Brewers take on capacity to expand

Owners and brewers at Ground Up Brewery in Wanaka Oli Boyes (left) and Julian Webster inspect the former McDuff's brewery mash tun from Dunedin. Photo / Tim Miller.

Two Wanaka brewers hope to breathe some new life into some well-known and well-loved brewing equipment.

To keep up with ever increasing demand for their brews, Oli Boyes and Julian Webster, owners and brewers at Ground Up Brewery, bought the McDuff's Brewery manufacturing equipment from Dunedin earlier this year.

McDuff's owners Graham Jenkins and Gavin Duff sold the micro-brewery earlier this year after 25 years of business in North Dunedin.

Included in the deal was some equipment made by New Zealand micro-brewing pioneer Terry McCashin.Mr Boyes and Mr Webster planned to have the equipment operating by September and they were already renting bigger premises in Gordon Rd.

First the brewery would need to be modified to fit the specific requirements it had. The work would mainly be done by themselves.

"We could have brought a brewery from China but this is a lot more fun doing it this way, and probably a whole lot more stressful.

"It's still very exciting."

At the moment all the brewing was done in a small unit in Frederick St, but the demand for the beer meant the two former professional abseilers needed somewhere larger.

Once completed, the brewery will produce about 1200 litres at a time, with a capacity of about 300,000 litres per year, 10 times the amount they are able to brew now. They would not need all the capacity straight away but it gave the brewery room to grow, if the demand was there, Mr Boyes said.

"Our goal for the first year is to hit about 90,000 litres, which means ... we were being paid and the company had enough cash to keep growing."

Mr Boyes said they would look to start distributing around the country.

"We are going to need to go outside of Wanaka and we have had so much interest from people in Wellington and Auckland.

"We want to do that but distribution is going to be difficult to work out."