Brewed to perfection

When 8 Wired picked up the unprecedented double win for both Champion Brewery and Champion Beer at the recent NZ Beer Awards, they weren’t the only local brewery receiving accolades.

The Sawmill Brewery at Matakana won the Brewing Sustainability Award for the fourth year in a row, as well as winning a number of gold, silver and bronze medals including Champion International Pale Ale for its Sawmill XPA. McLeod’s Brewery in Waipu also bagged a swag of gold, silver and bronze medals, and its Longboarder Lager won Champion International lager.

Newer brewers on the local scene also did well – Puhoi Beer’s Rudi’s Lager won bronze and Colab Brewing, north of Warkworth, won gold for its US Lager, as well as bronze for three of its other beers.

For 8 Wired owners, Søren and Monique Eriksen, it was the second time they had been named Champion Brewery. They first collected the award in 2011 while still based in Blenheim and just two years after launching 8 Wired with two beers – the brown ale Rewired and IPA Hot Wired, which is still the company’s flagship beer. In the intervening years, they shifted to Warkworth to be closer to family and have since created a vast range of award-winning brews.

Søren, who has a masters degree in biochemistry, says his interest in beer making, which started as a bit of fun with a home brew kit in Perth, is a hobby that “sort of took over”. As the name 8 Wired suggests, there has been a hands-on DIY approach from the outset.

“We had limited resources and skills when we started, so we had to learn to fix problems and make do with what we had,” Søren says.

8 Wired beer is exported all over the world, with about one-quarter of its annual production of around half a million litres going mainly to Australia and Asia, but also Europe and the US.

“Beer, by its very nature, will always be more of a local product because it is best drunk fresh. The exceptions are the barrel aged beers, or sour beers, which are more akin to wine.”

Experimentation is a fundamental part of business. 8 Wired has a core range of about 10 beers, but can produce up to 25 seasonal beers, mostly IPAs and pale ales, that are one-offs and “a bit more fun”.

Half the hops used in the brews are from Nelson, while the rest are sourced from the US, Europe and Australia. Different hops add different flavours.

“The American hops are good for American IPAs because they are more citrussy and piney, NZ hops are more fruity and European hops are better for classic German style beers, as they are more spicy and earthy.”

Søren says although he has a good idea of what a beer will turn out like when they are experimenting, it is not possible to control the process completely and that’s what makes it fun. Looking to the future, he sees craft beer becoming more mainstream, with Kiwis drinking less beer, but being more discerning about what they drink. Going forward, he sees non-alcoholic and low alcohol beers being a big focus.

“The current challenge for us, like a lot of businesses, is rising costs with everything from ingredients to packaging getting significantly more expensive. Even the war in the Ukraine is affecting us, with more farmers growing wheat instead of barley. The margins are very small with the price of making beer going up by about 40 per cent, but we can’t just pass that on to the consumer. If we started selling six-packs for $35 I don’t think we would sell many six-packs.”

8 Wired’s Wild Feijoa won the Champion Beer award. Søren describes the beer as a labour of love as a batch takes three years to produce – it’s aged for two years before one metric tonne of the fruit is added, and then it sits for another year before it is bottled. The feijoa, which are supplied by Peter and Helen Lowry, from the organic Quinta Feijoa Orchard in Omaha, are sliced by hand.

He is also disappointed the government has resisted any reform of the excise tax.

“The excise is a blunt tool that the government basically uses to incentivise the big producers of cheap alcohol to increase their prices so people drink less. They give no real consideration to the fact that it hurts small producers like us. It’s very frustrating.

“In most other countries there’s an excise rebate for small producers. In Australia, for instance, I believe it’s something like the first $350,000 of excise you don’t pay. Something like that would help us tremendously.” on their social responsibility programme, in particular the wastewater project to reinstate a wetland.

Søren says he and Monique were honoured to receive their awards on behalf of their team, but for him, the reward remains the fun of seeing consumers surprised that a beer can taste “so good”.