Beer – Better than cat’s pee

Happy New Year! Can you remember your New Year’s Eve celebrations? If not, then this column might help you in years to come.

On my recent travels to Germany one thing struck me like a hammer when I visited liquor wholesalers, which was frequently I might add. It was the amount of non- and low-alcohol beverages, particularly beer, that is available. It is staggering. Many breweries produce a non-alcoholic beer, and they don’t all taste like cat’s pee. Some of them would be difficult for the average beer drinker to discern the difference.

Now I love the taste of beer and would drink it all day given half a chance, but there are, of course, side effects to this hobby – work, life, driving – the list goes on. Recently, local brewery 8 Wired produced a beer with the wonderful moniker of Ghost Chips. This beer weighs in at a feathery mass of 1 per cent alcohol by volume (ABV). Light indeed. So light, in fact, that under New Zealand liquor laws it cannot be classified as a low-alcohol beer … yeah, go figure right.

But producing a tasty low or non-alcoholic beer is no mean feat. So, when Soren Eriksen at 8 Wired decided to try to produce one, he started by tasting lots of beers in that category. Not a job I would be putting my hand up for, as many of them are insipid shadows of the thing called beer.

Enter Ghost Chips. It is styled on the New England cloudy/hazy pale ales from the northeast coast of the USA. It is a style that is “very in” on the beer scene. Renowned for its hazy look and juicy finish, these beers can be astonishingly delicious. Whilst Ghost Chips doesn’t deliver the full New England IPA experience it will fool most. In fact, it has done at the Tahi Bar. Few people have picked it as an only 1 per cent alcohol beer until they have been told.

The secret to enjoying low alcohol beers is to start drinking them first. If you go to them after a fuller flavoured, higher alcohol option, then the former will overpower the latter. I am hoping that more brewers join this revolution and that lower ABV beers in the future are nearly as flavoursome as their bigger brothers, without breweries having to make them taste like some poor relation to a citrus juice. Recalling those anti-drink driving ads: Spook … Spacehead … I CAN have your Ghost Chips.  Cheers.

Ian Marriott, Tahi Bar
www.tahibar.com