May 2014

The Speight’s Brewery in Dunedin, New Zealand. Photo by David Lansing.

While Justin and I are walking around Dunedin looking for a shop that sells New Zealand whisky we stumble across the Speight’s Brewery.

Like a crossing guard, Justin slams an arm across my chest. “Hold up!” says he. “I’m thinking we might as well have a beer while we think things over. What do you say?”

It takes me no more than two heartbeats to see the logic in his proposal, so in we go.

Here’s the funny thing about the Speight’s pub: There’s nobody inside. Just two older blokes sitting in a small office reading the Otago Daily Times.

“We were wondering if we could get a beer?” Justin says. “You serve beer, right? Actually we’re looking for Doublewood whisky but we can’t seem to find any. I don’t suppose…”

“Hold on a minute,” says the gent Justin is speaking to. He turns around and addresses the other gent behind him. “Graham, you speak American, don’t you? Come over and talk to this dag. I can’t understand a word he’s sayin’.”

So Graham puts down his newspaper and slowly rises up out of his well-worn leather chair. “It’s beer you’re interested in?” he says.

“That’s right,” says Justin.

“Well, it’s $25.”

“For a beer?”

“For the tour.”

Seems we’ve entered the door for the brewery tour rather than the ale house which, we discover, is next door. But Graham persuades us to do the tour with him since, he tells us, at the end we sample all the Speight’s beer we want.

“All the beer we want?” says Justin.

“Yep,” says Graham. “And you can pull them yourselves.”

Justin does a quick computation in his head and figures that at $10 a beer, which is what we paid for our handle at the Nova Café, all we need to do is down three beers at the end of the tour to make it a bargain. So we sign on with Graham.

Now, do you want to know about the tour? Do you want me to tell you when the brewery was founded and by who and what sort of hops they use to make their beers? I thought not. Nor did we. Which is why neither of us had a single question for Graham as he prattled on about malting and milling and mashing and all the other processes that go in to making beer. We just wanted to get to the tasting room. Which we did soon enough.

It was an old-fashioned wood bar with a shiny copper tap in the middle. Graham lined up a half-dozen glasses for us and then took his newspaper over to a chair in the corner to do a little more reading while Justin pulled both of us a Speight’s Gold Medal ale. And then the Distinction ale. Followed by the Triple Hop pilsner and the 5 Malt Old Dark. And then, just to cleanse our pallets, we finished with a cold glass of Speight’s Cider.

All lovely. And well worth the $25.