Nothing beats a freshly poured pint of great beer. At Tuatara, we are delighted to see more and more venues making the effort to put craft beers, including ours, on tap. In this post, we highlight long-standing Tuatara customer Havana Bar putting our Pilsner on two taps and brand-new client Heaven’s Pizza offering both draft Hefe and draft Pilsner.
These two establishments are not only both located in the Cuba precinct of Wellington City but they are each funky venues with great food, drinks and service. If you haven’t been, you should. If you have been, you should absolutely go again. Havana is located at 32a Wigan Street, Heaven’s Pizza at 247 Cuba Street.
The usually reliable Wotzon website describes Havana Bar as a unique, exotic, comfortable, exciting and friendly bar “that boasts an exciting assortment of live music, great food and drink available from the bar and top notch staff and service.” The Tuatara team makes regular quality control checks at Havana and can endorse that assessment.
While bottled Tuatara beers have long been popular at Havana, the crew there have taken the opportunities provided by their extensions to increase the number of taps. There is one beautiful copper cobra tap now pouring Pilsner in the main bar and there will be a second in the new extension area too. This is opening soon and will provide more room for diners and drinkers.
We are also delighted to see that Havana has added a Cooper’s tap and a guest tap. It will be great to see a selection of craft beers rotating through. An early contender for that guest tap will be Tuatara APA. Havana already has their hand up for some kegs but, as we have had to tell everyone else, there is absolutely none left at the moment. Rest assured, more is on its way. We thought people would love the APA – even we didn’t think they would love it this much.
Heaven’s Pizza only opened in early September but it is already forging a reputation for incredible wood-fired pizza. They also do salads and desserts for those who like that sort of thing. They have put the Hefe on tap (which by all accounts goes brilliantly with their seafood pizza) and the Pilsner (which goes well with most things and is a bit of a conceptual match with the Bohemian crowd down that end of town).
There are a few other matches too. The real Tuatara is a living fossil and looks like it could be a relative of the magnificent dragon being slain by Saint George in the statue built on top of the pizza oven. Words don’t really do it justice so head over to the awesome shot on the Wellington Daily Photo Blog.
That blog also describes the interior of Heaven’s Pizza as “very much like the style of Upper Cuba Street - eclectic, recycled and interesting.” That is also true for the beer taps. We knew Heaven’s Pizza was going for a heavily recycled retro theme so when Tuatara Head Brewer Carl Vasta found a couple of vintage beer taps from the Porirua RSA in the brewery shed, he knew exactly what to do with them. He reconditioned and cleaned them before they were installed in the pizzeria – they are a perfect fit.
It seems to be working. They are apparently roaring through Tuatara, selling three times as much beer as they expected. We are just happy to help. It’s just such a far cry from the early days when Tuatara was only available in Lower Willis Street (Malthouse) and Upper Willis Street (Bar Bodega).
Cheers from the team at Tuatara
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