The win by No 19 Brewing in the NZ Stout Challenge on July 11 in Christchurch has a direct connection to one of the country’s most celebrated but short-lived breweries: the newcomers are creating their beer on the brew kit once owned by Derelict.
No 19 Brewing are Craig Monkman and Alun Davies — neighbours in the Christchurch suburb of Marshland.
Craig and his wife Debs came to New Zealand from Chelmsford in the UK, while Wales-born Davies gave up a career as a ski instructor to follow his wife to New Zealand.
They met when Alun moved in next door to Craig a few years ago but the spur for their brewing dream was the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Craig explains: “Al had his in-laws staying with them from the UK. I had my dad staying with us from the UK. And then we went in lockdown and the parents were stuck and everyone was climbing the walls.
“One Sunday, we thought it’d be a really good idea to cut the fence in half and build a drop-down bar.”
Shortly after that Alun decided to give homebrewing a go as Covid lingered and life slowed down.
“I went down the local homebrew shop and bought a couple of the buckets, as you do. And it just escalated. It escalated extremely quickly to be honest,” Alun says.
“Craig started buying a bunch of equipment. I started DIY-ing a bunch of equipment. And before you knew it, we were constantly spitting out beers for the bar and the wives were getting really bored of us talking about it.
“At one point then my wife Caz said ‘look, why don’t you stop talking about it and just start doing something with this, just start selling it and see if you can make something out of it’.
“Well, that’s the green flag, isn’t it?”
They called the brewery No 19 as it was born from the bar they built on April 19th during the first Covid-19 lockdown and also because their properties back on to the Waitikiri Golf Club, “so it’s a sort of 19th hole too”, says Alun.
The Derelict connection
Just as they were thinking about going pro, Derelict, the North Canterbury-based brewery that was the No 1 Kiwi brewery on Untappd for a number of years, suddenly decided to call it day and owner Sam Cottier put his equipment up for sale.
Craig and Alun pounced.
“We were going to aim smaller, maybe just get a couple of [Grainfather] G70s or the Brewtools B100, and then Sam’s kit came online. That’s when it escalated extremely quickly,” Alun says. “Thankfully, Craig was able to move the caravan out of the garage and we jammed this whole brewery into the side of the garage.”
They have a 500L mash tun, 400L brew kettle, another kettle they use as whirlpool and three fermenters: 400L, and two 250L. They also do smaller brews on the Grainfather system.
From buying the kit to going commercial there was a long lead time of nearly a year as they got all the licences they needed, complied with food safety standards and dealt with waste.
In that time they did lots of testing on the big kit which proved invaluable as they soon found out they needed a bit more help than YouTube videos.
Craig: “There was a fair bit of beer going down the drain. Some beers were pretty good, and other ones were just really inconsistent.”
Alun had done some work with ChinChiller and their former brewer, now at Renaissance, Jared Stewart, helped them out and he advised them to sign up with Steve “Hendo” Henderson’s Rockstar Brewing Academy.
“It’s very process-orientated, so it’s a way of just ironing out all of the variables and getting things constant,” Alun says. “A lot of the problems we were having were when we would brew a beer and it’d be great, and then we’d brew it a second time and it had changed and we didn’t understand what was different.
“Online all these people have got all these ideas and it’s hard to know where that source of truth is. So with Hendo’s course you’re essentially creating the process. We’re able to go, ‘this is right, that’s wrong’ and just tick boxes and have this accountability back to ourselves each time.
“So it’s gone into this very methodical thing now, which is so different to home brewing.”
They sold first commercial beer in Dunedin Beer Festival last year and got a great boost when the legendary Richard Emerson took a shine to their mild and was sending people to their stand.
They spent the summer chasing festivals but have also found time to get some beer in cans and they can be found on tap at many of the best venues in Christchurch.
‘Don’t Want to embarrass ourselves’
The stout challenge was a next level event for them — the first major event where they pitched themselves against other breweries.
“We went into that basically just saying, ‘we don’t want to embarrass ourselves’. And it turns out we didn’t,” Alun says.
The winning beer, After Dark, was created in unusual circumstances, being a blend of two separate beers. They had a chocolate, coconut and vanilla pastry stout that came out at 10.5% ABV and the competition had a 10% cap.
So they started testing blends of that beer with a double stout they’d recently brewed, playing around with proportions to get the ABV down.
Craig: “It turned out that every time we did it, it kept coming back to this sweet spot at around 8.7% where the vanilla wasn’t overly sweet or sickly.”
As a result there was only one keg of After Dark and it’s now gone — likely to never be repeated, although they have the data to do it again.
What’s next for the fledgling brewery?
Both Craig and Alun are employed fulltime in other work: Craig in project management and Alun in web design. They know they could fit more fermenters into Craig’s garage but they are happy to stay small and, for now, unprofitable.
“Effectively we’re doing this unpaid because it’s basically just paying for itself,” Craig says.
Although they now have a fancy road cone trophy — which is close to priceless.
Alun adds: “We don’t have ambitions to become a huge brewery overnight. For now, the aim is to keep improving, get our beer into more people’s hands and gradually build No.19 into a small brewery with a reputation for making consistently good beer. Winning the Stout Challenge has given us confidence that we’re heading in the right direction, and we intend to continue on that trajectory.”