It’s a magical drive into Karamu Barrelworks on Daryl Bryant’s rural Waikato lifestyle block. The morning light softly filters through the trees he and his wife Lynette planted when they first moved onto the property. Vision, a bit of hard graft, followed by time has produced many beautiful things here. The gardens are serene. Bonsai trees sit outside the dining room window. The brewery buildings were all hand-built by Daryl using 16th century European techniques, mostly with hand tools. The blue gum cladding has silvered to blend naturally into the surroundings.
Daryl follows a similar process to make beer. Start with classic styles, add a bit of experimentation, and then time, up to three years in barrels. There is a cuckoo clock in one of the barrel rooms. “I figure that time is important in this process, and if you’re not measuring it you can’t be sure it’s happening.”
Daryl makes the kinds of beer he likes drinking. Saisons and spontaneously-fermented Belgian-style beers. He traces his fascination with these back to swapping home-made ginger beers at primary school. “This one kid brought along ginger beer… and it was just completely different to what anyone else was making. Ours was really sweet and syrupy but his was as dry as a bone, absolutely dry. And super fizzy, like a champagne. I just instantly fell in love with it. And that was as a 7- or 8 year-old. I’ve just had a taste for that sort of thing ever since. And that’s why this is along the same sort of lines.”
The second epiphany was trying a Berliner Weisse in San Francisco. “The light just suddenly turned on, there’s a whole other world of beer, not depending on bitterness to provide a backbone to the beer. It uses sourness.”
Daryl brews multiple small batches on brew days in the winter. Most lambic-style breweries then transfer the wort to a coolship overnight inoculation by wild yeasts in the air. To save having to use a pump Daryl cools his beer in a large collection of buckets. “I call it a cool fleet rather than a ship.” He then pours these buckets into larger drums for an initial fermentation over a day or two before being transferred into oak barrels. This gives him peace of mind that he has actually captured wild yeasts, and also gets rid of some of the spent yeast.
Today is time for a tasting. After the beer has spent at least a year in the barrel Daryl regularly tastes them, rating the contents of each on acid, esters, funk, and clarity. This helps him decide where it could go. Maybe directly onto fruit, or into one of three stainless tanks to be put on fruit later. He has hundreds of kilos of local peaches in the freezer ready to be used, and also uses local figs, cherries, other stonefruit, and berries. The most-promising beers might be kept in the barrel for longer
We also taste some of his finished beers. They are all excellent. Tart, complex, refreshing, and would be great food matches. Seek them out and be rewarded. Time, with a guiding hand from Daryl, has created something beautiful and magical.
As a bonus the beers are also great value. “My mother says I’m not a brewer, I’m a philanthropist. Because I sell beer for less than it costs to make it.”
