Even after 150 years, Speight’s workers say the company is still filled with colourful characters, each with a story. Business reporter Tim Scott takes a look back at the storied, often peculiar history of the mighty Dunedin institution.
When Bill McAdam began his first day at Speight’s, in 1982, he thought it was ‘‘heaven’’.
The then-19-year-old was between jobs before landing work across the road from the Dunedin brewery in the former bottling house, now home to Harvey Norman.
Back then, drinking while on the job was still an accepted part of the brewing industry.
‘‘You could have a beer at smoko, you could have a beer at lunchtime, you could have a beer after work - what a better place to be for a 19-year-old who would enjoy that,’’ McAdam says.
‘‘Everyone knew their limits, of course now it’s completely changed.’’
‘‘Once I got the job, I certainly didn’t intend leaving or going somewhere else.’’
Speight’s, the oldest operational brewery in New Zealand, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this weekend.
It has operated at the same, original site in Rattray St since 1876.
Back then, it was known simply as ‘‘City Brewery’’.
The foundations were laid in 1876 by three mates: James Speight, Charles Greenslade and William Dawson.
It was only a decade later that Speight himself died, in 1887 - it is thought due to his large consumption of alcohol.
Greg Hamburger, another current long-serving employee, considers himself ‘‘part of the furniture’’ at Speight’s Brewery.
The engineering reliability leader, he started working for Lion in Christchurch, in 1980, before relocating to Dunedin with his wife after the 2011 earthquake.
‘‘I thought I’d only be here five years, but here we are, 15 later.’’
Over his 46 years of service to Lion - or 2395 weeks, as he likes to frame it - he had seen some massive changes: the computerisation of the industry and automation within the brewery itself.
But the brewing process was still just the same as it was back in the 1980s.
There was something ‘‘so alluring’’ about the Dunedin brewery, Hamburger said.
‘‘It’s a quirky place to work.
‘‘We are so lucky, because there wouldn’t be another place like this, I would say, in the world.
‘‘Nobody builds breweries on hills.’’
The early years
In his comprehensive 1993 book, Speight’s: The Story of Dunedin’s Historic Brewery, the late Donald Gordon - a former chemist at the brewery turned historian - recalled the early years of James Speight & Co.
For its first few years, and with only a handful of employees on the payroll, it struggled against competition from about a dozen other Dunedin breweries.
There were times when the income was insufficient to pay wages by their due date; Greenslade and Dawson had to do most of the manual labour in the malthouse and brewhouse themselves.
‘‘Speight is said to have spent less time in his office than on the road trying to drum up sales,’’ Gordon writes.
‘‘To be a successful brewery traveller it was necessary to share a few drinks with every publican, and the continual imbibing of beer - that was much stronger than today’s product - eventually undermined Speight’s health.’’
However, Speight was a successful salesman armed with two assets: ‘‘a persuasive tongue and a product of high quality’’.
That was recognised in 1879 when a cask of Speight’s Strong Ale was highly commended at an international exhibition in Sydney.
Sales immediately increased by about 50%.
And towards the end of 1880, Speight’s entered several casks in the Melbourne Exhibition and, in the face of competition from across the globe, won two first and four second prizes.
It is from here that ‘‘Gold Medal Ale’’ gets its name.
Sales almost doubled over the next two years.
In 1887, Speight’s became New Zealand’s biggest brewery.
By about 1902, Speight’s was producing 70% of the beer sold in Otago and Southland - 20% of all beer in the country.
Later, in 1959, Speight’s became the only brewery south of the Waitaki River.
'Thirsty work’
When Hamburger first joined Lion in 1980, the legal drinking age was 21.
While all the older guys used to drink beer a lot, the then-19-year-old was not allowed to drink - ‘‘in theory’’.
‘‘That lasted about three weeks before they, I’ll say, ‘made me’ drink,’ Hamburger says.
‘‘But I didn’t mind having a beer or two.’’
McAdam said among the big changes he had witnessed over his career was when the company started prohibiting drinking during work hours and at lunch, around the early 1990s.
But as a qualified taster, he is among a few who are permitted to drink small samples of product for work.
There is even a breathalyser in the lab he must clear before being allowed back at the workstation.
Drinking on the job appears to date back nearly a century before McAdam says it officially ceased.
According to Gordon, about 20 men worked in shifts at the Speight’s malthouses towards the end of the 1890s.
‘‘It was hard, thirsty work,’’ he writes.
‘‘But there was always a keg of beer on hand and no restriction on access to it.’’
There was even a legend that anyone caught drinking water rather than beer was sacked.
A man named Harry Cummings apparently consumed an estimated ‘‘400 hogsheads of beer’’ during his tenure.
Speight’s also had a lot of cats who kept rats and mice out of the barley and malt, Gordon says.
‘‘But they weren’t given milk or water to drink, their preferred beverage being beer.
‘‘Some of the brewery-born kittens, taken home as pets by workers, refused to drink anything but Speight’s for the rest of their lives.’’
McAdam says, surprisingly, two of the decades-long-serving staff he works with now both do not consume alcohol.
He still enjoys the occasional drink.
When he first started, the majority of workers would drink Speight’s - or Lion Brown if you were in Christchurch; Lion Red if you were in Auckland.
Craft beer and RTDs were ‘‘something you just did not see back in the 1980s’’.
He recalled the time someone in Dunedin once accidentally took a ‘‘shower’’ in Lion Stout.
The story goes: a gentleman, who lived on site, had just finished his shift for the day.
He decided to have a shower at the boarding house and get himself tidied up before coming down to the bar downstairs for a drink.
At the same time, the keg plant upstairs was filling a keg with Lion Stout.
The operator had left a water pipe hooked up to the same line the beer tank was on, McAdam said.
‘‘The unfortunate boarderman ended up having a shower in Lion Stout, not in hot water.
‘‘No harm was done to him - apart from being very cold with a 1˚C beer temperature.
‘‘He came down into the bar area yelling and screaming with a couple of towels wrapped around himself.’’
Oddballs
All of the ‘‘many, many characters’’ is just one reason why McAdam says he is still at Speight’s all this time later.
His brother, an engineer of nearly 40 years, works at the brewery too.
‘‘You find that across these sites, most of the people are long-serving staff members because they enjoy it.
‘‘The people make it.’’
Everyone had nicknames, McAdam said.
One of the men he worked with now was called ‘‘Itchy’’ - his father was a tanker driver called ‘‘Scratchy’’, often seen scratching his beard.
Gordon details several of Speight’s ‘‘legendary characters’’ from times past, and the many anecdotes to their names.
One was Murdoch Mackenzie, the cellar foreman and ‘‘a law unto himself’’, who constantly smoked inside the cellar.
He one day set his shirt ablaze hiding his pipe from the boss.
‘‘Sometimes he would stay in the brewery drinking long after he should have gone home.’’
Robert Shepherd appeared in every staff photo from 1893 to 1922, and in every one of them wore what seemed to be the same tartan scarf.
There was also Joe Keogh and his ‘‘magnificent whiskers’’.
When he dozed off during a break, a prankster shaved off half his moustache, resulting in the nickname ‘‘Half-a-Mo Joe’’.
Bill Cunninghame had ‘‘the disconcerting habit of gazing at the ceiling when speaking to anyone’’.
And Watty Flawn, a good-natured soul known as ‘‘Butch’’, apparently ‘‘took great pride in the fact that he was the ugliest man in the brewery’’.
He frequently brought in sacks of vegetables from his garden for staff members.
Gordon also described ‘‘a long-haired filler operator’’ who moonlighted as a member of a rock band and spent his hours at the brewery singing at the top of his voice.
That man’s name was - now Sir - Ian Taylor KNZM.
Hamburger said he could recall a lot of the ‘‘oddballs’’ he had worked with over the years.
A Dunedin man dubbed ‘‘Pink Lemonade’’ earned that title after suggesting to the Christchurch team they produce such a beverage.
‘‘There were a whole lot of people like that, who made the job fun.’’
There were still a few oddballs working at Speight’s today, Hamburger said.
He considered himself lucky to have such a great team; two of them had been working with him for more than 30 years.
‘‘We seem to attract good people.
‘‘If you can’t have fun in the beer business, well, you’re doing it wrong.’’
An icon and ‘religion’
Thomas Rillstone, host of the History of Aotearoa New Zealand podcast, has dedicated a nine-part series entirely to the history of Speight’s.
He was inspired to explore the subject after embarking on a tour of Speight’s Brewery in 2021; Gordon’s book formed the basis for the episodes.
A University of Otago alumnus hailing from the ‘‘heavy Speight’s country’’ of Invercargill, Rillstone said a lot of the people around him were drinking Speight’s as he was growing up - it was nostalgic, in that sense.
Speight’s had a long history of trying to connect beer to manual labour and the working man, particularly around the prohibition period, he said.
The ‘‘Southern Man’’ television advertising campaign, which launched in the 1990s, was more of a modern take on an idea that was already floating around for some time.
Before legislation permitting brand liquor advertisements on radio and television came into effect, in 1992, Speight’s had been limited to pamphlets, booklets, billboards and even painting the sides of trucks.
‘‘I think the ‘Southern Man’ is probably the first really successful televised ad campaign that Speight’s has,’’ Rillstone said.
‘‘It evokes this general idea of, in some sense, masculinity in terms of New Zealand agriculture.
‘‘It would be very recognisable to New Zealanders.’’
While it was an interesting advertising campaign that had become quite ubiquitous, it had not aged well and contained some ‘‘questionable material’’ which would not necessarily fly today.
But it was successful in portraying Speight’s as ‘‘a working man’s drink,’’ Rillstone said.
Gordon also highlighted some of Speight’s earlier marketing strategies.
In the early 1950s, the slogan ‘‘Purity, Body and Flavour’’ was introduced - personified by little ‘‘barrel men’’ dressed as Sherlock Holmes, a bodybuilder and a chef.
A staff competition was held in 1980 for a new Speight’s slogan.
While the winner ‘‘Follow the Stars’’ was used in advertisements for a time, it was the runner-up ‘‘Pride of the South’’ that prevailed in the long run.
Lion chief operating officer and New Zealand country director Craig Baldie said Speight’s was more than just a brand in Dunedin - ‘‘it’s an icon and it’s a religion.’’
It was in 1993, originally as a student, that he first came down to Dunedin.
‘‘I was just blown away with how much this particular brand was loved,’’ Baldie said.
‘‘I thought I was there at the zenith, but I still go down today, 30 years later, and that hasn’t changed.’’
There had been some trials and tribulations: changing legislation, war, recession and the threat of prohibition.
And while their products may have changed, he believed Speight’s identity had largely stayed the same.
Its values were deeply rooted in Otago: mateship, the importance of friends, deeds not words, humility, honesty and understated humour.
But as every new generation of drinkers came along, the beer needed to remain relevant.
The big challenge from here would be to stay in step with the evolving taste needs of consumers, he said.
‘‘I believe that what the brand stands for has stood the test of time, and I don’t think that needs to change.
‘‘Those qualities continue to really resonate with Kiwis today, as they did a hundred years ago.’’
Timeline
1876: Rattray St lease takes effect
1880: Speight’s wins two gold medals at Melbourne Exhibition
1887: Speight’s becomes New Zealand’s biggest brewery
1902: Speight’s is trademarked
1919: The three stars appear on Speight’s labels
1923: Lion acquires Speight’s
1940: New brewery is constructed
1951: First tanker delivery
1955: First lager hits the market
1960: All beers are rebranded to “Lucky”; Speight’s returns two months later
1968: “Lion Brown” is launched
1970: New bottling house is constructed
1975: Speight’s begins to brew Steinlager
1977: Sports sponsorships begin
1983: “Pride of the South” appears on bottle labels
1983: Brewery tours begin
1984: Speight’s is sold in cans
1985: Daily tours begin
1988: Dunedin bottling house closes
1992: Speight’s releases its “Southern Man” advertisements
1992: Speight’s “Old Dark” is launched
1994: Speight’s “Distinction Ale” is launched
1999: First Speight’s Ale House is opened by PM Jenny Shipley
2014: Redeveloped brewery is opened by PM John Key
2017: Speight’s “Summit Ultra” is launched
