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Winner of the 2021 Brewers Guild Awards Fruit & Flavoured category, this scintillatingly ruby sour (5.3 per cent) is brewed with blackberries, boysenberries and raspberries.  The aroma is equal parts freshly reduced jam and mixed berry yoghurt, with the deep and lush fruit ripeness meshing perfectly with the tart undercurrent.  The palate begins with a flush of sweet red berry sorbet, before pivoting into drying champagne sharpness, with just a touch of fresh yeast character on the finish.  A delightful sour with enough heft to carry the weighty berry-fruit flavours, but a masterful agility on the palate that ensures no one note lingers for too long.

Instagratification: Dusty’s Favourites

Photographer, beer-lover and Instagram influencer Dusty, picks his highlights from the latest releases. Urbanaut La Grande Urbanaut brewing slay the summer game here with their 4.8% La Grande lager with lime. Classic Saaz & trad Czech malt set up one crushable...

The Generation Game — Mount Brewing At 30

For Briar Harley, born into the brewery life, there’s plenty of excitement in sharing the news that come June a third generation will born into the Mount Brewing family. Briar and husband Niall, who own Mount Brewing in partnership with her parents Glenn and Virginia...

Boneface Knuckle Duster West Coast Pilsner

The ‘West Coast Pilsner’ style continues to wander through the craft beer labyrinth somewhat without a bearing, and drift further from its (admittedly flawed from the beginning) descriptor in the process.  It’s as much as I can do to classify them as ‘good ones’ vs...

Bach Skinnay Ultra Low Carb Hazy Pale Ale

While low carb beers are bigger than they’ve ever been, it’s still uncommon to see the styles range too far from the lager safe-zone.  You’ll find a few zero% hazy IPA’s, but an actual low-carb-full-strength example is rarer.   Never idle for long,...

Eruption Brewing — Lyttelton’s Local Legend

To understand Eruption Brewing’s place in Lyttelton, it helps to zoom out — first a couple of centuries, then a few million years. The town sits inside the remnants of the Banks Peninsula volcano, long extinct but still shaping the landscape and, fittingly, inspiring...

Epic Stout

While not to say that Epic is a total stranger to dark beer (they’ve made some extremely good ones over the years) it would be fair to say that it wasn’t exactly the style they’re known for.  So it was a surprise to see this one show up (and slickly presented too, I...