Long time no see

It has been far too long since the last blog. I apologize but life has been quite hectic: We have been finishing up a big export order for both 8 Wired and Renaissance, destined for the Shelton Brothers in the US. We also shipped 2 pallets to Better Beer Imports in Melbourne and one to Denmark where fellow contract brewer Mikkeller will distrubute to my native people.

On top of all that work, Monique gave birth to our gorgeous baby girl, Mia Sarina Eriksen, on the 23rd of September. She's behaving pretty good but obviously still consumes a lot of time. Great fun and really exciting being a parent. She's so tiny and I can't figure out how she can make noises that loud!:)

Since the last blog we also scooped a bronze, silver, gold and best in class trophy at the BrewNZ awards in August. I don't mean to neglect the awesomeness of this achievement but there's not much else more to say about it. We haven't received our judges notes yet but I am eager to see why iStout and ReWired didn't win anything.
After being a judge for the first time myself this year I realize that ReWired was probably in the wrong category. Although I call it a brown ale, it is probably too big for the style and might fit better in the porter category. Beer judging is a lot more complex than one might think and really quite fascinating.

Of other news, last week we brewed a batch of a beer I have been dreaming about for months, a beer with big malt, big hops and big drinkability. It has the malt backbone of a big amber/red ale, almost scothch ale like, and the hoppiness of an IPA. Consequently I call it an "India Red Ale" and the name is Tall Poppy. This time we are also swaying away from one of our original mantras about brewing solely with NZ hops. I just couldn't find a NZ combo that would work in this beer, without making it a red HopWired or a bigger version of Red Dwarf. So in the end I went with American Warrior, Amarillo, Simcoe and Columbus, and I'm really happy about the choice. The first batch will be released in kegs only and hopefully before christmas we will have labels for the second batch which will become the fourth member of our permanent range, along with ReWired, HopWired and Big smoke.

Finally, I think I told you last time that I was getting a pilot brewery from Liberty Brewing. I've been playing a lot with this and at the moment I'm doing a series of belgian inspired beers. If I'm happy with the results we might make these on a large scale in the new year. Starting with a smallish quaffer for the tap market and following up with a tripel and a quadrupel in bottles.

Until next time, and I hope it wont be this long again,

Cheers!