Humble Beginnings

We have promised a blog since we started up almost 6 months ago, so without further ado and delay, here it is!

We'll dedicate this first blog to a brief description of who we are and how 8 Wired Brewing came to life. For those of you who don't know, I am Søren Eriksen, born and bred in Denmark. I haven't really lived there for the last 7 years though, which is about one quarter of my life. In 2003 I spent 10 months in Bangladesh working for the Danish embassy It was there I met the other half (and the better half some might say) of 8 Wired Brewing; my soon to be wife, the Te Aroha born and round the world bred Kiwi, Monique Aves.

Monique is actually the one to blame for all this: 5 years ago we were living in Perth, where she worked as a Physio and I was finishing my biochemistry degree. Our interest in craft beer slowly started to grow as we were living close to Little Creatures Brewing Co in Fremantle. For Christmas that year she got me a Cooper's homebrew kit. Very basic stuff: Mix some malt extract with water, add yeast and wait. It tasted terrible, but as I always say: You'll always love your own children, no matter how ugly they are! Due to a lot of travelling and moving around I didn't really upscale the brewing until 2007. By then we had semi settled in Auckland and I started playing around with specialty grains, hops and eventually brew-in-a-bag style all grain brewing (that term will make sense to the homebrewers and probably no one else). In 2008 we did a roadtrip through the USA and while visiting every brewpub we passed I started to realize that this is what I wanted to do with my life. No more biochemistry, brewing is the biz! Once again, Monique is to blame really, for being so damn supportive! Well, alright, it took a bit of convincing, but I was persistent and in the end she caved...

The plan was to start a brewpub but I needed some commercial experience, so after contacting basically every craft brewery in the country I got the dream position: Keg monkey (an affectionous term describing the guy who cleans the kegs and other tedious tasks) at the awesome Renaissance Brewing in Blenheim. We shifted down from the North Island, intending to stay for 3 months. 18 months later we are still here: We quickly realized that a brewpub was beyond our abilities, adding to that the global credit crunch made for a very inhospitable environment for new businesses. Life has a funny tendency to sort it self out though. It turned out that Renaissance will be in need of a new head brewer by January 2010. They offered me that position and when I proposed to start my own brand on the side to vent the steam of my creative ambitions they were all for it and generously let me brew and bottle the beer at their facilities. In hindsight I don't know why we ever considered any other option than contract brewing: What we really want to do is make top-top beers that appeal to a small but enthusiastic audience. To run a physical brewery you need to shift a lot of volume to sustain the overhead, contracting is much better for our kind of venture which is inspired by the likes of Danish contract brewer Mikkeller and New Zealand's own Stu McKinlay and Sam Possineskie, a.k.a. The Yeastie Boys.

The name, 8 Wired Brewing, came to life during a brain storming session with Monique's family. They are probably still debating who said it first and frankly I don't remember either but at some point “No 8” was suggested. This led into “No 8 Wired” and eventually just “8 Wired”.

For all you Non Zealanders, No 8 Wire (it was the 8th type of wire in the catalogue) is a specific gauge of wire originally used for electric fencing. In New Zealand it's use is much more widespread than that though, Kiwi's have used it to fix just about anything, from cupboards to cars, because it was versatile and readily available. Over the years it has become a symbol of the kiwi ingenuity, their ability to fix any problem no matter how limited the resources.

We think this fits our company pretty well: We don't have the resources nor the abilities to run our own brewery, so we make do with what we have. We also think that all our beers have a certain amount of ingenuity, ingenuity in flavour we like to call it.
“8 Wired”, as opposed to the more traditional term “No 8 wire”, is to symbolize that our beer is not old school Kiwi draught, kiwi lager and kiwi dark, in fact it is the exact opposite. Still, we're keeping it as Kiwi as we can through the ingredients we choose to use.

Cheers!