Lockdown Thoughts

It is 1pm on Saturday the 21st August. The first weekend in this lockdown. I have had a productive morning of jobs round the house and a little bit of work. So I chose a beer from the fridge and sat down to write my Lockdown Thoughts.

My lovely wife Emma knows how to look after me. About 2 years ago she signed me up to a thing called Beer Hug (www. beerhug.co.nz) which delivers a regular supply of craft beers to my door, about a dozen at a time. Cheaper than buying in the shops it makes an economical way to try lots of different breweries and styles. I love having a good range to choose from. The Hazy IPA pictured is going down very well!

Beer has come a long way since I experimented with lager as a teenager. As I reached my early 20s I branched out to Guinness, bitter and pilsner, but that was as far as beer really went back then. When I first started travelling to the US in the mid 1990s I recall being amazed how bland the beer was there. Every bar had 9 different beers, each tasting exactly like the next. Budweiser, Miller, Coors and Amstel were basically the same flavour, and served so cold it tasted of nothing anyway! Rather like American cheeses where the name simply denotes the colour rather than any flavour difference! These beers were great for a thirst, but useless in terms of being an interesting drink and something to talk about. If you were lucky a bar would stock Samuel Adams Boston Lager, a mid brown ale with a more hoppy taste.

Fortunately the Americans were some of the first to get the craft beer bug. There are literally dozens of different beer styles and micro-brewers all around the country began experimenting, and soon found that you could build a loyal local following of people wanting to try anything you produced and willing to spend a bit more for the privilege of taste and interest.

Now craft beer is massively popular across the globe, with NZ at the front of the pack. Wellington was recently named one of the top 20 cities for craft beer in the world, and second in the world for most breweries per-head of population after Asheville, North Carolina! We have the luxury of lots of dedicated enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, and sadly the 7th highest beer prices in the world to fund it all!

My tastes have broadened since I was young. I particularly like a well made wheat beer, a nicely rounded double IPA, a big stout (i.e. high %) and have growing liking for the right kind of sour. I’m always open for a pint after work if you are interested!

Ben Reed
Managing Director - HamiltonJet