Cantabrians Abroad / Wurst wizard Simon Ellery
After nearly two decades in the food industry, Ashburton’s Simon Ellery found his passion by bringing Kiwi flair to the home of sausage making.
You could say that 15 bucks and a flea market changed Simon Ellery’s life. On a sunny Sunday several years ago, the heavy metal-loving bloke from Ashburton was strolling through Mauerpark in Berlin, browsing stalls set up near where the infamous Wall used to split the city, and East from West, for decades. Simon had lived in Berlin for a couple of years, following an OE stint in London, and was working at a butchery and learning the language.
At one stall, a metal contraption caught his eye. ‘I bought this old-school hand mincer from the flea market for nine euros, then I started making sausages at home, just using different ideas I’d learned on the job,’ says Simon. Nowadays he’s the founder of a popular and highly regarded butchery business: The Sausage Man Never Sleeps.
Talking to him just as COVID-19 restrictions began to ease up a little in Germany, Simon says the past couple of months had forced him to adapt his business quite a bit, shifting from largely supplying cafés, restaurants and other wholesale customers with his high-quality small goods, to doing lots of home deliveries for individuals and families.
‘It ’s been an interesting time because it ’s been really challenging,’ says Simon, ‘but I’d switched into a bit of a cruise mode the last year, so while it ’s been turbulent it ’s been the challenge I needed.’
And it all dates back to spying that vintage Alexanderwerk meat grinder at the flea market. A hunk of metal junk, perhaps, to many passers-by, but the seed of a passion-driven business for Simon, who admits he often grew bored in his past jobs. Not now. When I point out the nine euros he spent (about NZ$15) was a pretty shrewd investment, Simon laughs. ‘Yeah mate, a good investment. I’ve got a tattoo of it on my arm now, so it’s always with me.’
Simon was first exposed to butchery as a teenager at the Countdown in Ashburton. He’d left school and first got a job in the produce department. ‘Then I kinda thought to myself that I needed to get some sort of qualification or trade,’ he recalls. ‘An apprenticeship came up at the butchery so I jumped at that pretty much. Back then it wasn’t like I had any passion about meat, it was just a job and something I could utilise for future life – not that I ever thought I’d have my own business making sausages or living in Berlin or whatever else.’
In fact, Simon’s big passion for 20 years or so was music. He worked in a variety of jobs – heading off to Australia where he worked in mutton boning rooms for a few months, then home to Ashburton to do lamb boning and supervising at the freezing works for a few years. This was followed by three-year stints in production scheduling in Dunedin, then the Food Safety Authority in Wellington, then off to London in 2008 – but music was what sustained him. ‘It’s never been a thing that’s made any money, but it’s a thing I’m passionate about and have always been passionate about,’ says Simon. ‘But having my own business now, that’s where that passion has been transferred. So for the last (coming up) seven years, it’s just been like this isn’t a job for me. The Sausage Man Never Sleeps is just something I really enjoy doing.’
Selling sausages to Germans may seem like selling ice to Eskimos, given the country’s long history and world
leading reputation when it comes to wurst of all kinds. But Simon’s New World take on Old World traditions means he’s valued by customers and his peers in the fleischmeister trade. His business is based on flavour combinations and products that aren’t common in Germany, so he’s not really in direct competition with his German butcher pals.
‘It’s good to give people other options, because I don’t want to recreate what others do,’ says Simon. ‘There’s a lot of international influence in what I do. Pretty much all my products are unlike typical German small goods, except for the Knacker, but then I put jalapeno cheddar into it so that just messes up the whole idea of it being a traditional German sausage.’
While Simon continues to experiment (his fresh meat sausages have included flavours like tomato, fennel and mozzarella; apricot, hazelnut and cream cheese; and a nod to his Kiwi roots with lamb and mint), popular mainstays include fresh pork belly sausages in jalapeno cheddar and apple and sage flavours; gourmet bacon; cold smoked chorizo and andouille; hot smoked Käsekrainer and Frankfurters; and black pudding made to a traditional Scottish recipe.
‘Whenever I do lamb sausages people love them – if you don’t overcook lamb it’s bloody beautiful – in fact I’m making some tomorrow for another butcher,’ says Simon.
‘For me it’s about the continuous challenge; as soon as it becomes mainly about money, the passion is gone.’
‘But the majority of what I do is pork-based, due to the ease of getting pork here. My supplier is called Schwäbisch Hall, a farmers’ community near Stuttgart, and I get all my pork from them, an old race of pig that was almost extinct in the 1980s but then this group of farmers brought it back, and now it’s geographically recognised, it only comes from that region.’
When he began, Simon made about 10 kilos of sausages a week, now it’s around 350 kilos of gourmet small goods. It makes for busy weeks. What began as one Kiwi bloke experimenting at home has grown into a small business with another two staff helping Simon with butchery and wholesale deliveries, and others working on social media and selling at the Saturday markets. It’s a word-of-mouth success story that has struck a chord with expats and German locals. ‘Social media is kind of our only form of advertising that we do – free advertising.’
As for the future, the Ashburton lad has plans. But any expansion will be balanced with his ethos for his gourmet business. ‘One of my Kiwi mates is like, mate, why don’t you just get into the supermarket supply business, do that for five years and you’ve got a million bucks. I’m like, mate, what the [heck] am I going to do with a million bucks? For me it’s about the continuous challenge; as soon as it becomes mainly about money, the passion is gone.’