Little craft brewery
had a s... show of becoming president. It was preposterous and it still is, so the beer was a joke. And then he got the candidacy and we thought, let’s do it again. And then he won the election and I was just shell-shocked; and I thought, I’m not brewing this again as it’s not funny any more.
‘‘But then people were calling for him to be impeached, so we did Im-Peach-Ment [a sour peach ale] and we said we’d keep doing that until he got impeached or left office – two years later we’re still doing it. But I thought, ‘this [impeachment] is taking too long – let’s do Dump The Trump again and it had only just started hitting the shelves when it all blew up.’’
It has not always been so peachy for Childs – there are scars that hurt a lot more than the hate-mail and abusive phone calls he still gets from Trump fans. In late 2015, the brewing industry was rocked by news of an industrial accident at 8 Wired Brewing in Warkworth, where Childs was making one of his beers under contract with 8 Wired assistant Jason Bathgate. A brew kettle exploded under pressure, coating Childs and Bathgate in hundreds of litres of boiling sugary wort (unfermented beer).
The burns were deep and extreme. The pair were air-lifted to the burns unit at Middlemore, where they stayed for a number of days – but the full recovery, both physical and emotional, took many more months.
Childs looks down on his scarred arms and says: ‘‘I still get really upset about it – I look down at my arms and see these big patches of distorted skin pigment and think, ‘That’s really messed up’. The more time goes on, the less you think about it but it’s taken a long time and I really wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemies. It is the most unpleasant thing I’ve been through. High-level burns are just horrible.’’
And yes, he had doubts about going back to brew again. ‘‘But it also made me prove my resolve. Once the drugs wore off, my attitude was, this sucks, but I haven’t worked this hard to stop now. There was no going back – I was still a one-man band at that point – and I had to make up my mind and just do it. I wanted to see how far we could take this – if you give up early you’ll never know how far you can go. So the burns were just a speedbump in the end.’’
The accident also sealed Childs’ relationship with Hannah Miller, now his wife of two years.
Miller, born and bred in Portland, Oregon, is a New York-trained chef and butcher who has worked in some of the world’s best restaurants, as well as doing adventurous stints in Antarctica, cooking for scientists at a US base there – ‘‘a great way to save money’’, she says.
She and Childs had been dating only nine months when he ended up at the burns unit. At the time, she wondered if their relationship could survive the trauma.
‘‘I had to decide – we’d been serious for four months when that happened,’’ Miller says. ‘‘I was in shock and it was so much, so draining. I was complaining to my mother that I was so tired and stressed that I lost 2kg in a week. I was overwhelmed and said to mom, ‘Why am I doing this?’ People were saying, ‘Hannah you’re a saint,’ but I felt exasperated.
‘‘My mom said, ‘He’s your boyfriend, you’re not married, you can leave – or if you care about this guy you’ll stick around. The only option you don’t have is to stick around and complain about it.’
‘‘That made me really mad, but it also made me think about it and I decided, yeah, he’s the guy for me. He proposed a few months later and my answer was yes, yes, yes.’’
The couple are now married and in business together.
‘‘I was always adamant I wouldn’t work with my partner as I’ve seen it tear other people apart,’’ Miller says, ‘‘but I haven’t looked back and we very much run Behemoth together. I absolutely love it and it’s so much fun.’’
Miller has her own business, A Lady Butcher, that supplies charcuterie and smallgoods to a number of top restaurants, as well as Farro Fresh and Moore Wilson’s.
Behemoth and A Lady Butcher are about to come together under one room, with Behemoth crowd-funding to build a brewery-bar-restaurantbutchery. After five years as a ‘‘gypsy’’ brewer, Childs wants his own place near the top of Auckland’s Dominion Rd. But it will be more than a brewery. Miller’s business will also be on the premises, as well as a bar and restaurant.
‘‘This will be the culmination of everything I’ve done in my career,’’ Miller says. ‘‘All these seemingly random things I’ve done are going to come together.’’
Her ethos as a chef and butcher is driven by a meeting with legendary chef Fergus Henderson, of St John in London. He’s regarded as the father of modern-day nose-to-tail cuisine. ‘‘I was 18 and meeting him changed my life. I had never heard of nose to tail, never eaten liver, pig’s head.’’
From doing butchery in restaurants around the world, she developed a passion for charcuterie and curing, which is the heart of her business.
The new premises – to be called Churly’s – will offer visitors a view of the brewery and Miller’s 1000-kilogram meat-drying fridge. The restaurant will have an on-site butcher and focus on nose-totail eating, with beer to match.
‘‘The menu will change every day based on what cuts we have and we’ll make our own burgers and sausages,’’ Miller says.
For Childs, who remains unabashedly ambitious, getting a ‘‘home’’ for Behemoth is just the next step on a journey that has seen Behemoth become one of the mostpopular craft beer brands in the country – it even out-scored Garage Project to be voted top brewery by members of SOBA (the Society of Beer Advocates) – a decision Childs calls ‘‘gobsmacking’’.
‘‘We’re doing well, but it’s not a success yet,’’ he says. ‘‘No matter what we’re doing we’re only getting started.
‘‘One of the things about me is that I’m never satisfied – yeah, I’m doing well, but I’m not doing as well as that guy. That’s a driver. There are things we want to achieve that we haven’t come close to yet.’’
The irony is that Childs, who was once ‘‘called to the bar’’, will be making his future at a bar of another kind.