New Zealand’s newest brewery belongs to one of our most prominent hop growers.
Cultivar Brewing, owned by Mac Hops, is taking over the site previously home to Hop Federation and will be run by hop farmer Brent McGlashan alongside his wife Ria. Former Hop Federation brewer Dean Hunter is making the beers.
The brew kit is an amalgamation of the old Hop Federation kit and one formerly owned by Whistling Sisters in Wellington. And how they came to own two brew kits is a story in itself!
“We’ve been wanting to do some brewing for a number of years — it’s always been a slow burn in the back of our minds and one of the reasons was to have a diversified farm income,” Brent explains. “Hopefully it will be an income and not a loss, eventually.”
The idea was fast-tracked when Hop Federation shut down last year and Mac Hops hired Hunter.
“Dean was looking for work and he wanted to come into hops to see what it was like on the raw material side of things. He did a summer with us and harvest, but and you could just tell his passion was in brewing. So we thought, well, let’s do a bit more investigating into this…”
They approached Hop Federation’s former owner Kono about the brew kit that was sitting in a building in Motueka after the brand and IP had been sold to DNA.
But Kono had a buyer for the kit.
“Then we found another brewery kit for sale, Whistling Sisters up in Wellington. It’s a Chris Little-built kit — it was built in the Nelson area, went over to the ditch, and now it’s come back home again.”
No sooner had they bought that kit than Kono said their deal had fallen through and asked if Mac Hops were still keen.
The hook there was that Brent was able to negotiate the lease of the building as well, saving him from building a brewery on his farm.
They have downsized and amalgamated the two kits, using the Whistling Sisters brew deck and fermenters next to the old Hop Federation canning line and keg washer.
They will sell the remaining Hop Federation kit along with some other bits and pieces.
“We weren’t expecting to buy two breweries, but when the opportunity’s there and you’ve got a brewery in place, it’s certainly a hell of a lot easier to set things up.
“Ultimately, we would have loved to have the brewery on the farm, but that would be two or three years down the line in terms of planning and putting a building up, which we couldn’t afford right now anyway.”
Brent sees the brewery as a natural extension of hop growing.
“We sell our hops all around the world to brewers who are doing great stuff and winning medals across the globe, and it’d be nice just to showcase some of our stuff here to the locals and get a community thing going.
“It also gives you a bit confidence when you go into the marketplace and you’re talking to people about what different hops do in a brew.
“Ultimately we would like to have our own tap room at some stage because that’s how we want to tell our story — through our area, through our heritage and through our beer.
“We’re pretty bloody excited. There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there but we try to look past those things and just go, ‘bugger it, this is something we want to do’.”
The first beers are already in fermenters.