In the Business of Beer
The story of Three Boys Brewery with founder Ralph Bungard
Christchurch’s Three Boys Brewery is one of New Zealand’s oldest independently owned breweries. The award-winning family-owned brand helped put craft beer on the map in this country, with ongoing innovation over the years contributing to its longevity and success. We catch up with founder Ralph Bungard to learn about his passion for brewing and how it all began.
EVERY MORNING, BAGS OF LOCALLY MILLED GRAIN from Dunsandel arrive at Three Boys Brewery on Ferry Road, Christchurch. Hops come in from Nelson, along with other fresh local produce from around the South Island. With the magic of fermentation and the addition of good Christchurch water, beer flows out the other end. Half a million litres of it is produced every year from these premises.
Central to the Three Boys’ core range are distinctive brews like Oyster Stout, a true dark malt champion and
New Zealand’s most awarded dark beer. Bluff Oysters added during the brewing process are what gives the stout its subtly briny edge. Another top-selling star brewed here is Three
Boys Wheat, a Belgian-style wheat beer with a Kiwi lemon and spice twist.
Ralph has a lot of respect for the primary products from which beer is made. At our interview in his office above the brewery, he explains that his reverence for the land and what it produces started on the South Otago sheep farm where he grew up. ‘It was a small hill country farm with two families on it; my mum was a typical rural mother who made meals out of nothing! I was already brewing back then – not alcoholic beer, but ginger beer. As a boy, I was always preserving produce from the garden and making sauces and jams … I still love gardening – particularly growing veges – and we have a big section at our home in Avoca Valley. Gardening is one of my favourite pastimes alongside hunting and fishing.’
Add to that, cricket. He and his family have a strong connection with the Heathcote Cricket Club – ‘the first suburban team in the history of Christchurch cricket to be promoted to the premiership’. Ralph plays ‘old man’s cricket’, his wife Brigid keenly follows cricket and their two sons, Marek and Quinn, both play for Heathcote.
Making a career in horticulture was Ralph’s first choice as a young man and with that in mind he studied horticulture, viticulture and oenology at Lincoln University. In fact, he wound up with a PhD in Plant Science and, by the 1990s was working in the United Kingdom as a researcher at The University of Sheffield. Ralph and Brigid had first met as students at Lincoln. Brigid had already qualified as a physiotherapist but had returned to university to retrain in environmental science and found work in that field when the couple went to the UK.
In those days, beer being sold in New Zealand was far behind what was available across the other side of the world. English pubs made a real impression on them both. ‘It was a revelation for us to discover how good beer could be! British
beer can be brilliant but there was good exposure to European beers too. There was so much diversity – it was very exciting. I’d started home brewing in my student days but definitely began getting more serious about it in Sheffield.’
In 2001, having started their family, the couple decided it was time to head home. Ralph accepted a Marsden Grant to do research on photosynthesis using parasitic plants at the University of Canterbury, but could see that there might be more options outside of academia. ‘I still love science but New Zealand is a difficult place to do science. We’re a small country and the funding structure is such that research options are quite narrow.’
Brewing beer offered an alluring alternative and so he gradually set about channelling his new-found knowledge of European beers into a home-grown craft beer business. With so few genuine craft beers being made back then, the timing was good from a competitive perspective. The downside was
Ralph gradually set about channelling his new-found knowledge of European beers into a home-grown craft beer business.
that locally made craft beer was still a hard sell. New Zealand was the land of fizzy lagers and craft brew-style beer was regarded with suspicion. Ralph says the only market niche for the country’s craft beer pioneers was the restaurant trade, where there was more acceptance of non-mainstream beer as a novelty treat with food.
It took several years to develop his plans beyond the washroom-turned-brew room at the family home in the Heathcote Valley into the first proper brewery in the basement of a tilt slab building off Garlands Road in 2004. These were very busy years for Brigid and Ralph, who were both working and raising their two boys. Specialist home brew kit wasn’t available like it is today so the first brewery was very much pieced together as a DIY project. ‘Looking back, the hardest part was learning how to run a business. My years at university were no help in that respect. It was a really big learning curve but because we started small at least we didn’t have to know everything at once.’
The name ‘Three Boys’ came from Brigid, originally used in reference to her husband and two sons (now aged 21 and 19 years and pursuing their own careers). In the early 2000s, Garlands Road (Christchurch) did not yet have The Tannery and Ralph says the location was nothing special. Both he and Brigid liked having a brand name with its own unique vision that wasn’t tied to a specific place.
Their second brewery was in a good-sized, established building on the other side of Garlands Road. All went well until it was wrecked in the 2011 earthquakes and the family home was also red-zoned.
A brewery is not the kind of business that can be easily shuffled in and out of a building to accommodate repairs. It was a tough time for the family and Ralph still shudders looking back on all the upheaval. ‘We had to move and fortunately this building came up in Ferry Road. Revamped, with a new front and a new floor, we had our new brewery premises … It’s an amazing community here in Woolston
‘Craft brewing is in a constant process of change and reinvention, but underlying that there’s still plenty of room for good solid beers like the Pilsners and IPA.’
and if there was one positive from the earthquakes it was how Christchurch changed; it really opened up opportunities for innovation and for non-traditional businesses to make their mark and become accepted.’
Reinvigorating the city was the new focus and Three Boys certainly contributed to that through its support of both visual arts (CoCA, The Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū) and music (CSO, RDU). Three Boys remains committed to the arts and held its first charity event in March with proceeds going to Th’Orchard Art Space.
This couple share a passion for the environment and owning a brewery business that relies on clean water has only deepened their concerns over the state of our precious water resources. ‘What is happening to our environment should be of concern to every business … When I was a student, I lived at Selwyn Huts and at that time you could still swim and fish in the Selwyn River. Now the signs say ‘no swimming’ and the fish are all gone. We looked forward to experiencing New Zealand’s clean environment when we came back from the UK, but the river running through the centre of Sheffield is probably in better condition today than some rivers in the South Island. There’s something really wrong there.’
Over the years, Ralph has made a big contribution to
New Zealand’s beer industry. He was heavily involved in the Brewers Guild of New Zealand in its early years and continues to be very active as a beer judge. He will be involved as a judge again at this October’s New Zealand beer awards, BrewNZ’21.
After nearly 20 years in business, Ralph is starting to think about life after brewing. He and Brigid have never seen it as a legacy project for their kids. As yet, they have no clear answer on how they will exit the industry but in the meantime, Ralph says the ever-changing craft beer scene is still a source of ongoing inspiration and motivation.
‘Hazy beers and sour beers are very popular at the moment. One advantage of beer over wine is that you can make a different beer every day if you want. You can cycle through them very quickly so it does allow for a lot of experimentation.
‘If you can think of a new beer, someone has done it. Craft brewing is in a constant process of change and reinvention, but underlying that there’s still plenty of room for good solid beers like the Pilsners and IPA. As a brewer, you have the best of both worlds and you are always interacting with a big spectrum of people. It’s different every day – it makes life interesting.’