Beer and Food Matching Taking Off

Beervana was bigger and better this year and so was the fledgling Beer and Chefs competition. This contest, also run by the Brewer’s Guild of New Zealand, challenges chefs from around Wellington to offer their very best beer and food matches using any beer they choose. There were fifteen entries this year, up from ten in the first year, and the overall winner was our friends over at Logan Brown.

Here at Tuatara, we were delighted to see our beer popping up on three of the entries. We have always been hugely supportive of beer and food matching as it is a great way of highlighting the flavours in our products and introducing the range to a more foodie audience.

Lagerfield on Blair Street offered up “Tuatara Pilsner braised duck with apple and fig jam and a cider foam, served with a Tuatara Pilsner Beer.” They described the dish on the menu as “The duck is marinated and braised in Tuatara Pilsner and the whole creation of the dish was based around matching the duck with the beer. Our chef wanted to focus on local products and locally brewed beer. The dish brings together two great New Zealand flavours and the fusion of flavours proved to be mouth watering!”

The dish is still on the Lagerfield menu and several of the Tuatara team have proclaimed it to be ‘meaty, hearty but still sophisticated.’

Over at D4 on Featherston Street, they served “lamb rump stuffed with blue cheese, walnuts and spinach with parsnip cake and fruit stuffing, paired with Tuatara Porter.” Here was their rationale:“With Tuatara Porter’s yeast flavour, we went with the blue cheese which takes some of the yeast taste out and brings other flavours through. The walnuts give it that nutty flavour to complement. Parsnip and stuffing also work really well to enhance the beer’s flavours.”

D4 is also currently selling Tuatara APA – a lot of Tuatara APA.

At Le Carnard on Murphy Street, the dish was “Tournedos of pork stuffed with prunes, wholegrain mustard sauce and Gratin Dauphinois, with Tuatara Ardennes.” Their explanation of this intriguing match read “The Tuatara Ardennes is a Belgian strong ale with smooth malt characteristics which go very well with the texture of the pork. The slight bitterness of the beer blends perfectly with the wholegrain mustard sauce. Finally, the prune adds a bit of sweetness to end in the mouth.”

If you know of places doing great food matches with Tuatara, leave a comment or drop us a line. We would love to highlight them in future posts.

Tuatara also popped up at the Chaffers Dock Building on Monday at a function to promote the 2011 Melbourne Wine and Food Festival. A gratifying number of Wellington hospitality people and various media personalities selected Tuatara Pilsner from the large range of beverages on offer. Tuatara brewer Carl Vasta was there in a suit, celebrating perhaps the fact that it was also his birthday. This basically means that everyone already owes him a beer.

Cheers from the team at Tuatara

Tuatara Popping up in Sydney

Hardly anyone saw them coming as a culinary trend but ‘pop-up restaurants’ are simply huge right now. Empty spaces – anywhere from theatres, shops, closed eateries, warehouses, car parks, tunnels and parks – can be quickly but temporarily converted into a restaurant. The same can be done with a private home but it is not really legal. Well, not legal at all.

A proper ‘pop-up’ always has a finite life span. It will start – usually relying on word-of-mouth for publicity – serve great food then close on a specified date, never to re-open. Equally, no matter how good the head chef is, dining at a ‘pop-up’ should be relatively cheap. This almost-guerrilla style of dining has gained popularity, in part because of the current tough financial climate.

Journalist Matt Campbell from Scene Adviser explained the phenomenon best when he wrote:

“Pop-ups are the embodiment of our high-octane, short-attention-span culture. One minute they're here - restaurants and bars opening in unexpected locations, causing a storm - and then they're gone. The temporary dining spot manages to break all the rules of what a traditional restaurant should be. Which is precisely why the trend for temporary locations dips into our whimsical 21st-century consumer mindset.”

He even went so far as to call them “raves for the restaurant world.” London restaurateur Pablo Flack had perhaps the most famous (or infamous) description saying that ‘pop-ups’ were “the crack cocaine of restaurant-running. We want to do it quick, sharp, full-throttle, and then shut up shop.”

On 14 September, a Wellington ‘pop-up’ will open in Sydney for two weeks and the only beers on offer will be from Tuatara. The restaurant is called WLG and it will be run by four of the Capital’s top chefs who will take it in turns to serve local food and drinks to over 2,500 patrons who have already virtually booked the place out.

In a press release, Tuatara Director Sean Murrie recently said Tuatara jumped at the chance to be involved:

“This will be a brief but intense opportunity to give the people of Sydney a taste of Tuatara and hopefully they will get a bit of a thirst for it. We are already putting in place a distribution network over there so Sydneysiders can find Tuatara on the shelves after they have tried it at WLG.”

“For many of the guests, this will be the first time they have tried a real craft beer. It will certainly be the first Tuatara for the vast majority of them. We are taking across Tuatara Helles, Tuatara Hefe and Tuatara Pilsner to introduce them to quality craft beers. There is huge interest from the dining public in Sydney already and we are expecting a lot of cameras and media interest as well.”

Cheers from the team at Tuatara

Tuatara APA Launched in Bottles on Friday

There are a lot of websites out there which let drinkers, both expert and amateur, put up ratings and comments about the beers they have tasted. The one which has really taken off – and which has a vocal Kiwi contingent – is Ratebeer. In a post-Beervana moment, we thought it would be useful to see what the Ratebeer crew had to say about our new Tuatara American Pale Ale (APA):

Reviewer Sdriessen (with a respectable 310 ratings) said “Solid malt, fruity hops. I could drink a lot of this. Very nice from Tuatara.” The aptly named TheGrandMaster (a staggering 2048 ratings) wrote “Plenty of bitterness with this, and that hop flavour really comes through. This will please the hop lovers.” Praise from Caesar indeed!

Mr Winewanker (with just 59 ratings) is of course well known to Tuatara and he described our APA thusly: “Lovely rich malty layers with fresh, zesty grapefruit and grassy hop notes. Probably a bit rich to be a true APA - more like an American IPA.” We at Tuatara can probably handle being called ‘too rich’ in this context. It certainly doesn’t happen very often.

Despite the unusual nom-de-plume, Donfardz64 (519 ratings) has a more than decent palate and noted “Pours amber, white head. Aroma is slightly lemony, grassy. Those American hops don’t really come through here. Bam! In the flavour you’re hit with an assertive grapefruity bitterness, backed up by a rich malt. Probably my favourite Tuatara beer so far. Quaffable and hoppy.” The second batch, pouring now, certainly has a lot more hops on the nose so we might get a second “Bam!” if there is a re-review.

The latest review was from KapitiCritique (119 rating) who seems to hail from our part of the world. They ended their review saying the APA was “evidently not out in bottles yet” but they “would love to see this on local shelves.”

And now they can. In fact, everyone can. From Friday 10 September Tuatara APA will be available in 500ml bottles at a limited range of outlets including Regional Wines and selected New World supermarkets. There are only 360 dozen bottles in total for this batch.

To celebrate, we are throwing a party at Regional Wines and Spirits (by the Basin Reserve in Wellington) from 4:30pm to 7pm this Friday 10 September. The brewers will be pouring samples of the beer, we will cook up some spicy food matches and there will be some classic Americana music courtesy of DJ Shady from Radio Active. It is free of charge and everyone is invited. Tell your friends.

Cheers from the team at Tuatara

Making more Tuatara and Making it Easier to Find

Ten years ago, you could get Tuatara on tap at The Malthouse on lower Willis Street, Bar Bodega on upper Willis Street and at the Tuatara brewery up in the hills. That was it. Since then, production and distribution have expanded dramatically, aided by the introduction of our stylish bottles.

Over the last twelve months or so, Carl and the team have been working hard to complete a major plant upgrade at the Brewery. It has basically doubled our brewing capacity and, with a couple more conditioning tanks, we should be able to produce three times as much as beer as we did at the same time last year. The challenge for the brewers, as always, is to ensure that beer quality remains high as we grow.

One area that has undergone a radical transformation is the bottling plant. This was from the old Harvest Cider plant in Gisborne and she certainly has a bit of age on her. However, Carl’s been chatting to her quietly and doing a bit of an overhaul. Today, the bottling plant is working better than ever.

The most tangible result is that the rate of ‘short fill’ has plummeted to virtually zero. That is good news for business but it has caused a bit of dismay for the young guys on the bottling line who used to get the short fills as staff drinks…

Now that Tuatara is making more beer – a lot more beer – we have decided to call in the professionals to help get this massive volume of craft beer into the bars and stores efficiently. We are proud to have partnered up with Toll Logistics. This partnership reflects the maturation of Tuatara as a business and allows our brewers to focus on brewing and bottling.

Their website says “Toll Logistics is Toll New Zealand's specialist in the provision of supply chain management and third party logistics, including: Container Devanning, Pallet Consolidation, Storage, Trucking Consolidation, Pallet and Box Picks, Despatch and Delivery”. What is means for us is that the biggest truck we can possibly get up the driveway swings by twice a week and takes all the beer that is not nailed down. That beer then ends up in the right place in the right time. We have to say, the system is working very well.

So, Tuatara is making more beer and it is being distributed professionally so it should be easier to find.

Finally, the best way to keep up to date with what is happening at Tuatara in the long week between blog posts is through social media. In the last year, we have really embraced technology and now have a strong presence on Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn still kind of confuses us.

So, please ‘like’ us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can learn the most interesting things.

Cheers from the team at Tuatara