Jody Thomas has a beer CV that could fill this website from back to front but her new job as the one and only brewer at Alibi on Waiheke Island is almost like starting over.
Thomas has worked in breweries up and down New Zealand as well as in Sydney, Geelong and Adelaide — all under the Lion umbrella — returning home to New Zealand in the Covid aftermath with her husband Ben and family.
Thomas started on her beer journey when she was at Washington State University on rowing scholarship around 20 years ago.
She started rowing at the famed Wairau club in Blenheim and was good enough to earn national honours in age group crews — pairs and fours.
“I think I was one of the youngest junior rowers selected for the under-18 team. And when I got selected at under-23 level, they [Rowing NZ] wanted everyone to move to Cambridge.
“And I was conflicted around that because my degree was everything and I didn’t want to move. And it was just such a big deal for someone from my family to go to university, because no one in my family had done that.”
A friend suggested she apply for a scholarship to an American university so she could row and study, but that meant giving up on rowing for New Zealand.

Her degree was in genetics and microbiology and she wrote an honours paper on sulphur metabolism pathways in brewing yeast.
“It was the Pacfific Northwest at the turn of the century — around 2002 to 2006 — so, you know, craft beer was massive.
“And I got to a point in my career, my university studies where I thought ‘where am I going with this?’ I love science but I couldn’t see myself in a lab environment. And you start to think ‘what’s an applied science?’ And brewing was something I was really interested in.”
But back then the question was: how do you even start?.
Part of the Pride at Lion
She applied to the Lion graduate programme and when she landed back in New Zealand it “was just bizarre because no one wanted to be a brewer. Everyone was like, ‘I want to be in marketing or sales’.”
The Lion team put her in touch with Colin Paige who was then brewing at the Mac’s brewbar on the waterfront in Wellington.
“And so I had an interview with Colin Paige and he’s so great because he’s so unconventional in many ways. He just said to me in the interview, ‘you’re not expecting something really professional are you?’
“Then he goes, ‘what’s your favourite beer?’ And I was like, ‘oh, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale’.
I didn’t know it but that was the right answer — but it was just a beer that I really loved. I think it’s the last beer I had at San Francisco Airport before I came home.”
Her apprenticeship started at Mac’s and soon she was at Speight’s in Dunedin where she experienced a culture shift — “there lots of older gentlemen working there,” she says with a laugh. “That was quite fun, but, a little bit different.”
After that it was back to Lion’s now-gone Khyber Pass brewery where she was one of the team leaders who helped Lion transition to The Pride in East Tamaki.
“There were lots of lessons there around managing chaos.”
Next stop was Sydney where she worked in the new product development team followed by stints at Toohey, West End in Adelaide, a brewery that made all the Guinness for Australia.
Across the border to Victoria, she joined the Little Creatures team in Geelong as head brewer and site leader.
Just before Covid hit, Thomas had her first child, a boy born a week before they closed the borders in Australia.
“So that was a very strange time for us because I think we’d been in Geelong for about 18 months and a lot of that was focused on work, so we didn’t have a massive support structure around us. It was just me and my husband and our little baby.
“It was lovely but it was also a very strange time when you think about it. We’d put the television on so that my son could see other faces at some point. And when we did start to meet other young children, my son would freak out a bit.”
There was an inkling to come home at that point, and Thomas got offered a job back in Auckland focused on trying to bring all Lion’s satellite breweries — Speight’s, Emerson’s, The Fermentist, Harrington’s and Little Creatures under one roof in terms of operating systems.
“They were operating completely separately, with different accounting systems, different reporting systems and different suppliers. And they just wanted to simplify some of that baseline stuff so there wasn’t duplication.”
Before too long, The Fermentist closed, production at Harrington’s moved off-site. She was on maternity leave with her second child, living on Waiheke Island, when Lion ceased production at Little Creatures in Hobsonville.
“So when I went back to work, I was like, ‘guys, what’s my job?’.”
Lion were thinking the same thing and Thomas took redundancy.
Time to do Something Different
“They were just under pressure and, you know, some people fall by the wayside, but on the upside, I’d been there for so long, it was totally time for me to do something different.”
Part of her redundancy package was an interview with a careers advisor and during that came the realisation she preferred hands-on work.
“So you go from a role, which is just making red dots turn green and you’re in meetings all the time and now there’s something quite nice about just putting on my work boots, turning on the boiler on and trying to produce the best beer that you can. It’s just refreshing.”
And so we come to a woman with this huge amount of experience moving to what feels like a small brewery on a lovely island … except that small brewery had built a cult following thanks to the work of previous brewer Bernard Neate, who left at the start of the year to start his own business with Twofold in Parnell.
Neate’s incredible brewing talent had earned Alibi the Champion NZ Brewery crown at the 2021 NZ Beer Awards and his beer had developed a cult following off the island.

As Thomas describes it, being overseas, being on maternity leave, working in the corporate world, she wasn’t “tuned into the cult profile Alibi had”.
She soon found out.
“I think I had some awareness of Bernard’s success, but I didn’t realise that there was this deep indie culture.
“And it probably only dawned on me, like, maybe six or seven or eight weeks into the job, that there was this thing going on … and I was like, oh, shit.
“I was getting people going, ‘oh, she’s not as good at Bernard’.
“You don’t want to disappoint anyone and you don’t want to let any customers down, or you don’t want people to feel like the status has slipped or anything like that.
“The challenge is to keep everyone excited about Alibi and to keep standards high.
“Those people care a lot. And they have a big voice but it’s also about trying to maintain perspective because the most profitable times we have here are when we have a big wedding and they come in and drink a low ABV lager.”
After a hustle-bustle career with Lion, what she’s loving most is the pace of life on Waiheke. The ability to pick her children up from kindy, work flexible hours and work in one of the most beautiful spots in New Zealand with Alibi set in amongst the vineyards of Tantalus Estate,
“It’s quite a thing. It’s one of the most amazing spots in New Zealand.”
In that sense, Thomas has certainly landed on her boot-clad feet.