Like Wrestlemanias and Superbowls before it, the Greater Wellington Brewday had its IVth annual festival at the weekend. In a paddock decorated with hay bales, flannel, and amusingly non-ironic tattoos, 2,000 appreciators of beer congregated to sample the finest ales, stouts, lagers, pilsners, and limbics Wellington has to offer.
Brewday has a relaxed, semi-hipster vibe. There are beards aplenty, police afew, and covers bands galore. It’s much more chilled out than the other festivals around Wellington. The organisers even brought in a few livestock transport trucks as a temporary windbreak when they saw the forecast. Because they’re looking out for us. Gold.
This was my third Brewday. In 2014, I discovered the joys of Panhead’s big, bold, American-style ales like Quickchange and Supercharger.
Last year, I fell in love with Funk Estate’s Superaphrodisiac Imperial Stout.
And this year, we experimented with personalized beer fetcher service, because our group are job creators. Job creators, I say! Specifically, we created a job where an enterprising student got paid a living wage and got a free Brewday ticket if he spent much of his Brewday fetching beer and food for us. It was like having our own under the radar hipster butler called Finn.
The festival organizer told us nobody else had thought of this idea before. We’re either ahead of the curve, or the laziest people in the history of Brewday. Or both.
Once you divide it by a few people, the cost isn’t super high. And it made it us own little stealth business class. We’d say “those dumplings that guy’s carrying looks great!” and three minutes later we’d have a plate of our own right in front of us. “Ooh, I remember this ale form last year!” Almost magically, it appears. “Haha - what’s with this odd lemon and coriander beer?” Here, find out.
Actually, that was the only problem with the beer fetcher concept – lack of a cool-down period between having the kind of ideas people at Brewday, and having someone go and carry out those ideas. It’s like the Twitter of waiters.
Actually, sometimes those hare-brained ideas work out surprisingly well. For example, part way through the afternoon one of my colleagues saw a beer called Cookie Beer. That sounded crazy dumb! But we were intrigued just long enough to get Finn to bring us some. It turns out Webb St Brewery’s Cookie Beer is delicious. It tasted like chocolate chip cookies, sure enough, but somehow that didn’t make it any less refreshing as a beer. Amazing! You probably wouldn’t want to drink lots of them in a row, but it was a really fun idea.
Not all the “gee I wonder if this’ll work” beers worked, of course. That’s kind of half the fun. Garage Project is one of my favourite brewers, and their Death from Above and Pernicious Weed provide great unique takes on the big hoppy IPA. But their Tournisol, which promised meyer lemon and coriander in a Saison style, went too big on the lemon and came out, in my amateur opinion, more like a mild Saison mixed with double-strength Raro.
Overall, our crew gave line honours again to Funk Estate’s Superaphrodisiac Imperial Stout. It’s a big, bold stout, with really rich flavor additions coming from the combination of fig, vanilla, and chocolate flavours.
I was going to say it’s just a shame the beer isn’t available year round – it’s a Valentine’s Day annual release – but in retrospect I’m actually glad I have to look forward to my yearly dose of romance-themed inky stout. Like the DB ad says – beer always tastes best if you’ve earned it.
So long Brewday and see you next year for Brewday V where, if history is any guide, mega powers may collide or a horse might ride a cowboy.
