If you don’t have your ticket for at least one Beervana session, then run (don’t walk) to their website and order some right now.

To help the thirsty crowds attain true Beervana, thirty of the country’s best brewers will converge on the Wellington Town Hall on 28 and 29 August to offer their wares.  Beervana will showcase a number of limited-release, rare and unique beers.  In a highly anticipated development, the Impish Brewer will finally be tapping Melissa (and Pete) – two barrels of Epic Armageddon which have been criss-crossing Cook Strait on the Interislander ferry for weeks.  It will be the first ever tasting of this IIPA (Inter-Island Pale Ale).

Beervana will also feature a number of beer education seminars and eight sessions of the hugely popular beer and food matching show presented by top chef Martin Bosley and slightly above average beer writer Neil Miller.  The Brew NZ beer awards are already underway, Beervana passports are being stamped all over town and it is just going to be a huge week really.

Malthouse is proud to be the Home of Beervana.  All week it will be hosting assorted beer fans, aficionados, experts, geeks, tasters, slurpers, judges, anoraks and pneumatic cerevisaphiles.

Making a rare appearance on tap in Wellington is the rather excellent Croucher Pale Ale (5%).  The Malthouse is now pouring the flagship beer from Paul Croucher and his team at their newly expanded Rotorua brewery.  It throws a heady, tropical fruit aroma and is certainly the best smelling thing to come out of New Zealand’s ‘aromatic capital’ in a long time.   This full-bodied beer has notes of orange, caramel and biscuit before a lingering, quenching dry finish.  I have always liked Croucher Pale Ale.  The people at Croucher clearly have impeccable taste as they call me a “Wellington Based Beer Celebrity” on their website.

However, it is not just the Croucher Pale Ale, New Zealand’s largest beer selection, the handy Courtenay Place location or even the proprietor’s Imelda Marcos-sized collection of gaily coloured shirts which makes Malthouse the Home of Beervana.  It is the knowledge and abilities of their staff.  They know their beer and they know how to serve it properly.

In hospitality legend Bill Brien’s erudite tome “100 Years of Hospitality in New Zealand 1902-2002” he recounts the qualities Francis Hickson Drewitt – known to all as Frank – believed a licensee must have.  It summarises the Malthouse staff quite well really.   Frank said:

“A licensee must have the following qualifications – the dignity of an archbishop, the levity of a comedian, the tact of schoolmaster, the hope of a company promoter, the benevolence of a charitable institution, the eloquence of a cabinet minister, the cheek of a parliamentary candidate, the elastic conscience of a magistrate, the legal brain of a lawyer, the sporting knowledge of a sporting guide, the smile of a film star, the voice of a sergeant major and the skin of a rhinoceros!”

Let the staff and the beer at the Malthouse help you attain true Beervana today… grasshopper.

Cheers


Beer Writer
Real Beer New Zealand
Beer and Brewer Magazine

Links

Beervana – http://brewersguild.org.nz/beervana/
Martin Bosley – http://www.martin-bosley.com/
Impish Brewer Tapping Melissa – http://www.realbeer.co.nz/blog/2009/07/epic-journey-recreates-beers-most.html
Croucher Brewing Company – http://www.croucherbrewing.co.nz/
Malthouse Facebook Group – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wellington/Malthouse/7084276173
Real Beer – http://www.realbeer.co.nz/blog/blog.html
Beer and Brewer Magazine – http://www.beerandbrewer.com/