Pacific Coast — the Mangawhai brewery that opened last year to great fanfare — is in liquidation.
It’s a little bit complicated because the business that went into liquidation is called Vanderlay Industries and it owns the brewery/production side of the Pacific Coast business.
Vanderlay Industries — owned by Adam Booth — was put into liquidation last Friday after an application to the High Court by the Commissioner of Inland Revenue.
However, Pacific Coast Beverages, which is the trading arm of the business, and Vanderlay Hospo, the taproom side of the business, are not in liquidation and continue to operate.
Pacific Coast posted the following to Facebook this week:
With the brewery now in the hands of liquidators KPMG, both brewer Sam Williamson and marketing & sales manager Matt Eats lost their jobs. The taproom and website continue to trade, selling what beer is left in tanks.
I spoke to brewer Sam Williamson in the wake of the announcement.
“No real shitty thing has happened, just a slow grind to nothing. We knew we weren’t doing well, but we did think we had seen the worst and had high hopes for this coming summer.
“We just couldn’t get momentum quick enough before the crunch bit. We gave it a red-hot crack; built a beautiful brewery from scratch, it was efficient and could make great beer and was a dream to brew with.
“Matt Eats came on board and he really aligned all our branding excellently and quickly grew our reach with his effusive and passionate style of business. We had all of our COGS sorted and analysed. It should have worked, really, except for the volume. We were on lots of shelves but consumers don’t have the expendable cash to buy it. I feel our main flaw was that we didn’t get our taproom going quick enough. We started with the factory and were chasing low-margin sales for too long.
“A real shame that we didn’t scrape through to summer as I had just unlocked a few tricks in our processes last month that would’ve taken our beer quality up a few notches.
“I’m lucky to be able to look back on the project as an amazing experience. Walking onto a paddock three years ago, building a brewery to a high specification, having time to have well thought-through floor drains! Contributing to the brand creation and controlling recipe development. Brewing some delicious beer. Beach Break, our 4% Pilsner, was a real highlight — winning the Rising Tide Lagerfest and making the Highly Recommended list at the New World Beer Awards. A great opportunity to implement some contemporary ingredients and processes that have only come to light over the last five years.
“For instance, I developed a real passion for biotransformation (using it as a broad word here, encompassing a few different processes), which came through in most of our products as a tropical but clean juiciness.”
Matt Eats said the brewery “executed our plan really well” but bumped up against forces that couldn’t be controlled, notably excise tax and contracted, or tied, taps.
“Excise tax is a huge issue, tying excise to inflation and with no relief for smaller producers is crushing the industry.”
Matt’s point is that large breweries can absorb the cost of excise more easily than small breweries and he noted that Lion-owned Mac’s were selling six-packs of gateway craft for around $13 recently, “which is below our liquid production costs”.
“And the fact that around 90 per cent of taps are locked out to the wider industry is a real detriment to the scene as a whole. We have so many great producers making fantastic products and the fact they are locked out of 90 per cent of the [on premise] market is brutal.
“I came back from a trip overseas recently and I was really proud of the New Zealand beer industry — it should be a real success story but the lack of government support is crushing the industry.
“Small breweries employ significantly more people per litre of beer brewed than big breweries and the help drive tourism as well.”