s normal range, and ideally from everyone else’s range too. But just how experimental a brewery was prepared to get varied a lot.

Now by the time I had got through the 16 beers from the first bar, I’d had:

• an American Black Pale Ale
• an Imperial Black IPA
• a Dark Imperial IPA
• a Black 19th Century IPA
• an English IPA
• a Barrel Aged Amber Ale

by the end of the third bar I’d also had:

• a Barrel Aged Belgian Black IPA
• a Barrel Aged Black Ale
• an Imperial Black IPA Aged on Rum Oak
• a Black Rye Witbier
• a Spiced Imperial Chocolate Stout
• a Belgian IPA
• a Shiraz Barrel Aged Farmhouse Ale
• a Black IPA

see a pattern? It was as if the (magnificent) Beer Review Generator had spun off the Beer Style Generator, where some very standard form of beer, such as a pale ale, was modified in one or more ways by the prefixing of a colour, a method of fermentation or a method of ageing. Or failing that was “imperialised”. And barrel ageing, which I think is very much in the “less is more” category, seems to have become the go-to method of recycling a recipe, or perhaps just a pre-existing beer. Oh, and black wasn’t the only colour – there was a white stout. Not to mention a certain brewery’s Belgian Blonde that came out a lurid red thanks to the use of beetroot. Now this is more an observation than a criticism. I just found it odd that hop-forward pale ales at or below 6%, without any major points of difference, were a novelty. And what ones there were came as a relief.

But this is a festival and 89 brewers were trying to do something original that was different from every other brewer’s original idea, without knowing in advance what everyone else's idea would be. It’s not strange that they clustered around a few related concepts. So congratulations to those who succeeded in doing something that left them right out on their own. In that category were:

• Birra Del Borgo’s Myrtle’s Bunga Bunga Party. A lemon myrtle infused British/Belgian pale ale that shone in the 85ml format, but by the end of a full glass might have outstayed its welcome. And what a great name.
• Bacchus’ White Chocolate Raspberry Pils. I gave it a low score but the flavour matched the description and it won the People’s Choice.
• Brewcult’s Acid Freak – Balsamic Baltic Porter. Rather than mess around souring their beer these guys simply added balsamic vinegar. Kind of worked.
• Young Henry’s Divine Manchu. They called it a “kombucha beer” – low alcohol, sweet/sour beer made with tea and fermented with a SCOBY – symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. I couldn’t finish 85mls of it but it had its defenders. Probably great for the colon though.
• True South’s Killer Python Kölsch – a Kölsch with Killer Pythons (the chewy sweets) added. Surprisingly pleasant but don’t ask me why I approved of this but not the White Chocolate Raspberry Pils.

Finally, aside from the grumbles about what constituted originality, there were some truly great beers. Arguably quality won the day, regardless of originality, but this list probably just reflects my own biases as much as anything else:

• 8 Wired Merge Like a Zip – Imperial Black IPA
• Blue Sky Golden Ale
• Feral Barrique o Karma
• Garage Project Death From Above
• Liberty C!tra Junior
• Sierra Nevada Return of the Red Eye IPA
• Summer Wine Brewery Warthog American Porter
• ParrotDog BloodyDingo Imperial Red IPA

Offensive Beer Names

I thought it might be illuminating to look through the names of the beers we've had on tap at Hashigo Zake and check whether anyone might be offended by them. This could be an invaluable resource the next time the Dominion Post are looking for a story. By the time I got to the Es I was exhausted.

But to be fair to the Dominion Post, Garage Project do appear in this list an alarming number of times, and this is without getting as far as Golden Brown and Pernicious Weed.

Beer	Brewery	Possibly offended group
AK4.7	Founders	victims of gun violence
Avarice IIPA	666	saints
Bastard Rye	Garage Project	children of rye farmers
Beach Bum	Twisted Hop	beach goers
Beastwars IPA	Hallertau	victims of beast attacks
Black Arrow Pils	Townshend	victims of terrorism
Black Dwarf	8 Wired	black people of small stature
Black Magic IPA	Golden Bear	victims of voodoo
Black Ops IPA	Coronado	victims of counter-terrorism
Black Power	Moa	victims of gangs
Black the RIPA	Renaissance	Victorian era prostitutes
Blackbeard Porter	Golden Bear	victims of piracy
BlitzGreig IPA	Townshend	victims of the Blitz
Bumaye Imperial Stout	8 Wired	George Foreman
Bye Bye Blanket Man	Tuatara	Blanket Man
California Uber Alles	Garage Project	Arnold Schwarzenegger
Cherry Bomb	Garage Project	victims of chemical weapons
Clusterfunk	Funk Estate	prudes
Czar Imperial Stout	Wigram	Bolsheviks
Dasher’s Envy	Moon Dog	Prancer
Day of the Dead	Garage Project	the undead
Dead Good Pilsner	Free House	the living
DeadCanary	ParrotDog	victims of mining disasters
Defibrillator Weizenbock	Doctor’s Orders	victims of heart disease
Dirty Blonde	Cock and Bull	blondes
Emerson's last of the Mohicans	Emerson’s	native Americans
Epic Armageddon	Epic	survivalists
Expat Pom Porter	Twisted Hop	poms

Lift Your Game, Dominion Post

There’s nothing like seeing someone or something that you know turned into media cannon-fodder, to realise just how seedy journalism can get.

Garage Project’s Death From Above is not for sale anywhere yet and won’t be for a month. And it’s not being advertised anywhere, unless you count the brewery showing the artwork to its subscribers on social media.

That branding and artwork was actually the result of a forced change, after the beer’s intended name turned out to conflict with an existing brand. The intention all along was to make reference to the 34 year old movie Apocalypse Now. The beer in question has some ingredients with Vietnamese connections as well as being packed with American hops. It will no doubt be quite a mouthful. So in craft beer land an allusion to Robert Duvall’s Ride of the Valkyries-playing airborne cavalry is really, really apt.

Now to put things in perspective, Apocalypse Now has for years been the name of more than one bar in Vietnam. (Even more amusingly, Phnom Penh has a bar called “Heart of Darkness”.) The Apocalypse Now in Saigon has a surfboard on display with the slogan “Charlie Don’t Surf”.

But today must have been a slow news day, because someone at the Dominion Post saw fit to make calls to the RSA, a couple of Vietnam-born New Zealanders and a university academic to try and stir up some offence from people who would almost certainly not have heard of Death From Above if the reporter hasn’t called.

I don’t know much about the use of napalm, but it sounds as though it was a complete blunder to associate the airborne cavalry with the dropping of napalm, as the Dominion Post story did. But I guess if you only know Apocalypse Now from sound-bites, it is Duvall’s character who professes affection for the aroma of napalm.

Now as if the actions of Dominion Post, Stuff and Fairfax weren't sleazy enough, try going on Stuff and making a criticism of them for running this nonsense story. Will it get past their moderators? No. Make a really silly, reactionary comment wishing ill-fortune on Jos and Pete and, sure, they’ll publish.

Lies, Damned Lies etc

Statistics NZ yesterday released statistics showing that the volume of beer available for consumption had fallen dramatically in 2012. This has stirred the interest of Radio New Zealand in particular.

I had a closer look at some of the information given out by my one time employer. The most obvious detail was that the story was different when the market was segmented a little. In other words Stats give out numbers for four sub-categories based on alcohol strength. So there was a 22% fall for beer under 2.5%, falls of around 8% for the two bands between 2.5 and 5%. Then for beer over 5% ABV the volume of beer available rose 62%. That’s right 62%.

Now this has quickly been interpreted at (a) evidence that the popularity of beer is falling and (b) that the rise in stronger beer reflects greater popularity for the category of beer sometimes referred to as “craft”. And the spokesperson for the big breweries has been quick to blame the weather in 2012 for that apparent fall in popularity, even though it’s consistent with a long term trend.

Before any further discussion, it’s important to point out a few details about the process and the results.

• The statistics are based on declarations made to NZ Customs. So they only reflect supply, not consumption and they exclude any alcohol that isn’t declared to Customs, such as homebrew. These discrepancies are probably insignificant if we assume that supply reflects demand and that home brewing is still a specialist activity.
• That category of beer with alcohol greater than 5% apparently went from 8.956 million litres in 2011 to 14.468 million litres in 2012 – a 62% increase. But between 2005 and 2009 it fell from 24.510 million litres to 6.967 million litres. I was actually outside New Zealand during these years, but can't take credit for this scale of fall. So something is very fishy with this series. If anyone can explain this please post a comment. (There is a comment in the 2006 results saying “As the Beer Production Survey, which provided data on the volume of beer produced in New Zealand, was discontinued after the September 2006 quarter, information on volumes of beer by packaging type (bottled, canned, bulk) is no longer available.” But in theory this comment is irrelevant to this question of volume of beer over 5%.)
• Another aspect of the survey is the calculation of what proportion of alcohol consumption comes from different beverage types. To do this they calculate how much actual alcohol has been present in the beer, wine and spirit volumes already tallied. In the case of beer, they multiply the volume of beer in each category by an alcohol percentage. For beer between 4.35% and 5% they multiply the volume by 0.04675, which makes reasonable sense. For beer greater than 5% they multiply the volume by 0.051. Huh? They treat all beer between 5% and 50% alcohol as being 5.1%. It’s only a small anomaly, since the volume of beer greater than 5% ABV is small (but probably growing), but it means that beer’s calculated share of alcohol consumption is under-stated, exaggerating the impression that beer is steadily losing popularity. The pity of this is that the method used is probably unnecessary. These statistics are based on Customs Certificates, which include the volume of beer and the volume of alcohol. (At least the ones Hashigo Zake submits do.)

Anyway, having looked for a few holes in these statistics I’d like to join everyone else in making a sweeping generalisation about the results:

DB and Lion’s sales are in free fall. (Punches air.)

Now we know that New Zealand’s major urban centres are becoming strongholds of brewpubs (Auckland), craft beer bars (Wellington) and breweries (Christchurch and increasingly Wellington). Meanwhile bars that are contractually tied to the big breweries are (anecdotally) counting the days until their contracts run out.

We know that Lion made Emerson’s owners an offer they couldn’t refuse and if the rumours are true DB, Lion and (In)dependent Breweries are racking up air miles looking for more small breweries to buy. And the big breweries are desperately building “faux craft” brands.

But this survey suggests that there will be fresh crisis meetings going on in boardrooms in Auckland. And the measures of the last six months will just be the tip of the iceberg. We can reasonably expect more of the usual:

• more pressure on bars to stick to the letter of their exclusive supply contracts.
• bigger incentives for bars to sign new exclusive supply contracts.
• more use of volume targets with incentives and penalties in exclusive supply contracts.
• more purchases of leading independent breweries.
• more faux craft brands.

But what else will they resort to? More alcopop-like beers? More desperate marketing? Dirty tricks? Ultimately I wonder as well if DB’s and Lion’s owners will question the value of their investments and look to off-load them.

I can see one piece of good news for the big breweries. The new licensing laws are expected to impose big costs on bars and (in theory) a greater risk of being denied a liquor licence. I can see fear of the consequences of the new legislation driving more defensive hospitality operators back into the arms of the big breweries.

The Truth About Faux Craft

Right now “faux craft” is news. Beers fitting that loose definition have been around for a while but seem to have become more apparent as the big brewers respond to the perceived threat of true craft beer. In New Zealand faux craft has been commented on recently in both Fairfax media and the New Zealand Herald. In the US the Brewers Association have gone on the offensive, starting a campaign to expose and shame the practice with some success.

Craft Beer College’s Steph Coutts recently proposed a formal tasting of a range of New Zealand’s “faux craft” beer and this resulted in an event on Saturday January 5^th at Hashigo Zake. Invitations went out to some of CBC and Hashigo Zake’s regular associates and a group of 20 enthusiasts, brewers and beer writers sacrificed the pleasures of a sunny Wellington Saturday afternoon to sit together in an underground bar.

Steph and partner Jonny Day acquired stocks from four broad categories of twelve beers that they considered were faux craft. These were served blind (i.e. without being identified), one category at a time. In each of those four categories a fourth beer was added that was undeniably “craft” to act as a kind of benchmark and perhaps to ensure that we tasters took our samples seriously, since one in each flight was almost certainly a beer we respected.

I think I speak for everyone when I say that in general we expected a few preconceptions about the quality of these beers to be confirmed. In other words, we were braced for a fair amount of mediocrity. But we were all also open to the prospect that one or more of these offerings would give us a nice surprise and stand up well alongside one of the elite craft beers – maybe even show it up.

The first round was wheat beers. Samples of “A”, “B”, “C” and “D” were left in our glasses and we set about determining what was good, bad or indifferent and tried to match them to certain named beers. For me (C) stood out as an authentic and flavourful if imperfect German-style weissbier. Another (A) had many of the same characteristics but a lot less flavour and was a bit of a disappointment. (B) had a massive apricot aroma that identified it immediately but then failed to match its aroma with flavour and ended up somewhat insipid. Finally there was (D) which showed none of the aromas and flavours that I would expect a traditional German or Belgian style wheat beer to incorporate as a result of their distinctive yeasts. It was dreadfully bland. (C) comfortably won a show of hands for favourite and was revealed to be Tuatara Hefeweizen. (A) turned out to be Crafty Beggars Wheat As, (B) was Monteiths Apricot Wheat and (D) was Boundary Road Wheat Reaper.

We moved on to pilsners. (A) and (B) struck me as quite reasonable New Zealand Pilsners with plenty of hop aroma and bitterness on show. I speculated that a slight sweet note in (A) might have betrayed a little oxidation. Others judged it more harshly. (C) stood out for lacking the fresh hop characters we all expected from a New Zealand pilsner and tasted more like a plain old golden lager. Finally (D) blew away everything that came before it with fresh, vibrant hop aromas and flavours and a complete absence of flaws. It won the voting by a landslide and was revealed to be Croucher Pilsner. (A) was Boundary Road The Resident Pilsner, (B) was Speights Triple Hop Pilsner and (C) was Crafty Beggars Good as Gold.

On to pale ales and the craft wannabes were given something of a handicap by being put up against Epic Pale Ale. The Epic was immediately recognised by everyone. But I think that even if the craft representative had been something less distinctive the three faux craft pale ales would still have suffered from the same contemptuous judgement. All three really were awful, but in their own ways. Craft Beggars Pale And Interesting was hopelessly bland. Hancocks Grand Pale Ale drew scathing criticism for being faulty (diacetyl) and generally unpleasant. And Monteiths Pacific Pale Ale, whose commercial description made it sound like a hop-bomb, started with a raw, grainy aroma and barely improved from there.

Finally we had a round of “other” beers - a couple of darks and a couple of amber or brown beers. All were easily identified so the blindness of the tasting was somewhat compromised. The “control” beer was Emerson’s Porter, and as expected it was true to style and full of flavour. Boundary Road The Resident Red Rye was for me the best of all the faux craft beers – rich and flavourful thanks to the rye, balanced and bitter. Hancocks Brown Ale drew plenty of criticism and was considered faulty by some. For me its main problem was just a lack of flavour. Finally Monteith’s Barrel Aged Porter got plenty of positive reviews although I thought it reminded me too much of Monteith’s Black to get carried away. And for all the positive comment there was a lot of speculation about how much barrel aging it really had, whether the barrel it was aged in was actually made of wood or whether the beer was left in a barrel or vice versa.

In the end the tasting’s big surprise was the lack of a surprise. Respected craft beers stood out and many of the others were exposed as bland or faulty. Boundary Road’s The Resident beers did quite well, but the awfulness of their Wheat Reaper suggested that without their imported guest brewer (Spike Bukowksi) their capabilities are limited.

Many of us assume that with the resources at their disposal the only thing the big breweries need to make beer as well as genuine craft brewers is the will. This tasting suggested otherwise.