New Plymouth brewery Three Sisters is expanding into Wellington, taking over the site that was once home to Black Dog brewery in Blair Street.
It’s a massive step for a small provincial brewery but comes with the support of their shareholders and off the back of a hugely successful year in which revenue has grown extraordinarily.
The venue is currently home to a Mexican restaurant and Three Sisters owner Joe Emans says they hope to open the Three Sisters bar in mid-January, 2026.
They are the second New Plymouth brewery to expand beyond Taranaki after Shining Peak opened a taproom in the Sumner Post Office in Christchurch last year.
“We’d been keen on more venues for a little while,” Emans said, noting that some would-be investors from previous crowd-funding campaigns had asked about alternative venues so they could take advantage of the generous perks Three Sisters offered.
“I think our perks are pretty good and people were like, ‘oh, well, if we can’t avail ourselves of the perks, then we’re not quite so keen. But if you’re opening a bar near us, let us know, and we will be interested’. So that was a seed of thought that’s been growing.”
Wellington was home to many of those people.
Also driving the thinking was the last crowd-funded expansion which allowed Three Sisters to double the size of its space in the old New Plymouth Savings Bank building, creating another bar and seating area and more brewery space.
“That’s really improved thing for us, and we found that there’s a lot of good benefits to hospitality, especially if you’ve got something interesting, if you’ve got some points of difference, which I feel like we do with some of our beverages. That’s something that we can attract people with.
“Then probably the real catalyst was when we saw the Fortune Favours venue come up as a possibility. We had a good think about that, but we were obviously way too slow, because by the time we started inquiring, it was announced that Garage Project were taking the site.
“But that was encouraging to us, actually, that Garage Project took that over site.”
Not all doom and gloom in capital
Emans said once he took a closer look at Wellington he saw “two sides” to the capital’s doom and gloom hospitality narrative.
“It definitely feels like Wellington’s coming off the bottom or something. Talking to a lot of people there across various industries like real estate and hospitality, it seems that it’s not all doom and gloom.
“You can see the people who are doing something interesting are quite busy but there’s plenty of places that don’t seem to be doing well and possibly they are the ones who are not doing anything remarkable.”
It was only once Emans started discussing the lease in detail he learned his new venue was once home to another brewery, DB’s short-lived Black Dog. That legacy means there’s not much of a fit-out cost required.
“There are some of awesome features left over from when it was a Black Dog brewery. They’ve got a high-strength floor for rolling kegs in and out of, and for brewery equipment. There’s a feature keg fridge that you can see into, and the bar is really interesting. It’s all made from reclaimed materials. It’s a beautiful bar. The bar top itself is made from the wooden benches from the old Athletic Park stadium.
“So there’s not much work to do on a fit-out. All we really need to do is signage, logos, branding, and more taps.”
Would a brewery go in there?
“You could put in something like a one-to-two barrel system just to play around with and have some unique Wellington brews that were brewed there. That’s not the immediate plan, but that’s definitely something I’m a little bit excited about.”
On the back of this expansion, Three Sisters will be running a small crowd-funding campaign, their third, to add tanks to their existing brewery to meet increased demand both here and off-shore.
“The opportunity is very real right now and we want to be able to fulfill that.”
Smoothie sours driving growth
Three Sisters recent growth has been driven by their smoothie sour beers.
Lush, a pineapple, feijoa, guava and vanilla smoothie sour, featured in the New World Beer and Cider Awards Top 25 this year and was a huge hit. It’s about to get a rebrew.
As part of an export deal into China they initially put one smoothie sour into a shipment that was largely IPAs and hazy IPAs.
“They came back and said, `oh, wow, the feedback on your smoothie sours is really good, why don’t you do a few more of those the next time?’
“The next time around, they were maybe 30% of the order and they said ‘these are going really well, next time … more. So now it’s 60%, or even 70% by volume.”
They have also just signed a deal to distribute their smoothie sour range via Beverage Brothers, becoming the first craft beer brand to sign on with them alongside European brands Hollandia, Bavaria and 8.6.
Bizarrely they’ve also signed a deal to sell their smoothie sours in Bangladesh.
“It just happens that a very good friend of mine is from Bangladesh. I worked with him back when I was an engineer — in Dubai, and then here as well. We’ve been talking about business opportunities for a little while and he’s got a good network over there.
“It’s not a big beer market, but there’s not a lot of entrants either, so I’m going to say we’re one of the few, if not the only. craft brand in Bangladesh.
“Because it’s a Muslim country, generally the population doesn’t drink. But when international travelers go there, they’re allowed to drink beer in hotels, so there’s a reasonable market in sending alcohol into all the hotels there.”
It all adds up to good news for the still small brewery, where production is just under 300,000 litres per annum but revenue is up 62% year on year.
“It’s the bar, it’s the export, and it’s the domestic market, it’s all of it,” Joe says. “It’s all growing for us and it definitely feels like, more so than ever, that we are at an inflection point where we’re selling all we can make.
“There’s not much beer in the can fridge, there’s not much online, it just keeps going and we’re struggling to keep up, so that’s a really exciting.”