Behemoth: NZ’s big
Andrew Childs was all set to be a lawyer, until he discovered the delights of making his own beer. Michael Donaldson finds out what makes him tick.
Andrew Childs lowers his 195cm frame on to a bar stool and pops the top off one of his irreverently amusing Behemoth beers. Apart from being New Zealand’s tallest brewer, he’s also arguably one of the best-qualified, having spurned a career as a lawyer for the hard graft of making beer.
Leaving the regimented world of legal argument for the fun of beer might seem irrational but, as Childs says: ‘‘If I wanted to follow the rules, I would still be a lawyer. When I left the legal profession people said: ‘Are you crazy?’ But I don’t have any regrets. I wanted to make brewing my life.’’
Childs – a qualified barrister and solicitor – was a legal policy analyst for ACC when he quit law for brewing.
In retrospect, he believes he studied law for the wrong reasons.
‘‘I read too many John Grisham books and thought a career in law would be like that. I found it really hard going. It didn’t come that naturally for me. I know so many people who have left the legal profession and I think that’s because law works you so hard you find out what you really want to do.’’
Childs’ long-winded route to brewing was seeded as far back as his childhood.
His family holidayed in Nelson and one of his abiding memories is visiting the old Mac’s brewery in Stoke to buy ginger beer. At 11, he was using money from a paper round to buy beer mugs.
‘‘I don’t know why I started collecting beer mugs, but I just loved the 1980s styles you’d find at the Salvation Army stores – I liked the idea of collecting them.
‘‘I did a paper at school – maybe in fourth form – on the history of alcohol. It was about 40 pages long, but it was definitive and my teacher so loved it she wanted to keep it as a reference book. It’s not like either of my parents were big drinkers, but I was fascinated by alcohol and the culture around it.’’
As an adult, that fascination morphed into an appreciation for flavour, but brewing didn’t enter the equation until his late-20s when he asked some of his best friends to put a spin on a New Year’s Eve tradition and make resolutions for him. ‘‘One of them said, ‘You always wanted to home brew’ – and, two weeks later, I was home brewing.’’
He joined a group of avid Wellington home brewers and a breakthrough moment came with Wellington in a Pint in 2013, a Wellington-themed home brew competition, where four winners brewed their beer with a commercial partner as part of a four-pack to promote Wellington.
‘‘That was the first sign of how the Behemoth approach to things would work,’’ Childs says in a self-deprecating reference to Behemoth’s rapid-fire approach of making a new beer every couple of weeks. ‘‘We entered 13 beers, which was 8 per cent of all entries. Four made the top 32, two made top 16 and one was in the top four.’’
That was a coffee brown ale called Celia Wade Brown Ale, a reference to the mayor of Wellington at the time. It was also a first indication of how Childs would approach his business – clever marketing, a little bit of politics and a lot of fun.
‘‘That beer was the best publicity we could have had. That is what I love about beer – the creativity – there’s nothing else like craft beer for how crazy you can get about names and recipes.’’
At the time, Childs was brewing under the moniker Tall Tale Ales. ‘‘But that was too much of a mouthful. I googled ‘behemoth’ and found no-one had taken it. I was 6-foot-5 and a big guy so it suited me, but in America they also call the big brewers – AB InBev and Coors – the ‘behemoths’, so I thought it was ironic, as we were doing such small batches.
‘‘But the name is becoming less ironic by the day.’’
Five years on, it’s easy to lose count of how many different beers Behemoth has produced. It’s approaching 120, – about 40 came out last year alone. They are mostly hoppy beers, with a variety of names referencing popular culture – movies,
politics, TV shows, books – all held together by Churly, a grotesquely charming bald, toothy creature who was born of luck, rather than planning.
‘‘One of our designers had drawn this character and he was doing the thumbs-up and we thought, that’s great for a new beer we’d called Chur! And then we realised we could do other things with him. It just happened naturally. We didn’t think, ‘let’s come up with a concept and run with it’. It was a happy-accident beer that turned into 110-plus beers. We named him Churly because he first appeared on the Chur! pale ale.’’
Churly has donned a number of guises, changing costume for each beer and occasionally being transformed to film and TV characters such as Otto from The Simpsons, The Dude from The Big Lebowski, Jules Winnfield (played by Samuel L Jackson) from Pulp Fiction and Donald Trump.
Behemoth is among a swag of breweries that have been criticised by Alcohol Healthwatch for using cartoon characters, which argues bright labels and cartoon characters will encourage kids to drink. Childs doesn’t quite laugh off those concerns, but he’s unrepentant.
‘‘We think of it as adult cartoons – we reference The Simpsons, Family Guy – we do things that aren’t meant to be appealing to kids. Tasty Beverage has Jackson from Pulp Fiction – and that’s not for kids. Sure, it’s bright and colourful, but adults like bright and colourful as much as kids do.’’
For the most part, the ideas for Behemoth’s many labels come from one source.
‘‘I get people saying to me, your marketing team does a great job, and, I say, ‘What marketing team?’ It’s just me, making up stuff I think is funny. I do reference a lot of popular culture, but my dad used to run movie theatres and I worked at a video store – this is why I do these things, because I’ve watched way too many movies.
‘‘And if, I think it’s funny – even though it’s a bit teenage boy – then I know there’s lots of other people that share that sense of humour. Sometimes, we do it better than others.’’ The beer that propelled Behemoth into national consciousness was last year’s rendition of Dump The Trump – Childs giving voice to his disapproval of the US president.
When the beer came out, the Behemoth Facebook page was besieged by American (and Kiwi) rightwingers, who posted abusive messages and loaded the page with one-star reviews to take down the overall rating. The beer community rallied around and inundated the page with five-star reviews to counter the negative ones and Childs appeared on prime-time TV.
The irony is that the attention pushed Behemoth to a new audience.
‘‘The exact opposite happened to what these Trump-tards wanted – they wanted to bring us down, but it helped propel us to a new level.’’ The real joke is that Dump The Trump wasn’t new, nor was it was the first anti-Trump beer Behemoth produced. ‘‘When we first did Dump The Trump, he was a candidate who no-one thought
‘‘I googled ‘behemoth’ and found no-one had taken it. I was 6-foot5 and a big guy so it suited me.’’