Speight’s Brewery Tour

It was recommended by some friends that I should go on this brewery tour in Dunedin, Speight’s Brewery is the oldest brewery in New Zealand. The tour started with a bit of history of brewing.

The coopers at work making the old beer casks, this all stopped when the stainless steel kegs were introduced. All these old casks were found and the brewery tracked down one of the old coopers who was in his 80’s to re-condition them and set up the exhibition.

 

Captain Cook always manages to get in somewhere, he was allegedly the first person to brew beer in New Zealand.

Mr Speight a Yorkshire man who founded the brewery.

 

This mirror is the last of many produced and given to pubs for advertising, it is now estimated to be worth over $500,000.

The brewery building which was located on this site because of an underground waterway which has provided the water for the brewery since it opened.

Outside of the brewery by the front entrance is an outlet from the water source, local people come on a regular basis to collect water, there is a nominal honesty box charge of 10 cents for collecting water and the brewery match the collected amount and this is given to charity, this amounts to many tens of thousands of dollars per year. 

The brewery is gravity fed, all materials are taken to the top floor and fed down through hoppers to the fermentation tanks below.

There are a number of these mills for grinding the grist.

It is a shame but all these copper containers that have been used for many years are being replaced with larger stainless steel types. This is because  the earthquake in Christchurch did so much damage to their plant there, that they have decided to close it down and spend a lot of money to increase production and do all the South Island brewing in Dunedin.

 

Finally we come to the sampling stage, I was driving so I just tried a couple of mouthfuls of 2 or 3 different types. Unlike Australia they do actually brew beer here rather than lager, They have some very good flavours but unfortunately they are carbonated and I cannot drink them. One pint and I feel like I have downed 2 cans of coke in quick succession, completely bloated. Speight’s  have the licence to brew Guinness in New Zealand and I have found a lot of their pubs stock it. It is not as good as Irish Guinness but better than the stuff that Carlton brew in Australia ( that got so bad recently that Guinness almost took the brewing licence away from them ).