Duncan’s Brewing broke a big(ger) brewery stranglehold and surprised themselves with a “weird” winning feeling at the Smith’s NZ IPA Challenge in Queenstown on June 21.
After Good George and Parrotdog had each won back-to-back titles in an event that sees 31 breweries putting up their best NZ-hopped IPAs, Duncan’s — a brewery more often associated with ice cream sours and pastry stouts — won the top prize ahead of Bach Brewing and 8 Wired. Parrotdog took out the People’s Choice Award.
“It was pretty unexpected,” said owner-founder George Duncan. “And kind of weird. As you know, we don’t exactly specialise in IPAs. So it’s a real good win for us.
“We do brew IPAs but we do a lot of other stuff whereas other breweries, their mainstay is IPA. So yeah, it was definitely a shock.”
George noted that “because of what we do” — crazy, genre-bending beers — winning competitions is usually outside their experience.
“But at the same time I was really, really pleased with the beer.
“Our brewer, Evan Currie, did an excellent job of executing that beer. The recipe is actually very similar to what we brewed for our fresh hop this year, and we just tweaked the recipe from fresh hop to pellets and we were super-stoked how that came out.”
Like their excellent fresh hop beer, Return of Kem, this one, Research Kemicle, employed a “dynamic” hop duo of Eggers Special and Riwaka.
The use of the name “Kem” is a tribute to Kem Eggers of Eggers hops.
“We get all our New Zealand hops from Eggers hop farm. And Kem is an absolute character,” George said.
“You can’t go wrong with those hops,” he added. “Riwaka in the whirlpool and Eggers Special in the dry hop.”
Eggers Special is a relative of Riwaka, bred by the team at Eggers Hops.
“Eggers Special is like this perfect blend of Riwaka and old-world European style hops. You get elements of the tropical passionfruit that you get with Riwaka but then you get this underlying deeper tone to it. It’s just a bit more dynamic.
“With Eggers Special, you get a lot more of these spicy, citrusy notes coming through, as well as that classic tropical.”
Research Kemicle was released yesterday in 440ml cans and George is ruing the fact he didn’t put any of it in kegs. He figured with 31 beers brewed for the Smith’s NZ IPA Challenge there’d be too many kegs of NZ-hopped IPA on the market.
“Plus, we were not expecting to win. And then you win and you’re like ‘oh God we could have sold like a whole freaking batch of kegs’.”