18 January, 2024: Jason Bathgate, head brewer at McLeod’s Brewery in Waipu, Northland, has pre-warned me there may be chaos. He’s back at work after a bout of Covid and there is a long list of jobs for him and his crew to catch up on. Thomas, his assistant brewer, is brewing a batch of Mount Lion IPA, and cellar hands Knox and Kieran are busy cleaning and filling kegs.
Jason’s first task is transferring a beer to a bright tank via their centrifuge. Jason is always looking for ways to improve beer quality. Using a centrifuge to remove solids from the beer has helped. He also wages a constant battle against the introduction of oxygen into the beer. He points out a little oxygen meter on the line. “Eight parts per million. Call that a win… Get those little buggers out of there. I like to breathe ’em but hate ’em in my beer.”
Jason has been at McLeod’s for eight years now, and both production volumes and reverence for their beer have grown significantly over that time. The brewery expanded in 2019, with the brew house doubling in size to 2500 litres and bigger fermenters installed. More fermenters have been added since, including two 8000-litre tanks for Longboarder Lager, their most popular beer. “It’s Longboarder, Longboarder, Longboarder,” jokes Jason, about their production schedule. One of the big tanks is filled every few weeks to keep up with demand.
While Longboarder is most popular, it’s their New England IPA, 802, that is most sought-after by beer lovers. 802 is the area code for Vermont, Jason’s original home, and the birthplace of New England IPA. Jason brews a new version every month, each showcasing a different combination of hops. This month, number 56, it’s Talus and Nelson Sauvin and today is dry-hopping day. A phenomenal number of bags of hop pellets is at the ready. Jason starts loading them into a device connected to a port on top of the fermenter. After purging the oxygen from it with CO2 and then pressurising it, a hatch is opened and the hops drop directly into the tank. This way “we don’t have to worry about purging the headspace or any oxygen ingress during our dry-hopping. Safer as well, because those geysers happen quite often, when you dry-hop beer and it’s slightly warm, it just erupts through the top. We’ve had a couple of those… We came up with this idea based on some things I’ve seen in the States.”
“I love the smell of this hop, Talus. It’s like sage and rose petals and pink grapefruit. It’s beautiful. Just super fragrant, absolute floral. I’m trying to pair it up with some of that dankness from the Nelson. Haven’t tried it yet so we’ll see whether it works.”
Adding the hops takes over 20 minutes. I try to capture the process from a few different angles and then the last empty bag is thrown down from the platform. Suddenly Thomas appears from behind me with more bags.
“More hops! Holy shit”.
“Yeah, this one gets the most,” Thomas says.
“That’s what makes it the 802,” says Jason.
Jason empties the last few bags. “And that’s three thousand dollars’ worth of hops.”
Although they are most well-known for their hoppy pale ales, IPAs and lagers, Jason loves brewing traditional English and German styles too, but not as often as he’d like, only maybe once a year. “I don’t know if the customer wants them or not but I’m like, what are they gonna do, we wanna drink ’em.” They made a best bitter last year that was so popular with the local English ex-pats they had to brew it again and put it on the handpull.”
Thomas has been at McLeod’s for 18 months, after seven years at Lion in Auckland. It’s been an exciting change for him, getting more hands-on at McLeod’s. Jason told him when he started “that’s digital, and now you’re in analog.”
“At Lion it was tell the computer: ‘make me the beer’.” Every now and then he asks a question about something and Jason gives him a thorough answer. Jason likes training his staff so they know how to do each other’s jobs and help each other out.
“It ain’t easy, it’s exhausting getting there,” but it takes the pressure off and means it not such a big deal when someone is sick or on holiday.
The brewery is kept clean and tidy too. Jason is meticulous and expects everyone else to be too. I ask if it was his original job as a chef that made him so tidy and organised.
“Um, no it’s having a brother… I know that if I had my stuff in a place that I knew where it was, I could tell when he took my shit. So it started then, and… I haven’t let go of it.
“What I did take from being a chef, it’s clean, clean, clean. It’s pretty clean overall, but it can always be better, ya know”
As we wind down with a beer at the end of the day I joke, “Considering you were warning me of chaos, it’s been pretty good.”
“Yeah, well, it’s organised chaos. Everyone does good.” He says, obviously proud of the team he’s put together.