Northland brewer Ben Heaven's dark lager is among the New World Beer & Cider Awards Top 25 in 2025. Photos / Supplied
Ben Heaven started brewing beer in a garage during his student days.
Now a dark lager from his Northland brewery has been named among the 2025 New World Beer & Cider Awards’ Top 25.
The Judas Dark Sheep lager, which was one of 650 total award entries, is made with dark malt and New Zealand Pacific Jade hops, which Heaven says gives it a “citrusy, almost dark berry note”.
“Then on tasting the beer, you’ll have some quite sweet malt, but also a little bit of dark chocolate, a very light amount of roastiness, but the smoothness as well and an effervescence from it being a well-carbonated lager.”
The award-winning brew is the culmination of a lifetime’s work.
Heaven is originally from the UK but grew up in Pahiatua and first discovered home brewing in the late 90s when he was studying at Massey University.
But it was a visit to his home country that cemented his love for beer as a taste of the region where it was made.
“I got to go back for the first time in about five or six years,” Heaven, 46, tells the Herald. “Once I’d been in New Zealand, I’d really learned quite a lot from Māori culture about connection to your people and to the land and being tangata whenua.
“So, I think for me going back, there was quite a lot of significance. It wasn’t just a trip; it was reconnecting with my own family and background.”
Travelling through the Cotswolds, where his father’s family were from, he felt the history in the land and the buildings – pubs among them.
“What also struck me at the time was the regional nature of beer ... you’d go into a pub and there would be a whole different range of beers on the bar, and they were served through these beautiful ceramic and brass hand pumps at the bar – it was amazing."
When he returned to Massey, he recalls “probably boring my friends to death” with his beer obsession. A mate suggested he give home brewing a try; so, armed with a kit from a shop in Palmerston North, he did.
“Later on, when I met my future wife, her mother kind of enabled me by getting me this old brewing book from a car boot sale, and that really opened my eyes because suddenly there was this whole range of different flavours and options.
“So, I borrowed my mother-in-law’s old coffee grinder and then I’d be sat in the living room of the flat past midnight grinding up all this malt and making these concoctions.”
After university, the couple moved to England’s northeast for work, where Heaven discovered photography as a hobby.
“But then we had kids, and going off at dawn to take pictures of sunrises doesn’t really work with young children, whereas brewing beer in the garage on the weekend – it’s much more family friendly.”
So, he built a garage onto the side of the family home to house a 500-litre brewery, making beer for pubs and festivals.
Heaven and his family eventuallymoved back to New Zealand, with a dream of starting their own rural brewery. In 2016, they bought land in the Marua Valley near Hikurangi, but it took about a decade before Heaven’s Brewery was up and running.
Now, it feels “slightly surreal” to have one of their brews recognised at the New World Beer & Cider Awards.
“If I’m honest, one of the most amazing things about the award for me is it kind of helps me overcome a little bit of that impostor syndrome – a bloke from Palmerston North that was brewing in a shed.
“Still brewing in a shed, a slightly bigger one,” he jokes.
“But also, there’s been a lot of sacrifice and investment from my wife; she supported the family, she’s been the breadwinner for the last 10 years, and other family and friends have supported us.”
The winning beer is “deceptive”, he says.
“Generally, you’ll think of a lager as the pale fizzy stuff. So, with the Judas Sheep, I was trying to think of a good way to present this beer, also linking in with the things that we were doing on the place, with our sheep and pigs and so forth.”
And it was a “cheeky” ewe called Myrtle who proved to be the perfect mascot.
“You’ll go into the kitchen in the morning to make a cup of tea, and if she’s in the house paddock opposite and she spots you in the window, illuminating it, she stops eating the grass,” Heaven says.
“She notices you’re there and she’ll shout for you to come out and give her some maize. So, she’s quite a character.”
Myrtle is the “deceptive” Judas sheep of the flock, he explains. “The Judas animal is the one that you can tame. And being on a small block, we don’t need dogs to move the sheep around, they just follow us around.
“I thought she would be great on the label ... [of] this black lager, which is deceptive. In the glass, it looks like a stout or a porter. It looks like quite a heavy beer, but it’s actually a smooth, dark lager, fermented cold, conditioned in a horizontal lagering tank.”
Heaven wants to maintain the brewery’s original purpose: “Keeping things simple and local, but high-quality and family-friendly and community-focused”.
“I’d quite like to build a pub out of wattle and daub.
“We’ve got a lot of clay in the soil here north of Auckland, so it makes sense to draw from that and to have a brewery tap where we have some simple food and our own beer, of course, and people can sit and enjoy watching the lambs or the sheep.”