Ten Years of Tuatara

For most of us, the year 2000 was the start of a new century and we marked it with a huge party just in case the Y2K Bug really did destroy everything on the stroke of midnight. Of course, if you want to be completely accurate, the 21st Century didn’t actually start until 2001 but we didn’t allow that to dampen the mood.

Helen Clark was Prime Minister of New Zealand. George W Bush would (eventually) become President of the United States. Mission Impossible II was number one at the global box office while Britney Spears arrived with “Oops, I did it again.”

The Summer Olympics were successfully held in Sydney while the All Blacks won all ten tests they played that year. The International Space Station became continuously manned but the Russian submarine Kursk tragically sank.

Proving that some things do stay the same, anti-globalisation protests turned violent, peace efforts in the Middle East were unsuccessful and Microsoft was ruled to have violated antitrust laws by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors.

In 2000, Tuatara beer was brand new and only really available from The Malthouse (then on Willis Street) and Bar Bodega (then also on Willis Street but much further up). Supermarkets had just been given the right to start selling beer and it would take them a while to start stocking the good stuff. As it happened, it took a few years for Tuatara to start bottling and a few more years for Tuatara beers to start appearing on store shelves regularly.

This is all a slightly roundabout way of saying that Tuatara is almost ten years old. In some ways, the years have simply flown by. In other ways, it seems like our journey started a long time ago. A decade is a long time in this industry. What we do know is that we still have a long way to go but we intend to celebrate this milestone just a little bit. Craft brewing can be a tough business but we are going to keep doing our thing, our way.

The plan at the moment is to brew a special commemorative beer to mark Tuatara’s tenth anniversary. Because of the recent expansions to the brewery and the arrival of new equipment and tanks (even if the forklift got a puncture carrying one of them up the drive in the pouring rain – poor Carl), production capacity has basically doubled. With a few more conditioning tanks, it may even triple.

That has given us the ability to now produce a few more special brews and seasonal releases. Tuatara APA was really just the beginning in this area. If there is any particular style or type of beer you would like to see us make, leave a comment below or contact us on Facebook or Twitter. We will keep you updated here.

Cheers from the team at Tuatara