For a few days in June, Dylan Adams thought he was cursed.
He’d lost his job as lead brewer when Deep Creek went into liquidation last year. He soon picked up a new gig, as head brewer at Brothers Beer — but 11 months later he was looking at unemployment again when that brewery went into liquidation.
“When it started to look like it might happen again, I thought: ‘I’m cursed’,” Adams tells me over a glass of Brothers Beer pilsner.
“Two liquidations might be a record and it’s not an honour I particularly wanted.”
Adams joined Brothers Beer shortly after they’d gone into voluntary administration after hitting a fiscal wall, but the company was successfully restructured, for a while.
“When Brothers hired me it was looking good and it felt like a cool opportunity to work with someone who had come out the other side, so when they went into liquidation I was like: ‘f** not again’.
“It was stressful for three weeks. ‘Do we have jobs? What’s going to happen?’ There was a lot of anxiety and not a lot of sleep.”
Fortunately, a buyer stepped up in the shape of a China-based craft beer distributor that wanted to keep Brothers alive because it was the first New Zealand brewery they’d imported.
“They felt an emotional attachment and didn’t want to see it close.”
After the heartache and anxiety of a potential second liquidation, Adams is delighted with how things have turned out, with the new owners investing heavily in new equipment.
“I’d identified some inefficiencies in the brewery and said: ‘if you can give me $25K for a bit of kit I can cut your CO2 cost in half’. The amount of CO2 we were going through was criminal and all because we didn’t have a pump to clean a brite tank under pressure. That will save us 700 to 800 bucks a week.”
He’s also getting an augur, two yeast propagators and new fermenters which will increase the capacity of the Mt Eden brewery.
“It’s like Christmas. I say ‘these are the things I want’, and they say give us the specs.
“Propagators were the big one I missed from Deep Creek. Instead of using dried yeast because it’s cheap you can use good liquid yeast from Froth Tech.”
The new owners are keen on high-ABV beers and lots of New Zealand hops, Adams said.
“For the export orders they have sent me clear notes on what they expect from the beers. Like ‘this hazy should be big and hoppy and not too sweet’ and that aligns with what I was going to do anyway.
“They love high ABV – I have to do a couple of triple IPAs. One of them they want is an 11% hazy, and that’s right on the edge of what the yeast wants to do and it can take up to 30 daye to ferment right out.
“They’re after big IPAs, thick orange hazies, and big hoppy New Zealand-style pilsners.
“Most are beers we make or have made in the past: Martin Scores Hazy, Kapow!, Wax On Wax Off, Fear And Loathing.”
Adams believes Brothers is now a sustainable and strong business, noting the liquidation was the result of a “technical” sin rather than a deep financial problem.
“The debt wasn’t that high — it was less than 1/10th of Deep Creek’s. I think we violated a condition of the administration, not by much. We never had any trouble paying for anything and the business had been running quite well — we had record months over the summer and we were struggling to keep up with production demand.”
The news that Brothers had been saved came just as Adams was flying down to Queenstown for the Smith’s NZIPA Challenge.
“I was taken aback by how much support there was for us down in Queenstown, people were really happy to see we were still alive.”
Adams came to brewing from bartending.
He used to work at Sale Street, now Sweatshop Brew Kitchen, where the brewer was the late Mike Stimpson.
When Mike was thinking about leaving to take up a job at McLeod’s, he took Adams aside.
“He told me: ‘you’re the only person who talks to me about what I do, do you want to learn to brew?’ And I was getting too old to be a bartender, so I said yes. When he left, I was waiting for them to make me the brewer but they said I didn’t have enough experience, which was fair enough.”
He applied for various other brewing jobs without much luck. A chance meeting with Scott Taylor from Deep Creek changed things.
“I bumped into Scott and told him I was having a bit of trouble finding work because I was applying for jobs I didn’t have enough experience for.
“And Deep Creek were losing their sole brewer and sole cellar hand and Scott said if I wanted a job in brewing to get up there to Silverdale and apply … I did that, and by the time I got home I had a job offer.”
He was brewery assistant for a couple of months and quickly transitioned to lead brewer, and said working with head brewer Hamish Ward there was the best qualification he could hope for.
“One of the main things I learned from Hamish, who was a master at it, was balance. I like to get the hop character to be big but drinkable.”
And after a roller-coaster year, let’s hope there’s some prolonged balance in his career!