Onetangi Dark Ale

Back when I was first learning to brew in Canada, Porter was a beer that took up a lot of time and effort for many brewers. The original Porters were brewed in London in the 1720’s and became hugely popular. Breweries in the city vied with one another to build bigger and bigger brewing vessels, (Known as ‘Tuns’) to meet the demand for this dark and tasty ale. In 1790, a brewer by the name of Richard Meux built a tun twenty three feet high and sixty feet in diameter. Before this immense vessel was filled, Meux hosted a sit down dinner for two hundred people inside it.

Five years later, Meux’s son Henry took this crazed behaviour even further and built a tun TWICE AS BIG. But his hubris was to lead to one of London’s stranger disasters. These gigantic vats were not built from the stainless steel used today but from huge wooden staves bound with iron to hold them together. On October the 17th 1814 a huge iron hoop weighing some 355 kilos fell off the vat. This caused the entire vessel to fail with disastrous consequences. Somewhere in the region of A MILLION LITRES of Porter burst out of the tun, demolishing the wall of the brewery and flooding down the street. Nine people were killed and numerous homes destroyed.

Now you might think that there are worse ways to go than being drowned in a beer tsunami but in fact the reality is a bit more prosaic. The amount of carbon dioxide released by that much fermenting beer would have asphyxiated people before they had even worked out what the liquid actually was.

Porter lost ground to the newly popular India Pale Ales in the 19th century and only the Irish kept it going in the form of Irish Stout. By the 1980’s when the craft brewing movement got going, the style had almost completely vanished. We brewers saw it as our mission to revive this fine beer and a great deal of work went into producing it.

But all of this is by the by. When it came to producing a second beer at the brewery, my decision to go with Porter was influenced by two very important things. Firstly, that New Zealand has quite a taste for dark beers, more so than any country outside Ireland or Africa. If you run a brewery here then you can’t go far wrong producing a beer for those folks who hold that a beer is no good if you can see through it.

Secondly, and more importantly, Waiheke had just begun producing oysters in commercial quantities at Te Matuku Bay. These were of an amazing quality. If you haven’t tried them then I urge you to do so right away. In fact, why are you sitting reading stuff on the internet when there are Te Matuku oysters to be tried?

Go and try them now. I’ll wait here until you get back...

Right, so, with fine oysters available, the perfect beer was needed to accompany them. No beer sets off the delicate salty flavour of a fresh oyster like a good Porter. The Irish know what they are talking about on such matters believe me.

So the beer itself developed over a few years. The basis of the first brews was a pale ale malt, layered with crystal, chocolate and roast barley. The beer was hopped using imported British Goldings. While good, the beer seemed to me to lack something. I tinkered with it for a while before finding a new German malt known as Carafa Spezial. This is a de-husked roasted malt with a much softer flavour, less coffeeish and astringent than the roast barley I had been using. The combination of this, plus a switch to NZ grown Styrian Golding hops proved to be exactly what I was looking for all along.

I had my perfect oyster beer.

I spend quite a lot of time developing beers and looking into food matches for them but I can say in all honesty that my research into Dark Ale and oysters has been some of the most enjoyable ‘work’ I have ever attempted. Try this for yourself. Get a pint of Dark Ale and hold it up to the light for a moment to take in the deep ruby colour. The slide a freshly opened oyster into the beer, through the foam and down to the bottom of the glass. Take your time drinking this. As you drink, the oyster gives up it’s spirit to the beer while the beer gives it’s spirit to the oyster. Finish the glass by tipping up to get the oyster last.

This experience has been known to make even strong men weep with joy. Don’t be embarrassed to do the same. Our servers will understand and bring you a tissue.