It all started when four friends, Mario, Warren, Evarn and Harry, decided to brew some beer together for fun. It soon got serious, leading to them building a brew bar in Miramar, just down the road from Weta, in 2018. Cash-poor, they did a lot of the work themselves. Things went well, and they expanded into the building next door. Still cash-poor, they threw their bodies at the work involved to clean up that space to set up a packaging line and storage for Double Vision Brewing.
Mario says it’s been a fun challenge for them, scaling up, building everything, while keeping a great team environment. Things have gotten busy (“the fastest way to ruin a fun time brewing is to get packaging,” Warren says), but Mario sees things settling down a little. He’s keen to get the pilot kit back in action and get the other staff involved on the brewing side. “That’s the fun part, right? Otherwise, it’s just another hazy, another hazy, another hazy, bro … Keep the chaos going, eh,” he says, followed by a slightly maniacal laugh.
Brewing a batch of Chillax the day I visit is Emma Bell. She has been at DVB for four years after becoming a brewer by accident. Initially trained in broadcast and theatre lighting and sound, she worked in Canada for many years. Upon returning to New Zealand she didn’t have many contacts in the theatre scene, so was applying for everything and getting turned down a lot. “And one of the everything’s I applied for was an assistant brewer role at Kereru. As a throw away.”
She had done some odd work for a brewery in Canada but thought “…like, obviously, they want some beardy home brew guy”. But they offered Emma the job, and then, over time, she went from assistant brewer to brewer to having an assistant.
After a few years of the daily trip to Kereru in Upper Hutt from her home in Wellington city, the Double Vision boys approached Emma to see if she was bored of the commute yet. “Haha. I was. So yeah.” As well as brewing today, Emma is sanitising tanks and carbonating beer. “It’s a whole lot of plates spinning and juggling.” As I work the angles taking photos of the action, Mario comments, “It’s almost like you’re National Geographic, filming the animals, eh? Brewers in their natural habitat.”
Meanwhile, Mario is struggling to pour a giant bag of apple juice concentrate into a tank of their cider. He rigs up a system using a couple of half pallets and a giant jug.
“Did you manage to snap a pallet in half?” Emma asks.
“I just grabbed these two.” On perfect comedic cue one of the packaging crew pops around the corner. “Ah, the brewers stole my half pallets.” Much laughter. Mario negotiates their use for another five minutes.
Joviality and banter seem to be a key feature of the brewery. Emma jokingly complains that everything in the brewery was designed for a six-foot-tall man. “Stepladders fuckin’ everywhere,” says Mario. Maybe the next expansion will include some shrinking.