Saving the day with beer
A successful craft brewery lurks in the basement of a family home at Oakura. Virginia Winder breathes in the yeasty air while getting a taste of a husband and wife’s beer making passion.
Three Sisters Brewery turned professional in a move worthy of a superhero. In April 2017, Joe Emans and mates Ben Tarrant and Charlie Brown had just made a 50-litre brew of their award-winning American pale ale, Rain in Your Face.
On a Friday night a couple of days later, a group, including the three brewing mates, went out to dinner at Oakura restaurant Peeking Panda.
The waitress came over and apologised, ‘‘sorry, we have run out of beer’’.
Joe leapt in: ‘‘Don’t worry we can save the day.’’
He raced around the corner to his basement on Wairau Rd, grabbed some freshly made beer and took it back to the eatery and the keg was put on tap. ‘‘It was quite a busy night and everyone was drinking the beer.’’
Including the brewers. ‘‘We probably drunk most of it at five times the cost that we could have,’’ he laughs.
But he was happy they came to the rescue. ‘‘Not all heroes wear capes.’’
Two years earlier, that same beer won the inaugural home brew event run by the Taranaki branch of the Society of Beer Advocates (SOBA).
Buoyed by the victory, the three British-born beer blokes, then calling themselves Bellend Brewing, entered Rain in the Face into the SOBA National Homebrew Competition. It didn’t earn a medal.
‘‘It was a bit of an awakening,’’ Joe says. ‘‘It definitely killed the enthusiasm for them [Ben and Charlie] but made me obsessive about it.’’
He told himself: ‘‘I’m amazing at beer, I know I am.’’
‘‘If Joe thought he was good at something and found he wasn’t, if he had a gap in his knowledge, he would try and work it out – he’s a perfectionist,’’ wife Sarah Markert-Emans says.
As his research and commitment fired up, his mates’ interest waned, so Sarah became his brew-making sidekick. And Three Sisters was born.
For the Englishman and the Germanborn woman, the craft brewery’s name has two main meanings. They have three daughters, Rowan, 13, Raffie, 8, and Reggie, 4 – three sisters – who all have crinkle-cut hair like their mother.
The family also loves the coast at Tongaporutu. ‘‘We like to trip out to the Three Sisters and we have some really fond memories of going there as a family,’’ Sarah says.
Both have beer as part of their homecountry culture.
Sarah comes from Koblenz, which lies between Frankfurt and Cologne. ‘‘Beer is just big in Germany. It’s a big kind of entertainment thing. You might go for a bike ride in the summer and stop for a beer. Oktoberfest is part of the culture.’’
Joe hails from Marlow, a brewery town in Buckinghamshire, England. ‘‘My grandfather owned a pub, and we lived next door. There’s something in the blood maybe.’’
When the brewery in Marlow was making beer, the whole town smelt of it. ‘‘The smell brings back memories.’’
Now they are laying down olfactory recollections for their own children, who have that sweet yeasty, hoppy aroma as a permanent fixture of their lives.
It wafts up from the basement-garage, where the beer-making has grown like a Honey I Blew Up the Kids movie. Joe began making 20 litres of beer at a time and expanded to 50 litres. Now he has an entire brewery, including two fermenters that each hold 300 litres of beer.
All the machinery is gleaming silver in a fresh white-painted space, with carpet underfoot. ‘‘We thought the garage was too dirty to brew beer in,’’ Joe says.
But they cleaned it out completely and spruced it up. ‘‘I imagine it’s one of the only breweries in the world with carpet.’’
Sarah is sold on the underfoot feature. ‘‘For home brewing, carpet is amazing. It’s great to stand on. We can be 10 hours down here and you can be barefoot.’’
They love the footwear-free, adventurous lifestyle they have in New Zealand, especially after the more contained pay-for-everything existence they had in Dubai.
In 2012, Joe, a mechanical engineer, landed a job at WorleyParsons in New Plymouth and the family moved to Aotearoa, which was a complete contrast to the Middle East. ‘‘This is like a Famous Five novel; we swim in rivers, take picnics and go tramping,’’ Sarah says.
Not only is their boutique brewery a reflection of the Taranaki landscape, it also shows the immigrants have embraced the Kiwi can-do attitude.
Joe helped design some of the equipment, worked out how it would fit in the basement, carried in the large metallic monsters and installed everything. Sarah does the accounting, makes some syrups and helps with everything from bottling to labelling.
The process begins with heating up grains to 65 degrees Celsius in a mash tun for an hour to extract all the sugar. A kettle, cooler, heat exchanger, oxygenator all help make the wort – the name of the mixture before it becomes beer. Then it goes into the fermenters and yeast is added.
‘‘Brewers make wort and yeast makes beer,’’ Joe says.
The beer is left in the fermenters for two weeks and then spends a further week being cold conditioned. Then it goes straight into kegs or bottles.
An old bottling machine, put together by Joe from bits and pieces, has been replaced by a state-of-the-art one, made by Acos Filler at Bell Block.
Beyond the machinery are boxes filled with bottles and rolls of artwork, ready to stick on to the correct bottles.
The names and types of beer usually begin with a tale and a brew is made to suit. ‘‘I like the beers to be around the story,’’ Joe says.
Local artists have helped design some of the labels.
As a tribute to Taranaki’s fiery summer beaches, they chose the name Hot Sand Dash and developed a Belgium Pale Ale to fit. When looking for pictures of the New Plymouth Old Boys’ Surf Lifesaving Club, they came across the perfect image by painter Marianne Muggeridge. She okayed the use of the painting as a label.
Street painter Phil Jones was commissioned to design a robot making beer for a black India pale ale called Brewdini. This was inspired by one of Joe’s workmates, who has a fully automated brewery in his basement and made a black IPA as his first brew. Joe borrowed the recipe and dedicated the name to his mate.
The latest collaboration is with Juno Gin, resulting in a juniper witbier called Lila. The traditional Belgium-style beer uses many of the same ingredients as the New Plymouth gin makers. ‘‘We use what’s left over of their process,’’ Joe says.
Lila, named after Juno Gin’s copper still, is made using the botanical infused water from the gin-making.
This water was added to the beer mash and then the brewers included chamomile, coriander seeds, hand-zested oranges and juniper berries.
Oakura Blonde, which pays homage to the fair-headed females in the Three Sisters family, is made using water from the town’s aquifer. It is of course a blonde ale. Taranaki Gold is a pilsner that celebrates the place they now call home, and Fuzzy Panda, a New England India pale ale is the most popular of their beers.
Hot Rod was made for a television appearance.
Joe got a random text from a man called Doug Bell from the Hot Rod Show, asking if they would like to feature on the TV programme.
Joe told him: ‘‘We are quite a small brewery, we could brew something for your show – what would your viewers like?’’
Doug replied: ‘‘Something that tastes like burnt rubber.’’
‘‘‘I’m not sure if I can manage that but I can do a smoked beer.’ So, we made Hot Rod for the show and it won a bronze medal at the Brewer’s Guild Awards 2018.’’
They have also made an American pale ale called Medusa and the strongest beer is an imperial red rye IPA called Roses & Rivets. The label features a strong woman known as Rosie the Riveter and its alcohol content is 8.4 per cent.
Joe did the artwork for this label, as he has for many of the brews. Sarah made the Belgium candy syrup for this beer, which challenges the male-dominated craft beer industry.
While all this sounds like an idyllic lifestyle, brewing, family life and working, Joe and Sarah admit they do put in long hours, starting at 4am so they can spend time with their girls.
Sometimes, the brewing doesn’t always go perfectly.
‘‘I accidentally threw away half a batch of brew lately,’’ Joe says, still feeling the pain of wasting 150 litres of Rain on Your Face.
‘‘There’s always a drama – we’ve had beer spraying everywhere. It’s a metaphor for our lives,’’ Sarah laughs.
But Three Sisters Brewery is flourishing.
‘‘I want to keep doing interesting collaborations,’’ he says, pondering over the idea of getting bigger or staying as a boutique craft beer, but selling beyond Taranaki.
He’s the one with the big dreams and Sarah is the practical one, keeping them living within their means and in a place she adores.
‘‘The beauty of social media is that people don’t realise that it (our beer) is made in the basement of a house in a village in Taranaki in the middle of nowhere.’’
People always presume that having a home brewery is great, Sarah says. ‘‘’What’s it like bottling beer?’ It’s almost like a tumbleweed moment with a film running behind our eyes. We say ‘it’s so amazing, we love it’.’’