I had heard good things about the tour and they all proved accurate. Speight's is marketed as 'The Pride of the South', the South in NZ being kind of equivalent to the North in the UK. The South encapsulates Otago and Southland and anyone here drinking a beer that is historically from the North is regarded with deep suspicion and mistrust. Speight's main rivals from the North seem to be Tui and DB Draught. The Tui is a bird native to New Zealand, I have heard a few times Tui beer referred to as 'Bird-flu'. DB Draught's logo is a couple of shire horses which I suppose must have given rise to its nickname 'Horse piss'. My point, is from the moment I stepped into the local pub I was Speight's drinker.
Anyway back to the tour, which was pretty informal, very different from the kind of tour you would get in the UK anyway. We were taken through the actual working rooms of the brewery, past the pallets of barley and hops and within touching distance of all the switches and handles that control it all. They were very trusting. They don't brew on the weekend, so there weren't any tanks of beer to drop cameras, small children, etc into. I don't know if the access is the same during the week.
The brewery is currently being refurbished. They are replacing the very old genuine museum piece brewing apparatus with the modern equipment. This basically means they are going to put tanks made of stainless steel rather than the ones made of copper that have been making Speight's for so many years.
Here are a couple of the pictures I took.
It is nice to know that modern products are still being made in what looks like some of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
This mill for crushing the barley is basically the same as the one we use on the farm to roll the barley that the cows eat in the milking shed, except much bigger and about a hundred years older. It probably doesn't break down as much either.
Here is a fun brewery fact for you: Did you know that the dust from crushed barley is very flammable so traditionally workers used wooden shovels to avoid creating sparks on the concrete floor. They also always put the room where the barley is crushed on the end of the building in case there is a fire, this way they minimise the damage.
That is pretty much all I remember from the 'how they make beer'part of the tour. Although I do recall that there is a fresh water spring underneath the brewery which produces just about the purest natural water you can get. They still have to have an expensive and the only modern machine there, that sterilises it just in case.
Outside on the street they have this tap giving out free spring water to the public, apparently it is very popular and they make a ton of money for charity from the donations.
The highlight of the tour was obviously the free bar at the end. They had five beers and one cider on tap and it was all you can drink for half an hour. I didn't keep count, but I definitely drank more than the cost of my ticket. I am not a cider fan so apart from that I had one of each to start off (they were only half pints).
The beers from left to right are: Speight's Apple Cider, Speight's Triple Hop Pilsner, Speight's Distinction Ale, Speight's Golden Pale Ale, Speight's 5 Malt Old Dark and Speight's Gold Medal Ale. That is all from memory too which proves something positive I am sure.
If you are ever in Dunedin, you should visit the brewery. It is probably one of the most fun touristy things I have done in NZ.
In other news, 240 of the cows are now 8 km (5 miles in proper money) down the road on a newly acquired piece of ground at the hamlet of Five Forks. Five Forks is basically just a junction of three roads with a farm track joining it and what is pretty much just tyre tracks through a field. The latter definitely doesn't warrant a 'Fork' moniker. I appreciate it might have once been a more substantial Fork, but still 'Five Forks' is quite an exaggeration.
It was a long pretty boring walk for them to get there, it took as about two and a half hours I think. There were not enough junctions or open gateways to keep me busy, so I was just sat on the bike going at fat cow pace, which is really quite slow. Although at the one downhill bit with blind corners and a huge lorry driving through them, they did pick up speed a bit.
Here a couple of pics from the journey:
The farm where they are now is an old beef farm. The paddocks we a currently grazing are complete rings around pivot irrigation. With only one gate to get in, it makes for some pretty frustrating times trying to move cattle about. At the moment they are on a mix of Italian Ryegrass (a highly nutritious, short term type) and turnips. I am pretty sure the turnips are edible for humans so I have picked one for me to eat. I am going to forgo the grass.
To go and move reels for the cows at Five Forks twice a day, it is a bit far to go by quad bike, so I have been driving David's newish farm truck. As 4x4s go, it is not the most masculine or sturdy looking machine. It looks better now that it has some mud on it but still, its no Land Rover.
It is very light, so much so that it floats across any mud etc. If you do get it stuck, you can just pull it out by hand though and put it in your pocket. There is not much room inside, you have to have the window down when driving so there is room for the right hand side of your body to stick out a bit. You can't adjust the window and have your foot on the throttle at the same time though, there is not enough room. And when you put it into reverse, your elbow nearly hits the rear window. I can't complain too much though, when I went down to Five Forks on the quad one morning, my face was so numb from the cold air I couldn't speak properly. I would take the matchbox truck over facial frostbite any time.
This is probably my last farm related blog post as I finish working here in a few days. I have a lot of bungalow cleaning and jumping on top of my suitcase lid to do, I fly out of Christchurch on the 16th, arriving back in the motherland on the 17th. I will document my journey home and reflect on my NZ experience in the next week or so.
For now though, I leave you with an evening wintery view of the mountains from my garden.
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