Awards provide wealth of brews to test
SOME of New Zealand’s best beers to come out of New World’s annual beer and cider awards went on show this week. Some of them are regulars on shelves; some oneoff brews and others from breweries that are otherwise too small to make enough for supermarkets to carry them, for example, Burkes Brewing, in a cafe at Tekapo, whose beers are rarely found outside the Mackenzie Country.
One hundred of the more than 600 beers entered made it on to the Top 100 list (which includes Emerson’s pale ale, Steinlager Pure and Waikato Draught) and the best of those on to the Top 30 which are now on the supermarket’s shelves.
Among them are five IPAs, five hazy pale ales, five pale ales, four lagers/pilsners, four stouts/porters, three sours, three ciders and one wheat.
The Top 30 beers should be around for at least a month: I will taste as many for you as I can (it is hard work!) for the next column.
Haze craze
Hazy ales are in vogue here at the moment, with Baylands Offshore Bandit, Behemoth Be
Hoppy, Behemoth Heart of Darkness Some Sorcerer, Burkes #Fakenews and Garage Project Party and Bullsh#*t on the Top 30.
They are an American adaptation of India Pale Ales which, indirectly, is connected to a longstanding prohibition in that country of homebrewing.
Prohibition of the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933. The prohibition on homebrewing stayed until 1979, although individual states could, and did, continue to restrict it. It took until 2013 for all states to allow homebrewing, but some still restrict the amount or strength or require it to be consumed where it is made.
Homebrewers started establishing microbreweries as soon as the prohibition was lifted, the first in Colorado within a month; 100 within five years; now about 8000.
IPAs (ales with extra hops and alcohol to preserve the beer for its journey to British troops in India in the 1800s) became their favourite style but with American hops (hence, “APA”) instead of the traditional English varieties, and with less bitterness.
In the early 2000s the fad turned from APA to hazy pale ales which are created by not filtering the beer, using yeasts whose sediment floats rather than settles on the bottom of the bottle, by adding more hops for sediment or even introducing wheat or corn for their suspended sediment.
I wonder?
As ebikes and escooters grow in popularity, how long before we can be charged with drinkdriving going home from the pub on them?
Silly idea? Well, you could be prosecuted for being drunk in charge of a horse until 1989 (and still can be in some states of Australia).
Currently, it is not illegal to exceed the bloodalcohol limit when “driving” the likes of a pushbike or ebike, skateboard or escooter (although it is an offence to be drunk in charge of a pushbike in some parts of the United States).