The theme of awards going into the bin continued with Behemoth Brewing’s triumph as the champion medium-sized brewery.
Behemoth are not shy of success and have won plenty of trophies and gold medals for individual beers over the years, but it was an emotional night for founder Andrew Childs when the result was announced.
Behemoth are not shy of success and have won plenty of trophies and gold medals for individual beers over the years, but it was an emotional night for founder Andrew Childs when the brewery was announced as Champion Medium Brewery (200,000-2 million litres) at the New Zealand Beer Awards.
“As far as I’m concerned all the rest of the awards we won can jump in the bin, compared with this one,” Childs said. “We’ve had the champion IPA a couple of times, which is awesome, but we’ve only had our own brewery for just under two years and 28 of the 30 medals we won came from here, so I’m stoked for brew team as the beer is getting better all the time.
“And the medium brewery category despite the name is a big category – it has the most entries and features some really amazing breweries.”
Childs said Behemoth was “on our way” to large brewery status (over 2m litres), currently cranking out around 1.5 million litres of beer, which represents roughly a doubling of volume since they opened the Churly’s brewpub in Mt Eden.
“All success on outside has come with lot of hard work and pain,” he said, praising his wife and business partner Hannah Miller-Childs for “holding everything together”.
“Despite Covid, we still managed to grow pretty well throughout the past two years. We’ve gone from eight staff to 50 staff in that time, so it’s pretty full on.”
The brand hopes to further expand, with new hospitality venues in other spots.
“Covid has slowed things down, but we still have plans for other hospitality venues. I won’t reveal locations yet, some are close to home, others not so close to home.”
Outside the trophy for champion medium brewery, Childs was particularly rapt with a gold medal for their Halfway Down (as in Halfway Down Dominion Road) Lager.
“Our whole brew team, including myself, love that beer. It’s also the most popular beer in the taproom and at the Titirangi venue it outsells everything else four to one.”
The beer has been so successful on tap, it’s about to go into a 330ml six-pack.
