This is the final part in a series dedicated to breweries that have opened up since the Covid-19 pandemic. The past five years have been tough for those in the brewing industry. The data is there: higher costs, lower consumer spend, alternative drinks. All are eating into beer’s share of the beverage market. Despite the doom and gloom a number of breweries have started in the past five years. In this series we visit six from the length and breadth of the country. They are all slightly different but if there was one common denominator it’s that they’re all trying to control their own destiny in one way or another.
Twofold Brewery & Restaurant — Opened April 2025
Of the six start-ups featured in this series, Twofold are possibly the most ambitious — taking a sophisticated brewpub-meets-restaurant approach into high-end Parnell.
I say it’s ambitious because they’re first brewery to open in Parnell, plus the monied, restaurant and art gallery dense Parnell Road that runs from the waterfront up to Newmarket is one of those places that you strongly associate with green-bottle lagers rather than Hazy IPA.
Co-owner and brewer Bernard Neate — who built a cult reputation when he was at Alibi, winning champion brewery of New Zealand in 2021 — said opening the first brewery in Parnell was always going to be a venture into the unknown.
“It’s not been better than we expected; definitely not better. We had an idea of what we needed it to be, but in saying that, having never done anything like this, we didn’t really know what it could have been like.”
Co-owner John Austin says they’re still trying to find a “groove”.
“We’ve struggled to find much consistency or seasonality. The year-on-year months don’t make any sense at all. There’s days where it’s completely full and you can’t get in and there’s days where it’s not.”
They are operating on the site previously home to acclaimed restaurant Woodpecker Hill and before that The Bog — an Irish bar.
Austin’s introduction to the brewing industry was a Colorado brewpub called Carbondale Beerworks, which operated on a similar template as Twofold
“I just loved the idea of making the beer and selling it on-site, it was such a small, closed loop. It was an owner-brewer-operated place. He brewed one day a week and didn’t really need help. But I got a job as a server I begged him to let me help on the brewing side until he did.
“I was there eight months or so, after university, just before moving to New Zealand.”
His wife, Alice, went to university in Denver, where Austin was on the swim team. They lived in Colorado for a while before deciding to move to New Zealand.
The brewpub’s name, Twofold, reflects the fact there are two families involved in the business with the four shareholders being John and Alice Austin and Bernard and Erica Neate.
Both John and Bernard agree that starting in tough times has offered more lessons than starting when the going is easy.
What Twofold have got right is the quality of the beer. They burst on to Untappd as New Zealand’s fifth-ranked brewery (fourth-ranked, in reality, as the now-defunct Derelict are still there), which is pretty good considering they brew a lot of lager.
“The range is really diversified,” Bernard adds. “And it’s not just about the range of beers that are on tap, it’s also how they’re served. We’ve got the hand pull, we’ve got side pour taps, we’ve got the partyfaas (the 30-litre gravity keg). So, we are trying to offer a range of different beers, a range of different serving styles in different glasses.”
A dream is to be a local go-to with a bunch of regulars. That’s slowly starting to happen.
“It’s taken time, but yes, it’s starting to happen. And I don’t know if it’s potentially the craft beer crowd I thought it would have been two years ago. I’m not even sure if what a craft beer crowd looks like in Auckland at the moment,” Bernard says.
I asked the pair if they had message they’d send their younger selves?
Bernard: “I’d say buckle up. But no regrets at all. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”
No regrets at all. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.
Bernard Neate
John: “There the things that we’re working on at the moment that I think would have been great to have had as a focus from the start. Things like staff training — we’re trying to build a better way to help teach people about beer. That’s one project I wish I could have started earlier on.”
Both are optimistic for the future, especially as they’ve just gained a licence for additional outdoor seating in neighbouring Heard Park, which could be a game-changer.
Because there’s one insight they both know to be true.
Bernard: “People like drinking beer outside when it’s warm.
John: “That’s been proven.”
Bernard believes that starting at the toughest point in the industry’s recent history will leave them in good stead.
“We’ve learned, are learning. a lot from it … a hard time offers a lot to learn. You miss those learnings when it’s growth and you’re seeing good times. I think, in the future when it flicks, we will have set up the groundwork for a lot more stuff.”
John adds: “To kind of follow up on that, if we’re not having as many people through the door as we expected, it’s allowed us to focus on making sure that the people that do come through have a great time. And to focus on making sure the food’s great, the beverages, from our beer to our wine and cocktail programmes, that everything’s as good as it can be.
“It’s a goal of ours to be the local in this part of town. Yeah, we make beer here and that is a big focus, but so is the menu, the wine list and the cocktails. They’re all kind of their own little pieces of work and we want to be able to offer something for everyone.”