MATA Beer’s newest brew is not only made in the Eastern Bay, but the hops are grown here and are mostly of a variety developed by a Whakatane horticulturalist.
The Mata Tasting Room opened yesterday with full table service and a new one-off pale ale made with fresh hops on the menu.
The brewery’s Tammy Viitakangas likens brewing beer with fresh hops to cooking with fresh herbs from your own garden instead of using dried herbs.
“Fresh hop beers do taste a bit different from your usual hop beers, which is why a lot of breweries like to make them. You get a grassy kind of fresh flavour,” Ms Viitakangas said.
“The hops that all breweries usually use is dried and pelletised, because fresh hops have such a short life. But a lot of breweries make a fresh hops brew once a year when the hops are being harvested so it’s quite a special thing.”
Ms Viitakangas said fresh hops were very hard to come by in New Zealand. “Traditionally, the hops have all been grown in Nelson, where they have a bit of a monopoly on the whole market.
“The hops normally get trucked up to Auckland and then you’ve got to drive up to Auckland to collect your fresh hops and you’ve literally got to use them straight away. Pretty much within 48 hours of picking the hops in Nelson we would have the hops inside the tank.”
So when Awakeri couple Rob Franklin and Hilary Sheaff approached Ms Viitakangas about growing it locally, she was quick to say, “yes, please”.
“Rob and Hilary contacted me about 18 months ago and asked whether we would be interested in brewing a beer using locally grown hops, if they were to plant some.
“I think they had kiwifruit growing on a property that they were going to pull down, but they knew that hops grew in a similar way. So that gave them the idea, rather than wasting the growing structures that they had, whether they would grow something else in that space.
“I put them on to Dan Boyce, who I’ve known for years, who actually created a new hop variety. I thought it would be cool to use some of his hops, potentially, which they ended up doing, but Rob and Hilary have also planted some other hops varieties suited for making fresh hop beer. We took their whole crop.”
Mr Boyce is an award-winning amateur brewer in his own right, having won the Australasian amateur brewing championships in 2008. The self-employed gardener, horticulturist and co-director of Rangiora-based hop breeding company Monhopoly said the main variety of hops that was used in Fresh Hop Hands was Tangerine Dream.
“It is one that I developed a few years ago. There are two other varieties in there, but in smaller amounts. There’s probably about 70 or 80 percent of Tangerine Dream. Fresh Hop Hands showcases it quite well. It showed through quite nicely.”
Harvesting was done on March 1, by hand with a crew of about a dozen volunteers of family and friends of the growers.
Mr Franklin said he was very pleased with the Fresh Hop Hands beer Mata had produced with his first crop of hops. “It might take a few more tastings to be sure but I’m sure there won’t be any shortage of volunteers for that.” However, it was still too early to say from this experimental first harvest whether hops growing would be a good industry for the Bay of Plenty.
“At this stage it is looking really good,” he said. “Over time we might identify some unique characteristics of hops grown in the Bay of Plenty or we might find that, yield-wise, they perhaps do better than they do down south, which would make a good case for making it a Bay of Plenty industry.
Mr Franklin said that New Zealand hops was quite special.
“New Zealand owns property rights to grow our own varieties plus they grow here well because of the lack of disease. Any brewer you talk to around the world, their eyes light up when you talk about New Zealand hops.
“From what I’ve found in my research New Zealand hops are really in demand. New Zealand breweries often struggle to get New Zealand hops. We could easily sell what we grow three times over.
“The hardest part of hops growing is all the infrastructure around it. You essentially need a packhouse for every hop plant, to both separate it from the vine and also drying it and packing it. You need to do it in really good time so you can’t take it anywhere else to do it.
Because we don’t have any of that specialist equipment at this time, it will be a huge investment if we do go down that path.”
“So, our only real option at this point was to make a fresh hops beer, which meant we had to get it off the vine and down to the brewery on the same day.
Mr Franklin said it was early days yet as it took about three years for hops plants to come to their full potential, although the plants could keep producing for as long as 100 years.
He expects to see a yield 10 times as large next year.
“We were a little bit late off the mark last year when we planted them so this coming year the plants should be that much stronger, and also they develop different characteristics as the plant matures.”
Ms Viitakangas plans to make a fresh hops brew every year, though each year’s beer will likely have a different style, making Fresh Hop Hands very much a one-off. Because it was the first crop, there were only enough hops for one batch, about 800 bottles. “It has a beautiful, fresh citrus character,” Ms Viitakangas said.
Ms Viitakangas said she was delighted to be able to open The Tasting Room yesterday. The closure during Covid-19 had been “terrifying from a business perspective”, but the brewery had been able to sell some beer throughout the lockdown through a click and collect service and by delivery.
“She said the brewery had been able to operate since level four because beer manufacturing was classed as an essential service by the Government, so they had still been able to do contactless deliveries. However, it had only been a small fraction of usual sales. They were fortunate not to have to dump any beer, as the larger breweries had.
“We brew smaller batches, so our beer is turned over quite quickly and always kept quite fresh that way.”
“We’ve had really good support from the locals, I must say. We’re absolutely rapt that they have supported us through these tough times. It’s actually more important than ever that people support their local businesses, because they just will not survive without it.