A visit to Monteith's Brewery made today a stationary day. The guides go a bundle about Monteiths and from the hype you'd think they were a little craft brewery but dig a little and you see that they are now a big industrial combine (like Macs brewery, their main competitor) that likes to pose as a craft brewer. Indeed, Monteith's is the big west coast brewery, owned by DB Brewing. But they do produce quite a pleasant black lager under the name Black Beer and most of their beers are decent if not exciting or particularly notable. It's unfortunate that they don't do bottle or cask fermenting - no more yeast is added at bottling/fermenting. Nor do they do a dark ale - only a dark lager. They are keen on this clean reproducible flavour, which makes the beers reliable but a touch dull. Hops are pelleted and grown near Nelson.The tour was pretty slick - I'd guess our tour guide had done the spiel many times before. It showed us a modern, fairly large brewery focussed on lagers. It included pretty generous sampling - including the chance to pull your own beer which we both did. More than once.... The museum display shows that they have brewed old style porter, brown beers, even tripels and saisons. And wheats. So their current range looks like what happens when a small creative brewery gets the treatment from big management after a takeover. Reliable but a bit dull and designed more by the marketing dept perhaps than exciting brewing. Where are the wonderful old brews that the museum's bottles and ads mention? There was evidently once a vibrant brewing culture here - belgian style saisons and brown beers. What on earth happened?Make mine an oud bruin....The rest of the day was largely occupied by a few hours walking along the beach, seeing the point where the Grey River enters the sea and not quite finding our way around the bungalowed backstreets in time for evensong at Holy Trinity, a sad blow since as a devotee of choral (preferably) evensong as one of the most underrated liturgies I had longed for a fix of Nunc Dimittis and perhaps an antipodean sermon. They did have a service later called 19:29, hmm I guess this is to indicate the sort of age range their after and as I'm a fair bit out of that age bracket and frankly noah's ark in terms of my liturgical sensibilities I backed away, cowed.Greymouth is an unpretentious town in a wonderful, if rainy as today, location and I warmed to it. However we must get some miles done tomorrow and try to get a decent amount of the way towards those glaciers that we see advertised everywhere.
A visit to Monteith's Brewery made today a stationary day. The guides go a bundle about Monteiths and from the hype you'd think they were a little craft brewery but dig a little and you see that they are now a big industrial combine (like Macs brewery, their main competitor) that likes to pose as a craft brewer. Indeed, Monteith's is the big west coast brewery, owned by DB Brewing. But they do produce quite a pleasant black lager under the name Black Beer and most of their beers are decent if not exciting or particularly notable. It's unfortunate that they don't do bottle or cask fermenting - no more yeast is added at bottling/fermenting. Nor do they do a dark ale - only a dark lager. They are keen on this clean reproducible flavour, which makes the beers reliable but a touch dull. Hops are pelleted and grown near Nelson.The tour was pretty slick - I'd guess our tour guide had done the spiel many times before. It showed us a modern, fairly large brewery focussed on lagers. It included pretty generous sampling - including the chance to pull your own beer which we both did. More than once.... The museum display shows that they have brewed old style porter, brown beers, even tripels and saisons. And wheats. So their current range looks like what happens when a small creative brewery gets the treatment from big management after a takeover. Reliable but a bit dull and designed more by the marketing dept perhaps than exciting brewing. Where are the wonderful old brews that the museum's bottles and ads mention? There was evidently once a vibrant brewing culture here - belgian style saisons and brown beers. What on earth happened?Make mine an oud bruin....The rest of the day was largely occupied by a few hours walking along the beach, seeing the point where the Grey River enters the sea and not quite finding our way around the bungalowed backstreets in time for evensong at Holy Trinity, a sad blow since as a devotee of choral (preferably) evensong as one of the most underrated liturgies I had longed for a fix of Nunc Dimittis and perhaps an antipodean sermon. They did have a service later called 19:29, hmm I guess this is to indicate the sort of age range their after and as I'm a fair bit out of that age bracket and frankly noah's ark in terms of my liturgical sensibilities I backed away, cowed.Greymouth is an unpretentious town in a wonderful, if rainy as today, location and I warmed to it. However we must get some miles done tomorrow and try to get a decent amount of the way towards those glaciers that we see advertised everywhere.