For the husband-and-wife team behind Isthmus Brewing, winning champion beer at this year’s New World Beer & Cider Awards continues a nice upward trend following some “dark times”.
Hamish Ward and Caroline Muller-Ward are two of the nicest people in the beer industry and it’s great to see them celebrating the success Isthmus 3D IPA, which won champion beer at the NWBCA just a year after their fruited sour, Gone Troppo, won a trophy in the British & European class at the NZ Beer Awards.
Those outstanding results come after the future of Isthmus was briefly on the line after Hamish lost his job as head brewer at Deep Creek when that business went into liquidation in 2023.
“Yeah, there’s been lots of dark times, so you got to enjoy the good times, that’s for sure,” Hamish says.
In many ways, the fates of Isthmus and Deep Creek were entangled from the start of both operations.
Isthmus started in 2011 after Hamish had been home brewing for a number of years. He met Deep Creek founders Paul Brown and Jarred MacLachlan through a mutual friend.
“They had aspirations of opening a brew pub so we actually home brewed together one time at our house in Ellerslie.”
When Hamish, who had been a molecular biologist, had his job disestablished in 2012 he decided it was a good time to try to commercialise Isthmus and approached the fledgling Deep Creek operation, then based at Browns Bay, to see if they could brew a commercial beer for him. They replied by saying they were they were actually looking for a head brewer.
“So they said ‘why don’t you make the beer yourself?’ And they said they had big plans for new facility up in Silverdale and I could just make my beer at the same time I was making their beer. So they offered me a job pretty much straight away as head brewer of Deep Creek. And I started there early 2013.”
The rapid growth of Deep Creek over the next few years meant Hamish was too busy to focus on Isthmus and that operation went dormant for a while.
“Isthmus ticked at a slow burn,” Caroline says. “Deep Creek grew really rapidly and Hamish was doing great things there. He won so many prestigious awards … there’s no doubt that he’s good at what he does.”
But the truth is that Caroline is a pretty good beer creator in her own right, coming up with the design for Gone Troppo, a passionfruit and mango sour, which was the designated reboot beer for Isthmus in 2018.
“I’ve got a huge list of beers I’d like to do. I’m like, ‘I want to do this. I want to do that’. And Hamish always says ‘you’re not allowed any more beer until you sell some’.
“In 2018, I think I was kind of tired of him winning massive awards for other people and not for our business. So I was like ‘look, let’s do something with Isthmus’. And Hamish said: ‘You don’t have time’. It’s true, I had two preschoolers, but I was like, ‘I’m gonna, take over Isthmus. I’m going to grow it’.”
Her hope was that Isthmus could grow enough for Hamish to leave Deep Creek and work fulltime on his own business.
“I guess it’s hard to leave a salaried job to go to a small business, so I was trying to kind of get it going for him to just slide seamlessly across. But anyway, we had a reboot, and for an inaugural brew I was like ‘here’s what it’s going to be. I want a passionfruit and mango sour. And he made it happen.
“The beer was everything I hoped for it … but then I had to sell it!”
As for those plans with Isthmus … they got close.
“We did have plans and it would have been good to see where those landed,” Caroline says. “Although with the benefit of hindsight, it’s not the best time timing to be starting or launching a new brewery. There’s others that have started and proved that it can be done even in this economic climate.
“But we lost a lot of security and some money with Deep Creek and that just put the brakes on it.
“I’d love for Hamish to be making beer again because he’s so good at it.”
The couple are not totally against the idea, but realise they’d need a brew bar model and as Hamish notes: “hospitality is not really our jam, either of us”.
“But with the right partnership, somebody who’s good with hospo, it would be good. And I guess some financial backing would be helpful as well.
“So it’s not that we don’t want to,” Caroline adds, “I guess it’s just finding the right time and maybe finding the right person or people.”
“Everything in life’s timing,” Hamish adds. “We were looking for a site and had found something that we liked but Deep Creek’s liquidation blew the plans apart and I think we’ve been recovering ever since, to be honest.”
The good news is that after Deep Creek collapsed, Hamish found another job quickly and they found a new home for Isthmus to be brewed.
“I’m a consultant for a software company. Abel do ERP software, so we work with manufacturing businesses. It’s a bit of a pivot but I had some familiarity with the software because Deep Creek used it.
“When the news of the liquidation broke, they reached out and indicated there would potentially be a future for me if I wanted to go that way. It’s a great change and different to the old career. With the way the industry has gone post-Deep Creek, while I’m sad not to be in it and be on the same journey as everyone else, at the same time, I’ve got a slightly de-risked salary situation.”
And the brewing was de-risked as well with Liberty stepping up to contract brew it.
“Joe and Christina from Liberty are friends of ours from before they started Liberty. So, I’ve known them for a long time.
“They reached out when they got the bad news about Deep Creek and offered to make beer for us. They’ve got a similar commitment to excellence and they are a really good fit for what we wanted to do. So having that beer quality taken care of and not having to worry about that so much was a massive relief.”
Caroline also works fulltime as a physiotherapist, running a private clinic while contracting to another company that handles workplace injuries. “And I do a couple of other things on top of that.”
“So it’s long days. It’s a challenge. There’s always stuff to do. Lists. I have lists and lists of stuff that has to be attended to. Sometimes things just drop off the list. The day-to-day running of Isthmus doesn’t have so much time pressure. But organising everything that we’ve had to do for the New World Awards — all the logistics and everything you need to do to have everything show up, get to sites — it’s been a big overhead. On the whole, while it’d be nice to spend more time on Isthmus, with a busy family life, it’s sometimes hard to find that time.”
As for the winning beer itself, Hamish says, it’s stayed true to its roots — it was first brewed in 2014 — while also moving with the times.
“In the early days, I was going for a classic West Coast IPA, and it was a reflection of what IPA was back then. But over time IPA has evolved, so the beer has modernised a bit, to keep up with what IPA has changed to. There’s no crystal or caramel malts in there anymore but it’s still true to its former self with the malt. It’s not a super pale, bright IPA. There’s still malt there and a good bitterness as well. It hasn’t lightened up in IBUs.”
While Isthmus are not widely available they do have a tap at the place it all started, Browns Bay Brewing. And in a twist of fate, Hamish is re-entering the brewing game back as a consultant to Browns Bay.
The brewery disestablished the role of brewer-general manager held by Andrew Ranum (now at Galbraith’s) but wants to keep contract brewing, with occasional brews made on site.
“So they approached me to do some consulting around recipes. They want to contract brew the majority of what they’re planning to make now. I was happy to help them out with some recipe advice.
“But one of the directions they want to go is using the brewery on site. They don’t want to mothball it, but they also don’t want the expense of running it all the time.”