Arriving at the brewery in style

As the afternoon draws closer, Robin warms up to the fact that he looks like the dork he really is and we meet up with our drinking buddy, Mani from Germany, to arrive at the Wanaka Bakpaka. Ian, our host, has kindly allowed us to borrow the hostel’s VW Beetle to drive to the Wanaka Beerworks.

It’s a reunion with Mani then time to hop in a German car with our German friend to drink some… non-German beer. However, the Beetle is OLD – really old. The gear numbers have worn off the stick, the indicators only work via a hard-to-find switch, and the engine makes an alarming roar. This makes for a slow and hilarious ride out to Wanaka Beerworks.

Wanaka Beerworks

Once again, the our activity of the day takes us out to Wanaka Airport! Honestly, it’s all going on down here! Not only are there skydives, Oxbow off-roading and jet sprint boats that we did yesterday, and a whole bunch of museums, but it just happens to hold a microbrewery.

We discover the entrance of the microbrewery at the entrance of a toy museum (yes, we too would put the two together), where we are welcomed by David. He is going to be our Wanaka Beerworks tour guide today!

Inner workings of a New Zealand microbrewery

Beer is a big thing in New Zealand with more than 160 microbreweries dotted around the country. The Wanaka Beerworks is one of them serving beer to the masses of Wanaka, Queenstown and Arrowtown. Yet, there is a huge amount of work going into the brewing process as we are about to discover.

David takes us into a small room taken over by four large fermenting and conditioning tanks and a group of slightly smaller tanks.

Hops, malt, yeast and wheat, the key ingredients to beer-making are sat within jars as props for how the brewing process works averaging on about a month to make! David really goes into all the inner workings of the brewery, answering all our questions (even if he didn’t know, he would find out for us). From the tour itself, you can really tell that beer brewing on a small scale like this really comes out of passion.