Touring the West Coast’s Best Brewery

Monteith’s: A History

Our tour guide takes us over to a bar and presentation area at the back of the open restaurant and bar room. Like all good stories, she starts with a bit of context, what is Monteith’s and how did it become so popular. She goes through the history of the humble beginnings of the Monteith’s family starting their Phoenix Brewery in 1868 (in Reefton, nonetheless! God, we learn more about that town and its amazing history every day)! The Phoenix Brewery then merged with some other small breweries to form the Westland Brewery Company then eventually becoming Monteith’s Brewing Company.

Mini museum and jars of beery goodness

In a room to the side of us, old dusty bottles labelled from these good ol’ days are lined up in a mini museum, along with old brewing tools and shareholder books.

Jars of different hops and malt sit along the bar, where our tour guide explains how these are the base of their beers’ flavour, giving us a chance to smell and even taste the dry malt.

The fermentation tanks

Now that we’ve got a basic understanding, she takes us into the brewery itself. Big fermentation tanks line the walls of the relatively small brewery. Brewers are actually at work at the top of the tanks, opening the lids, letting the steam out, probably adding a secret ingredient, then closing the lid again.

Behind the scenes at the Monteith’s Brewery

A flowchart to good beer

The tour moves to a large wall-covering flowchart to explain the brewing process at Monteith’s. On the opposite wall is a short video running and rerunning to show some of the machines in action. It also demonstrates some of the machines that aren’t necessarily being used today, like the bottle-filling-and-labelling machine. (Maybe that’s not the technical term, but we don’t want to completely spoil the tour for you… Or maybe we just forgot the name).

How Monteith’s beer kegs are filled

Next, we move onto how Monteith’s fills its kegs for bars, whether it’s for themselves or for any of the bars and pubs in New Zealand selling their beer on tap (which is quite a lot, especially in the South Island. Then again it was the first alcohol Laura had tasted in a bar in Auckland, so it’s everywhere, basically!)

Pouring our own beer

Finally, the tour ends back at that bar at the back of the restaurant where we get to pour our beer. Laura can see that Robin is too busy taking photos and filming (doing his job, ya know) to pay attention to how to not to pour a beer. This is the perfect opportunity for Laura to volunteer Robin as the first one to pour the beer. As expected, foam flows over the glass and creates a trail across the bar to where Robin places it on the beer mat. Nice one, Robin, nice one.

Now Robin gets to drink his frothy ale, while the rest of us pour marginally better ones…