What Ales You?
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
71
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
Greymouth,
South Island,
New Zealand
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Arriving in Greymouth relatively early, we found the brewery and went in to organise a tour. The place was open but utterly deserted. We wandered around for a while, debating whether or not we should just help ourselves to the free samples available at their bar. A member of staff leading a small tour turned up and saw us, to her great surprise, as she thought she had locked the door.
Having arranged to be on the two o'clock tour, we went to a toilet block where we cleaned ourselves up, refilled our water supplies and Kirsty did some laundry whilst Jacob went to the local supermarket for bits and pieces.
Jacob came back just in time to save Kirsty from having to deal with a strange man on her own. A bedraggled looking character with a scruffy looking dog, a large roll of blankets and a collection of skin conditions, he had ambled across to the van, where Kirsty was busily hanging up our damp washing from the various lines she had rigged. It eventually turned out that he wanted some company and he was inviting us to go and share his marijuana with him. We declined politely.
We took the van back to the brewery and parked in the little customer car park. Another couple had just arrived in their rental van, so we got chatting and went into the brewery together.
Monteith's, although started in 1868 by Scottish immigrant Stuart Monteith, has only relatively recently been resurrected. As in the dark days of the UK brewing industry, when you could get 'bitter' or 'lager' and it didn't really matter whose name was on it because it was all made by the same enormous brewing conglomerate, Kiwi brewing was, for a while, run pretty much entirely by one or two major concerns. The more recent trend towards giving the consumer a choice between various interesting products - rather than flooding the market with one or two generics - has led to Dominion Breweries reintroducing the Monteith's name as their brand of premium ales. A good thing too. In fact, DB did originally close the Monteith's brewery on the 22nd March 2001 as they hd decided that the cost of production was no longer viable. After four days of public outcry, they opened it again. Monteith's fans were not about to allow production to stop. Yes, the people of New Zealand (and, in fact, the world) want nice interesting beers, and as DB found out, they're prepared to show it.
Although still owned by one of the giants, the fact that they've felt the need to relaunch a taste rather than price led brand is all part of the great new enthusiasm for decent quality food and drink.
The tour was quite interesting. We were shown around the various parts of the factory, which, as it was a Sunday, was not actually operating that day. Still, we got the general idea.
There was an interesting piece of machinery which was used for stacking bottles onto pallets at the end of the production line. It transpired that it had been built by the head engineer when head office refused to stump up the cash for a new one. He had used parts of the old machine, parts of an old Bedford truck he'd found rusting in the corner of the delivery yard and bits and pieces from all sorts of scrap yards, cobbled the whole thing together to a design he'd drawn in chalk on the floor, saving the company several thousand dollars, whilst securing himself a job for life as nobody else has a clue how it works.
The same engineer had also invented a device to take the bends out of kegs. Kegs are quite expensive and so have to be reused several times before they start being an economical option for the transport of beers. Unfortunately, they often get dropped and dinged as they are transported from brewery to cellar and back again. Bent kegs don't hold the same volume as straight ones and so are effectively useless. The patent is still pending on this guy's invention, but it will probably be found in every brewery in the world soon enough. It's simple enough - it uses high pressure air to blow the dents out, restoring the keg.
Prior to the invention, bent kegs were sometimes put to some other use, melted down or, more often than not, just thrown out. The toilets in the brewery had made use of a couple. The ladies had one instead of a porcelain sink, the gents had one as a urinal.
The highlight of the tour was, of course, the tasting. We tried six different beers. Hands-down favourite for both of us was the Monteith's Black Beer, a dark, rich, stout like beverage which is rather tasty.
We were allowed to pour ourselves a glass of whichever of the beers we fancied. The lady who was running the tour seemed a little disappointed when most people, even those who had never been the other side of a bar before, managed to do this without producing a big glass of foam.
After the tour, we decided to get something to eat before attempting to move on. We wandered around Greymouth but didn't find anything particularly interesting open, so eventually ended up getting sandwiches from Subway. Not exactly exotic, but the ballast helped soak up the beer.
The tasting samples hadn't been copious and we both felt fine to drive, so, having seen as much as Greymouth had to offer on a Sunday, we moved on.
