At the Dunedin Craft Beer and Food Festival, Greg Bruce discovers old Scarfies never die, but they do get more responsible
I remember watching television broadcasts of one-day cricket internationals at Dunedin’s Carisbrook and enjoying the “antics” of the “lads” on the bank, who carried couches into the ground, drank until they wet their pants, then set their urine-soaked couches on fire before heading back to university to earn medical degrees that would enable them to perform heart transplants and brain surgery on children.
The Scarfies, as they were then known, became legend. They seemed to say something important, if not necessarily good, about Dunedin. They were its damaged and arrhythmic cultural heart, the people who crowded into the city’s substandard rental accommodations and produced the majority of its antisocial behaviour and street chunder. In short, they were best known for being problem drinkers. So, a few months ago, when the Otago University Students Association offered to fly me to Dunedin to write about their annual beer festival, I smelled a rat. Why would an organisation representing a group of people best-known for their problem drinking want to fly in journalists from around the country to write about their festival of drinking?
That question is, of course, rhetorical. There are only two reasons journalists are invited to anything: publicity and reputation management. The story the OUSA hoped for from me was presumably one that followed a redemption arc. Something along the lines of: this is the 10th iteration of the festival and it’s been an enormous success, so much so that it’s now spawned two more festivals, one in Auckland and one in Hawke’s Bay.
A couple of thoughts about that:
1. No self-respecting journalist wants to be used as a PR tool just because they’ve been offered flights to and from Dunedin, accommodation in a beautiful hotel suite with a lovely big bath, airport transfers, taxis to and from the event, and free booze and food.
2. What could be more boring than a story about a group of people who used to be young and wild but have now become sensible with money?
No, no, I thought, as I read my Kindle in the bath in the hours before the festival, that’s not the story I’m going to be telling.
My taxi driver, who wore double-denim, took me past the hundreds already queuing at the front of Forsyth Barr stadium and deposited me at the stadium’s empty rear. From there, media liaison people, including one wearing a leather jacket, ushered me into an elevator and along a quiet concourse to a corporate box high in the grandstand. The room was already filled with a Dullness of Journalists. On a table at the back were canapes and, confusingly, several bottles of wine.
Although the festival had already started and I could see the hordes rolling in, I remained in the media room for a strangely long time. We all did. Nobody had explicitly said we couldn’t leave but control is most powerful when: A) it’s not explicit; B) you’re being plied with free food and booze; and C) there’s the prospect of more free food and booze.
Before letting us loose on the festival proper, they wanted us not just to receive hospitality that might engender in us good feeling towards them but also to meet the event’s organiser, Jason Schroeder, who was a charming and friendly guy and was able to tell a great success story that they presumably hoped would resonate with us sufficiently to incline us against going back to our typewriters and writing about people barfing in the toilets.
Eventually, they provided us with the electronic wristbands that were the festival’s currency, which would allow us to buy food and beverages from any of the festival’s many vendors. This was the signal that we were free to go - or at least that was the way I read it. The wristbands had been pre-loaded with $30, and if $30 sounds like an insignificant amount of money, it isn’t. Like so many young idealists before me, I had got into journalism hoping to spend my career writing imitations of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, not realising how much times had changed since Hunter Thompson rode the technicolour wave of 1960s psychedelics into journalism history. Where Thompson once took fat expense accounts on his cross-country subcultural explorations and used much of it to buy drugs, today’s out-of-town journalists typically rely on the generosity of PR people and their wits just to get a half-decent hot meal. In most situations, a gift of $30 is enough to make a journalist cry with gratitude. In this case, the speed with which I calculated that it could get me a good feed of Hungarian fried bread with enough left over for a couple of small Suckah Luckah blackcurrant sours made a mockery of my consistently poor results in high school maths.
The invited media included representatives from daily newspapers and magazines including North & South and Kia Ora - national magazines with demographics that skew rich and old. No one had come from Rolling Stone. The closest the press contingent came to rock and roll was Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath, who had grown up in Dunedin and even briefly attended Otago University. An interviewer once asked him what life was like there. He replied: “As you’d expect. One morning I woke up my flatmate by punching a hole in his wall and dragging his feet into the stairs.”
But that was decades ago. Where once Heath might have given zero f***s about social mores and other people’s property, by the time of the festival he was deep into middle age, had become the Herald’s happiness editor, had two children he’d spent many years writing touching columns about and was pulling down a fat salary commensurate with being one of the country’s leading breakfast hosts and happiness editors.
Scarfie culture has changed radically in recent years. For starters, they’re not known as Scarfies anymore, but “Breathers”. Furthermore, they’re not drinking like they used to, or at least they’re not drinking in pubs like they used to.
In 2020, Otago student magazine Critic Te Ārohi published a feature about the disappearance of the student boozers. In the article, titled “Why is Town So S***?” features editor Elliot Weir reported that Dunedin pubs had closed because they’d ceased to be economically viable, in part because patrons were able to get pissed there for next to nothing. At one stage, he wrote, The Cook was charging $1 for doubles and the Gardies was doing $4 jugs. It was tricky for the pubs because if they charged more for booze, students wouldn’t go, because fees and living costs were going through the roof and student loans were increasingly indistinguishable from 30-year mortgages.
Weir spoke to one pub owner who shut three pubs in 2015 alone, claiming students were spending less than $4 per person in his establishments. Weir summarised it thus: “In this era of late-stage capitalism, a vicious cycle has arisen where all the bars are closing or are too expensive because students aren’t drinking in town enough, and students aren’t drinking in town because all the bars are closing or are too expensive.”
Entry to the Dunedin Craft Beer and Food Festival (DBCFF) cost $50 – $45 with student discount. In the glory days of The Cook, that would have been enough to put you and several friends in hospital with alcohol poisoning, but at the DBCFF all it got you was a glass. I don’t know if there were any students at the festival, but if there were, their parents weren’t journalists.
I attended two excellent beer tasting sessions – A Taste of Dunedin and Emerson’s 30 Years of Beers – which between them served 11 generous samples. AJ, who conducted the first tasting, had been marketing lead for the team that launched the festival in 2013. He mentioned that he had once been invited to an event at the house of Richard Emerson, the city’s most famous brewer, who would conduct the second. “I got so pissed,” AJ said. “My wife didn’t talk to me for about three days. It’s cause he’s got keg taps at his house and he had wines on and one of the brewers goes, ‘I dare you to drink a pint of wine’, and I drank a pint of wine … S*** got real.”
AJ had conducted a lot of research for the tasting, as evidenced by his frequent referrals to his copious notes. It was clear he liked a drink, but he had recently had a baby and it was equally clear that event had changed the way he saw the world.
“Have a really lovely, lovely evening,” he told us as he wrapped up the tasting. “Don’t talk to me later, I’ll be lit. Basically I’m here for a good time, not a long time. Old mate, he’s teething, so I’ve got to get sobered up ASAP after a few beers and … Liam’s Langos, that fried bread, f***in’ best thing ever. Every single beer fest I’ve ever gone to, that s*** is the best you’ll ever have. And yeah, smash waters in between each beer.” No self-respecting Scarfie in the 80s would ever have advocated for waters.
I went down to the field, where I drank some beers I can no longer remember. I ate that fried bread from Liam’s Langos and while it may have soaked up some of the booze, it left plenty behind. I ran into an old friend but after a while of shouting half-drunk nonsense at him over the music of Jordan Luck, I had lost both my voice and desire to continue. It was for the best. It was late and Luck was just launching into Victoria. It was time to go.
Although the festival organisers had provided me with a taxi chit for the 2km journey back to the Distinction, I decided to walk. I wanted to see what was happening on the streets, feel the vibe and so on. There was no vibe and no ne was out on the streets. Having not yet read Elliot Weir’s Critic article, I wondered why town was so s***. Hungry and disappointed, I went to Countdown, bought a pie, along with a large bag of sweet and salty popcorn and a packet of chocolate raisins, and took the lot back to my room, where I ate every last crumb while watching Werner Herzog’s excellent volcano movie on Netflix, followed by English Premier League soccer highlights on YouTube. I felt increasingly queasy and disappointed in myself and eventually fell into a foggy sleep somewhere between midnight and 1am.
I woke the next morning feeling a bit rough but, when I opened the curtains, I saw the day was bright and beautiful, a #DunnerStunner. I bought a coffee and as I drank it I felt myself flowering anew. The thick fog of the booze and the self-loathing induced by the junk food and football binge was replaced by the light euphoria of the late-stage hangover, the emergence from the depressing alcoholic fog into the relative pleasure of everyday reality, the sober re-engagement with the world, the chance to start all over again, and to this time do it better.
The PR person arranged access for me to the Koru Lounge. On entry, the first thing I saw was Matt Heath, sitting at a table by himself, drinking a glass of red wine. It was 11am.
The Auckland Craft Beer & Food Festival takes place at Spark Arena on Saturday, March 18 2023.
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