Wanaka Brewery Tour – Day 131

Today we are going to the Wanaka Beerworks. Sunday, beer, vintage car I am now a 65 years old man.

It is another glorious day in wanaka and we are waking up in the awesome Wanaka Bakpaka and because today’s activity is quite a short one, we are visiting a brewery in the area, we have some time to take care of ourselves a little bit. I really need a trim down my haircut has been called a dead possum and even a dead bird so it’s really time for sheep shearing the back of my head. Laura also needs a little bit of the trim down so I do cut the ends of her hair as well so she looks as gorgeous as she can with her new French made haircut.

So today we joined by my friend Mani from Germany and Ian the owner of the Wanaka Bakpaka really wants us to take his old vintage car for a spin when going to Beerworks. It’s Ok, it’s meant to be like this.

We are heading toward Beerworks which is the microbrewery of the Wanaka Airport it’s situated at the Wanaka Aiport and it’s a little bit tough to find to start with it’s sort of hidden behind a toy museum. But we are meeting our host for today which is David and he’s going to be giving us a tour of Beerworks.

Beerworks is one of the over 160 microbreweries in New Zealand meaning they have smaller production run of beers they produce around 100,000 litres of beer a year. The tour turns into a battle of knowledge between Mani my friend from Germany which has probably been drinking beer since he was 7 years old and David our tour guide form New Zealand which is incredibly passionate by beer making. They are discussing recipes techniques as well as the different chemical ingredients that you can insert to beers to give them different tastes. Oh my God that is strong. And all the inner workings of beer making this all flies way above my head as I am basically a casual beer drinker I just show up at the pub order a beer and drink it. I never knew how beer was made until we visited our first brewery and honestly this is still a process that I’m really confused by. Why is there so many queves. why are there so many pipes why are there so many rows? But as David shows there’s a lot of science behind making craft beer. Beer only contains four key ingredients hops, malt, yeast and wheat but the process of beer making takes about a month to make. It’s all about tweaking the recipe with those four ingredients to make the different beers and then David is going into what the process is after the beer making so how how the bottles are filled where the kegs are stored, how the beer is filtered and how beer gets its bubbles.

David also takes pride in showing us all the machinery they have in this microbrewery, because despite the fact this is very small brewery compared to the bigger size this brewery still produce beer 700 litres at a time and you have to bottle all of that. So from the bottling process to the quality control we’re going through every single stage of what happened to that beer before it hits the shelves or the pubs.

Beers from Beerworks are distributed all over the area Queenstown, Arrowtown and Wanaka and they actually name their beers after the local landmarks like Treble Cone which is a famous ski field, but to be quite honest any good brewery tour should finish in the same awesome way – a beer tasting. And this is exactly where we’re heading to next we are having a whole table for ourselves and we are having a tasting tray which contains 6 different beers.

David is going through all the different types of beers we’re going to be tasting today and my personal favourite is the Cardrona Gold it’s sort of a safe beer but there’s also some eccentric beers in here like coffee stout as well. So after some good laughs, good company and good beer, we are gonna be getting back into the VW Beetle and making our way back to the Wanaka Bakpaka.

This car is incredibly hard to drive. I have a hard time passing the gears and even turning the wheel, I’m so happy when I’m done driving it. Back at the hostel we’re meeting back up with Marika that was the girl that joined us during the Wildwire Tour climbing a waterfall only a few days ago and we’re telling her all about our beer visit.

I guess it’s the thought that counts right? Thanks Ian for giving us this car which seemed like such a cool idea in the beginning but it yeah, It’s pretty nightmarish.