Brewing company is taking smashed avocado to new heights. Photo / Supplied
Brewing company is taking smashed avocado to new heights. Photo / Supplied
Subscription avocado company The Avo Tree has teamed up with ParrotDog Brewery to create a "salty and citrus-y" avocado-flavoured beer.
Under 20,000 cans of the gose-style beer were made, and went on sale in liquor stores today. The product is limited edition, but could be relaunched as a seasonal or permanent product if demand allowed.
The beer was dreamed up Thorley Robbins, the owner and director of The Avo Tree, a e-commerce business that delivers avocados door-to-door, about two years following the explosion of the craft beer movement and publicity avocados had received in the media.
Robbins said it played into the rhetoric that millennials could not get on to the property ladder as they were sending all of their dosh of smashed avocado on toast and craft beer.
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Robbins knew Matt Warner and Matt Kristofski, the owners of Wellington-based ParrotDog, and presented the idea to them.
"They went away, scratched their heads and were like 'Yeah, we can do this'," Robbins told the Herald. "There were a couple of international examples that had been done, but not as a gose-style [beer]."
The beer was made from New Zealand avocados grown in the Bay of Plenty. Photo / Supplied
The Avo Tree supplied its Bay of Plenty-grown avocados to ParrotDog to create the beer. In all, about 500 avocados were smashed to make 15,000 cans of the beer.
Robbins describes the taste of the beer as "kind of salty, kind of citrus-y", in line with the classic gose craft style originating in Germany.
"What the avocado brings to it is this kind of texture, which I haven't found in any other beer. Avocado is quite high in fats so it draws some of that out of the avocado and that's what changes that texture.
"There is a slight avocado flavour but it's certainly more about the texture."
Robbins said if the beer, which sells for $7.99 for a 440ml can, continued to sell "as successfully as it has been selling this morning" then the two parties would have a discussion to see if it could be brought back on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.
He said the beer was created to poke fun at the controversy around millennials liking avocado a bit too much. "You get the older generation being like 'Oh the young people can't afford houses because they are drinking too much craft beer and eating too many avocados, so it was a little bit of a laugh around we're going to stick these two things together and enjoy them.
"It's a bit of a sneaky pulling the fingers to the older generation telling us we're spending too much money on craft beer and avocados."
Given the uncertainty around the Covid-19 outbreak, the beer has also been released online and will be delivered for those who are not able to leave their house, he said.
"We're coming into a potentially unsteady couple of weeks so the online platform for any kind of purchase is likely gaining a bit of growth due to climate."
