Garage Project
Garage Project launched in 2011 with 24/24 — a project through which they released 24 different beers over 24 weeks at Wellington craft beer bar Hashigo Zake. That early cult following allowed them to to set up in an old petrol station on Aro Street, Wellington. Since then they have expanded on the site, added a second wild ferment and barrel-aging facility known as the Wild Workshop in nearby Marion St and were also a foundation client at Napier’s bStudio where most of their core range beers are brewed. They have been one of New Zealand’s (and possibly the world’s) most inventive breweries, experimenting with almost any ingredient that comes their way, as well as applying techniques usually associated with the avant-garde food movement to create beer.
They celebrated their 10th anniversary by picking up New Zealand’s champion large brewery title at the New Zealand Beer Awards in 2021 and repeated that triumph in 2022, as well as claiming the Champion Beer with Chance, Luck & Magic, a blend of three years’ worth of spontaneously fermented ale.
They have a cellar door at their original site, a taproom across the road at 91 Aro Street and another tap room in Kingsland, Auckland.
Their spirit of ingenuity, their experimentation and their continual questioning of the status quo is to be admired. Just as the culinary world needs progressive chefs, so the brewing world needs Garage Project. Their beers never fail to elicit a response (which ranges from rapture to horror to pious indignation); their philosophy will filter down and gradually change our notions of what is and what isn’t beer.
Most famous for: Pernicious Weed, a New Zealand-hopped (Nelson Sauvin, Rakau) double IPA (8.5% ABV).