Nothing like glass for a top-class drop

Pub pets are OK, but Josh Owens, 21, likes to drink his Speights from a glass flagon like those he once filled back in Kaitangata. Picture / Richard Robinson

He may be only 21, but Josh Owens has no interest in RTDs and the designer-label beers.

The sport and recreation student - and part-time Glenfield Tavern barman - prefers his Speights, and if it comes in a flagon, so much the better.

Josh moved to Auckland from his home town of Kaitangata in the deep south about a year ago and has yet to spot a glass flagon in his new home.

But he will know one when he sees it - he has been filling them regularly since he was five.

He used to earn $10 a week filling the glass jars with the amber liquid for his father, who owned the Bridge Tavern at Kaitangata.

They're still pretty common back home, he says.

"My mates' old mans, they still drink out of the old flagons."

Josh says he would swig from a "pub pet" (the non-refillable, two-litre plastic bottle people mistake for flagons nowadays), but a flagon takes some beating.

"I would be happy to drink out of glass flagons. They keep the beer cold in the glass," he says. "It makes you feel more manly, as well."

But Josh is a realist. He knows that in this part of the world a flagon is about as common as his southern rolling "R"

"It's something that is dying out, eh? It's something that is more common with the older folk."

If he wants to find a flagon, it may mean a trip back to that part of New Zealand where Southern Otago becomes Northern Southland.

"It still happens. The people who still own the glass bottle, they go and they fill them up."

There's nothing in Auckland that comes close to drinking from a flagon, he says.

He would love, on the rare occasions he goes pubbing, to be able to buy even a quart bottle over the counter.

Or, maybe just once, encounter a full, glass flagon: "Speights in a flagon's good, I would buy it."