They’re drinking Norwegian beers here now

NORWAY’S Mack beer has arrived in New Zealand. Sitting on New World shelves, its label declares ‘‘verdens nordligste bryggeri’’: the world’s northernmost brewery.

Now, the trouble with marketing yourself as unique is that someone, either deliberately or inadvertently, can take away your uniqueness. Take, for example, Black Ridge vineyard in Alexandra, at 45.15 degrees south, which from 1988 labelled its wine as coming from the southernmost winegrowing vineyard in the world.

In the mid1990s another was planted in Ettrick which was at 45.37S. When wine production there ceased in 2009, Black Ridge regained its title. Between times there were shortlived plantings in Roxburgh (45.31S) and Te Anau (45.22S): title reclaimed.

It was lost for good, however, when the first wine in 2018 came from a vineyard planted in 2012 at 44.33S (33km further south than Black Ridge) in Argentina.

The Mack brewery, the fourthlargest of about 70 in Norway, has long claimed the northernmost title. It is in Balsfjord, at 69.2N. From the 1940s until 2007 it was rivalled by a brewery, also at 69.2N, in Russia. There is a mini brewery in Greenland also at 69.2N.

However, the Svalbard brewery, which started in 2015 in the world’s northernmost town of Longyearbyen in the Svalbard islands in Norway, is at 78deg N — about 1000km further north than Mack’s. It makes about 500,000 litres a year compared with Mack’s 18 million litres. (78N is the northern equivalent of Mt Erebus on Ross Island in the Antarctic. Incidentally, the world’s southernmost brewery is at 53.1S in Chile.)

There are two styles of

Isbjorn and a Mack Arctic label here ($4 for 500ml), plus a smaller Gull pilsner. The two pilsners (4.5% and 5.5% respectively) have a nice balance of malt and hops, with lightish hop flavour and bite, more like a typical lager than the usually more hopped pilsner.

Glutenfree

One of the Isbjorn beers, labelled Lite, is a glutenfree pilsner — a reasonable assumption from the ‘‘glutenfri under 20ppm’’ on the can. (Glutenfree by international standards means there is less than 20 parts of gluten per million.)

Most glutenfree beers are made with rice, maize or sorghum. This one does have malted barley, but much less than usual. It also is lower in calories, carbohydrate and sugar. It is similar on the palate to the pilsners.

The next shipment in several weeks of Lite will sport English labelling on the cans, which should help beerloving coeliac sufferers discover it.

Top 100 beers

Wellington brewery Garage Project dominates the GAPS (Great Australasian Beer Spectacular) justreleased top 100 New Zealand beers of 2020.

Drinkers voted 25 Garage Project beers on to the list, with its Sunrise Valley hazy IPA getting the most votes. Second was Parrotdog Birdseye hazy IPA and Deep Creek Misty Miyagi IPA was third.

Dunedin’s Emerson’s has four on the list: Hazed and Confused IPA (23), Orange Roughy pale ale (29), NZ Pilsner (75) and Bookbinder English ale (84).

lojo.rico@gmail.com