Want a free couple of bottles of beer?
Boundary Road Brewery in Auckland intends releasing a hoppy brew in May and wants the public to choose what it should be.
Would-be judges should be aged 18 or over and need to register their interest at www.BRB.co.nz by March 23. The 500 who do best in an online test will soon afterwards be sent two different samples of an IPA (India pale ale) from which to make a choice.
Boundary Road is the brewing arm of Independent Liquor, whose brews include Ranfurly, NZ Pure and Haagen. The first Boundary Road labels, released 18 months ago, were Bouncing Czech Pilsener, Flying Fortress New Zealand Pale Ale, Grizzly Beer Ginger Beer and The Chosen One.
• Hop harvest
Just as the annual hop harvest gets begins, Speight's has produced a Golden Pale Ale that highlights two of the about 17 varieties of hop grown commercially in New Zealand.
One variety imparts a spicy passionfruit aroma and the other a green citrus character to produce a refreshing drop.
The ale is only on tap and poured only at Speight's ale houses (Invercargill, Queenstown and in Speight's Brewery in Dunedin) for the next couple of months.
• Even more hop
Dunedin brewer Emerson's has gone further, using five hops in its latest Brewer's Reserve, Bird Dog Pale Ale (5.8%). Bird Dog, named after one of the songs from The Verlaines' album, was made last year, but remastered this year. Three varieties of New Zealand hop and two United States varieties (which have imparted their characteristic resin-like bitterness) were added at a couple of stages of the brewing process.
Brewer's Reserve beers, which appear every six weeks or so, are not bottled but are available in plastic ($9.40 for 1.25 litres) at the Wickliffe St brewery or on tap at a couple of bars around town.
• Draught face-lift
DB Breweries has long kept an association with that era with its DB Draught maintaining, for some years, a team of Clydesdale horses and a vintage wagon to promote the brew. The team has gone, but now lives on in stylised form on new labels and packaging just released.
It is a double association because Clydesdales were also known as draughthorses and draught beer is named from the old English word "dragan", meaning to draw.
Hence the expression "to draw a pint" from a cask (now keg).
Speight's beer was also moved around Dunedin that way in the early 1900s, as were casks from the Tui brewery at Mangatainoka near Palmerston North.
The advent of motor transport meant the demise of most horse-drawn transport by 1930, when Dominion Breweries was born, and DB Draught was first produced.
But horses made a brief reappearance during World War 2 when rubber for tyres was in short supply and petrol was rationed.
