The year is 1850-something. Karl Marx, Edgar Bauer, and Wilhelm Liebknecht are on a pub crawl down London’s Tottenham Court Road. In one public house, by now full of ale, they clash with the fraternal order of Odd Fellows. The clash turns to high jinks on the streets, and they flee, unsuccessfully pursued by police.
The year is 2004. The scene is a sprawling but somewhat shabby 1920’s villa on a hill looking over Wellington city. The house is full of arts and crafts movement interior detailing, varnished dado panelling and carved balustrades. There is a flatmate’s pirate radio station in the attic, and my first home brewery sits under the stairs. A friend is staring at me over his Lion Brown and accusing me of being elitist and a class traitor for thinking beer should be something more than sweet, grainy and brown. I would retort by quoting Stuart Maconie who exclaims in prose form “only the finest will do for the working class” whenever he writes of sitting down to sumptuous meals followed by indulgent single malts. I would, but I haven’t read Maconie yet, indeed he has only just started writing books. Between gulps of Bookbinder I say something along the same lines but probably less eloquent and certainly less bombastic.
The year is 2023. A strange young man is working for me in the brewery. His taste in music could not be further from mine, and it is causing tension. He tells me he will only listen to music that reaches the upper echelons of the charts. He says, “if music is liked by millions of people, it is good, if it isn’t on the charts there is no point listening to it”. I wonder why he is working in a brewery that is producing 90,000 litres a year. Surely, he should be working at The Pride, or DB Waitemata not here in the niche back-catalogue of an avant garde noise band.
The year is 2026. As is customary for the time, the following exchange occurs over handheld devices connected by electronic wizardry that we charmingly still refer to as phones. I tell a friend I am launching my new brewing enterprise at Winter Ales Festival and Bruxelles Oamaru. He responds that he wouldn’t be there as he “actively spurned anything with the slightest hint of exclusivity”. He continues that he would only attend events that had a door charge available to anyone off the street to walk up to. I say that I hope he sells his Beervana ticket if the session sells out. He suggests I am being extreme. I of course most certainly am. I didn’t pay my first-year philosophy tuition fees for nothing.
It is a suitably cold and stormy Wellington winter’s night. The loft venue Whisky and Wood are hosting Winter Ales Fest 2026. The room has a warm hum of conversation. The beers are as varied as the attendees. Tables fill half the room and couches line one end. I show a friend a photo of us working in the kitchen catering the very first Winter Ales Festival. A baby born that night could now be behind the bike shed, surreptitiously downing cans of beer pinched from parental fridges. They could, but I hear the youth are more interested in less toxic pursuits these days. The degeneracy of the generations. The festival is small, and perhaps that necessarily means it is exclusive, but it is not elitist. I muse that the difference is a fine line.
Oamaru has put on its Sunday best for us. The sun is setting over the alps and is catching the clouds, setting them alight with glorious flaming reds set against the over ripe blue of the heavens. The spectacle is a Salvador Dali painting animated to reality. Beneath the spectacle of the natural world sits one from the realm of human endeavour. Cobbled streets of ornate Victorian white stone have weathered 150 years of southern ocean storms and Kiwi lust for the wrecking ball. Within two of the old buildings Bruxelles Oamaru is in full swing. It is like there is a portal from the sleepy southern town straight into the back streets of Brussels. Goblets of oaky spontaneous ale, various tart, fruited concoctions, lemon-flavoured blonde ales, saison and even a Belgian stout are drunk, discussed and enjoyed. This is the sharp end of the niche wedge. If one were after a Lion Brown one would be disappointed. That said the night before the festival The Criterion around the corner was doing a brisk trade in pints of Bookbinder doled out to the festival goers as they rolled into town.
And here at the end of the column, I should deliver some profound or controversial conclusion. But the truth is I have been thinking about the tension between big beer and small, niche beer and beer for all, for a quarter of a century and I am yet to find my punchline. I might pour something rare and old from the cellar, mutter to the dog “only the finest for the working class!” and think upon it some more.