Scotland's little brother
Trip Start
Aug 07, 2008
1
52
79
Trip End
Ongoing
Dunedin,
South Island,
New Zealand
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
eunice and i arrived early one afternoon to a cold and almost frigid Dunedin... it was on and off rain and the only thing that kept us there was the promise of sunshine to come the next day... and it did come ... still cold, but the sun was a nice warming change... side note: did you know that NZ has one of the biggest holes in the ozone above it? that makes for pretty strong rays of sunlight.. not to mention extremely dangerous UV rays...
anyways, after a cold evening in our camper van.. still no name for it yet... (remember, we are taking suggestions) we booked two tours that we were pretty excited about... eunice was all about the Cadbury Chocolate Factory Tour, complete with chocolate waterfall, and i was pretty stoked about the Speights Brewery Tour!
first the Cadbury Chocolate Tour... for me, it made up for us missing halloween... we walked around the places with bags open for the free chocolate bars that were given out. all in all, it was very informative and pretty much one big sugar rush... but in the middle of journey into a diabetic coma, i did learn a couple of things... first off, hernando cortez was the main person responsible for bringing chocolate into europe... when he conquered the aztecs, the people and the then emperor monteczuma welcomed cortez because he fulfilled a prophecy of a aztec god coming back in the form of a white skinned man... cortez even came in the year that it was prophesized... just dumb luck, i guess... also, back in the days, it was the quakers, one of which were the Cadburies, were the ones to revolutionize chocolatiering... also, chocolate drinks, in the old days of europe were said to have healing properties and thus was recommended by doctors for almost every known ailment (it was probably a combination of the sugar rush and the caffeine that made people feel better)... anyways, there's a bit of interesting information for you...
and my favorite of the day, the Speights Brewery Tour... this was not only intoxicating and tasty, but it was very informative... let me tell you what i learned.... a lot of people say that Guiness tastes different outside of Ireland because it doesn't travel well.... NOT SO... Guiness is actually a contracted beer outside of Ireland... thus, although the recipe used is the same, the ingredients are slightly different ... ie) the water in New Zealand tastes different than the water in Ireland.. likewise with the hops and malt and whatever else goes in... next, in Dunedin and New Zealand, alcohol production drops by 33% when universities are on vacation... 33%!!! incredible! apparently, NZ has a bit of a binge drinking culture... hmm...what else... oh yeah, Corona is another contracted beer... oh! did you know that the old school trollies used in San Francisco is actually from Dunedin, New Zealand? yeah, when they took the trolley system out of Dunedin, they sold it to SF... funny huh?
anyways, the best part of the tour was the last 30 mins... they let us taste 6 different beers on draft: Speights Gold Medal Draft (winner 5 years running at the Melbourne beer festival), Speights Old Dark (my favorite), the Distinction beer (their oldest recipe going back 150 years), Harvest beer (for the ladies, but not eunice... this one tasted like apricots.. much like a cider), Speights Porter (eunice's favorite), Summit Beer (to compete with Steinlager).... we even got a try at pulling our own taps!... it was good fun... i got to sample all of them a couple times... but it was ok since they were in small glasses....
Dunedin itself was a nice little stop... some other notable stops: Baldwin street - the world's steepest residential street (kinda not impressive), Pak n Save (the nationwide supermarket which we seem to frequent... cooking our own food saves a HUGE load of money), the Octagon (not the UFC one, the center of town) and that was pretty much it... bye
