Worth the wait
On Wednesday I had the great experience of attending the first birthday of the Fork & Brewer brewpub in Wellington.
The celebrations doubled as the de facto opening of the pub’s brewery, which is finally producing beer after more than a year of delays caused by earthquakeproofing and trouble getting signoff to have a boiler in a public space.
It was worth the wait, with the brewpub’s Base Isolator American pale ale turning out to be a pretty smart drop.
To mark the occasion, Sean Murrie, one of the owners of the establishment, asked me to say a few words and I took the opportunity to gently tease Wellington’s beer crowd.
I pointed out that while Wellington is rightly regarded as the hippest, coolest beer city in the country, it had a gap in its CV.
It has brewers who wear red pants (Stu McKinlay from Yeastie Boys), it has brewers who used to work in the gaming industry (Jos Ruffell of Garage Project) and a brewery where everyone is called Matt (ParrotDog). There is no doubting Wellington’s credentials as the centre of New Zealand’s craftbeer creativity and consumption. But what it really lacked was a brewpub.
Look at Auckland, I said, it has brewpubs coming out its ears: Galbraith’s, Hallertau, Shakespeare, Brewery Britomart, Deep Creek. Crikey, even the hippies over in Golden Bay have a great brewpub, the Mussel Inn. You could find brewpubs in Whangarei and Blenheim but it was a dark stain on Wellington’s reputation that it was without such an establishment.
The Twitter messages I picked up later suggested I was lucky to get out of there alive. A ‘‘smug Aucklander’’, they called me. There were scathing attacks on my pink checked shirt, which incidentally I bought in Wellington. Barry, a grand old fella aged about 127, told me a story about a borran (an Irish drum a bit like a tambourine without the jingles). I had no idea what he meant but the gist of it was that I should stop winding up these Wellingtonians.
Well, I can stop winding them up now because finally they have a decent brewpub.
Historically, the idea of a bloke brewing out the back and serving out the front formed the core of our brewing landscape. There was no intermediary between maker and drinker and every town had a brewery or two that operated this way.
It was the advent of better transportation, refrigeration and the growth of a beer as an industry that changed this set up – to the point in the mid-70s when we had two brewers, DB and Lion, deliver beer in huge refrigerated tankers to the network of pubs that were entirely owned by said brewers.
The return to brewpubs marks a return to that closer connection between brewer and drinker and fits in with that very 21st-century concept of food miles: at the Fork & Brewer, for instance, the beer travels only a matter of metres from tank to glass.
It’s a great addition to the incredible Wellington beerscape.