A new generation of McCashin intends resurrecting beer production in Nelson.
Dean McCashin, with his wife Emma, has returned to the brewery from which his father started producing Mac's 30 years ago.
The pair have not yet announced the label - although it will not be Mac's because Lion Nathan now owns that name - nor the styles they propose.
Terry McCashin, a former All Black hooker (1968-69), decided in the late 1970s he would like a pure beer (just water, yeast, malt and hops, without the then widespread practice of hastening fermentation with sugar) like those he had discovered while visiting Britain and Europe.
In 1980, he and wife Bev moved from their pub in Picton, buying the Rochdale factory at Stoke, near Nelson, which had been producing cider since the late 1930s.
The purchase included a stock of cider bottles - little squat ones with a ringed neck and tear-tab tops.
It was into these that McCashin's Brewery and Malthouse produced its first beer, Real Ale, in 1981.
An English brewer was hired and, a year later, Mac's Gold emerged.
The McCashin venture in no small way inspired wannabe brewers.
In 1987, in Auckland, the next small brewery started and there are now nearly 50 around the country, including five in Nelson (Founders Organic, Tasman, Lighthouse, The Mussel Inn and Nelson Bays).
The McCashins sold the Mac's brand, including the bottle shape, to Lion Nathan in 1999.
The following year, Lion leased the brewery from them and continued production of the Mac's brand there and in Wellington.
Last year, production was removed from Stoke and Wellington, and Lion relinquished the lease. (While Lion continues to produce Mac's in those squat bottles originally intended for cider, it perhaps ironically reverted to a long-necked beer bottle for Mac's Isaacs cider, which it released last November.)
Terry's son and his wife moved in when Lion moved out, reviving the cider production for which the factory was once famous.
They also bought the local 26000 vodka brand (so-named because of the 26,000-year-old water used from a glacial aquifer) from its struggling owners and now produce it in pure, raspberry, lemon-drop and lychee styles.
Their cider, fromlocally-grown apples, is called Fruté (pronounced froo-tay).
It is, they say, the first in New Zealand to be made without preservatives.
Fruté Berry (boysenberries, raspberries and blackberries) and Fruté Vanilla and Orange contain 20% locally-grown berries and citrus.
They intend an annual release of a 60-year-old Amagnac cider (only 150 bottles at a time) from forgotten juice in a vat Terry McCashin discovered 30 years ago when he bought the plant.
With distilled spirits added, it will be about 15% strength.
