From left: Richard Poole (Fine Wine Delivery Co), Dale Cooper (Fortune Favours), Alice Neville (The Spinoff), Georgia Davies, Adrian Heyes (both FWD Co) and Marcus Ebert (Fortune Favours) prepare to add a key ingredient: grapefruit juice

KaiSeptember 18, 2018

Grape(fruit) expectations: Announcing the hoppy arrival of a very special beer

Alice Neville

Deputy editor

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From left: Richard Poole (Fine Wine Delivery Co), Dale Cooper (Fortune Favours), Alice Neville (The Spinoff), Georgia Davies, Adrian Heyes (both FWD Co) and Marcus Ebert (Fortune Favours) prepare to add a key ingredient: grapefruit juice

Six weeks ago, through a haze of blood, sweat, tears and citrus, a grapefruit IPA was born. This week, it’s finally time to introduce the concoction to the beer-loving public.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a craft beer-focused jaunt to Wellington would be all fun and games. But I’m a professional, and when I travelled to our nation’s capital for Beervana last month, I put in the hard yards.

Yes, there was a small amount of fun and the odd game here and there (by which I mean I drank quite a lot of beer.) But I helped brew one too! Our friends at Fine Wine Delivery Co had also made the trip from Auckland to the capital, but the biggest event on the beer calendar was only part of their itinerary. The FWD Co crew were in town to make their very own beer with Wellington brewery Fortune Favours, and, seeing as I’m a home brewer of great renown (read: I’ve made a few beers that aren’t totally undrinkable), it seemed like a good idea for me to tag along.

Richard Poole, Fine Wine Delivery Co’s general manager of operations, and Georgia Davies, the company’s beer ambassador, were the masterminds of the operation. Poole had headhunted beer nut Davies — who was working for the opposition at the time — after meeting her at Beervana two years ago. He’d introduced beer to the then wine-focused company, founded by his father Jeff, three years prior to that meeting. “It just made sense to me to have someone to specialise in beer to help grow that category”, he says.

A whole lot of grapefruit: before and after

As they set about expanding the company’s beer offering, Poole and Davies soon decided they wanted to have a go at brewing their own. Davies has brewing experience — she’s part of the Pink Boots women’s beer collective — but Poole was a novice, giving it a go at home for the first time last year. “It was a very steep learning curve,” he remembers. “I started at about 6pm and finished at one in the morning.”

Undeterred, he and Davies began developing their brew. Inspired by the Grapefruit Sculpin from US brewery Ballast Point, they settled on a grapefruit IPA, and got to work developing the recipe. “We brewed it and it was great — Georgia and I were very happy with it,” says Poole. “Until we didn’t keg it properly…”

While they were siphoning the beer into it, the keg became clogged with some hop residue, so they siphoned it into a second keg — but in doing so, oxidised the beer.

Poole, Davies and Heyes pause to pose for a photo while Neville remains focused on the task at hand

It was an easily fixable error, though, and the base beer was a success. They dubbed it Juicy Tart, and began thinking about how they could scale up from the 20-litre batches their Grainfather brew kit produced.

“We were looking at contract brewing but it’s a really big commitment in terms of the size of batch,” explains Davies.

They decided to approach some friends from the brewing community — the good folk of Fortune Favours. The brewery is a relatively new kid on the ever-growing Wellington beer block, set up in 2016 by Shannon Thorpe. He’d been working in sales and marketing for various breweries, but was ready to take the leap into starting his own, and recruited Wellington hospo veterans Andrew and Jamie Williams and brewer Dale Cooper to join the team. Last year they opened a microbrewery and bar in the hospo hub of Leeds St in the central city.

Hop pellets: would not recommend nibbling

Poole and Davies had met the Fortune Favours team at Beervana in 2017 (another example of Beervana bringing people together) and loved what they were doing. When the brewery began canning their beers, FWDCo was the first Auckland retailer to get on board and stock them.

Fortune Favours was happy to help out with the brew and Cooper tweaked the recipe only slightly (switching a few hop varieties to up the grapefruit flavour).

The FWD Co team flew into the capital on the Wednesday morning of the week dubbed ‘Road to Beervana’, where pre-festival events are held all over the city. We all met at Fortune Favours bright and early, and Thorpe arrived laden with beautiful grapefruits grown at his family farm in the Wairarapa.

There were at least 200 of the golden orbs to be peeled and juiced for the 1,000-litre brew, so we got to work while Cooper started on the mash. We tried various methods to get the grapefruit skin off — zesting meant less pith, but was much harder, so a combo of the two was decided on. Poole proved a dab hand on the peeler, managing to get the skin off in one long strip, a talent to which he credited childhood potato-peeling competitions with his sister Tracey, now FWD Co’s general manager of marketing.

Davies helped Poole with the peeling and showed off her talent at heaving bags of grain into the kettle, while I joined FWD Co wine buyer Adrian Heyes on the juicing station. After a few hours and a lot of good-natured ribbing about who was working hardest, we ended up with a whole lot of grapefruit peel and juice, and bright orange fingernails. The peel went into buckets of vodka to be sterilised (Poole and Davies noted that this time they would drain the vodka off before adding the peel to the brew, another lesson from their first go that resulted in a tasty, if rather dangerously vodka-heavy, beverage).

To our credit, the only fermented beverage we partook of during the morning’s work was Fortune Favours’ very own kombucha, while under the watchful eye of Cooper, we weighed out and added various hops (Motueka, Chinook, Amarillo) at various stages of the boil. In hindsight, nibbling on a pellet of the stuff probably took my love of hops too far — bitterer than the bitterest thing you have ever tasted.

The grain before the brewing process and after

The (drained) zest and the grapefruit juice I had diligently squeezed went into the kettle at the end of the boil, and we all took turns symbolically pouring it in. The Fortune Favours team added some ruby grapefruit to the happily fermenting brew a couple of days later too.

Juicy Tart has its official launch this Friday at Uptown Freehouse on Symonds Street, so if you’re in Auckland, head along to be among the first to taste our masterpiece! Entry is free, or you can grab a beer-and-burger combo for $20. The beer will be on tap at the FWD Co superstores on Lunn Ave and Constellation Drive, so get your fill while it lasts.

The FWD Co team, who have had a sneak preview, say it’s tasting glorious, with Davies describing it as “a deliciously thirst-quenching IPA with zesty grapefruit character, juicy hop flavour and a lingering medium pithy bitterness”. They say that if the first batch proves popular, they will look at doing another brew and possibly putting it into cans for summer. And as such a linchpin of the first brew team, I’ll be sure to make my juicing talents available once again.

Liam Fox geeks out on analysing the crumb structure of each loaf, always striving to improve (Photos: Malcolm Campbell)

KaiSeptember 16, 2018

Movers and bakers: Fort Greene and the mission to create the perfect sandwich

Leisha Jones

Guest writer

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Liam Fox geeks out on analysing the crumb structure of each loaf, always striving to improve (Photos: Malcolm Campbell)

As they prepared to move to a bigger space, Auckland artisan bakers Fort Greene paused to reflect on the glorious potential held within two pieces of bread.

Springing out of bed to start work before the birds start singing is probably a sign you’ve found your calling in life. Liam Fox, who owns Auckland cafe Fort Greene with his wife Andrea Mulhausen, says it wasn’t until he started baking bread that he found something he’d be happy to do until he hangs up his apron for good one day.

“For a number of years, as a chef, I’ve sort of been going through the motions. Although I’ve always loved cooking, enjoying cooking and enjoying being in a commercial kitchen are not necessarily the same thing. I’ve always enjoyed cooking more than being a chef. When I started actively making bread for the business, I realised that was the thing that I wanted to do until I stopped working. It’s the first time that I’d ever done anything where I felt like ‘this is what I am supposed to be doing’.”

Fort Greene has been “on a mission to create the perfect sandwich” since 2015. Driven by the mantra that the perfect sandwich starts with the perfect bread, they make whatever they possibly can in-house using seasonal and ethically sourced ingredients. They want to change perceptions about what a sandwich can be, proving they can be a meal in their own right. Fox says people tend to categorise sandwiches as a cheap, quick lunch option. They will gladly go and sit at a café and spend $30 on a flat white and a simple plate of eggs, bacon and toast, but put those same ingredients in between two slices of bread and call it a sandwich and people are outraged if they have to pay more than $6.

But nobody wants a lecture on tight margins and food costs while they chow down on their Cubano, so the couple have had to get used to some people walking in, whispering to each other when they see the price tag (the sandwiches range from $14.50 to $19.50), and walking out. But the ones that are willing to hear them out are the best, in Fox’s opinion. “You see their mind change — you see them realise that a sandwich is not just two pieces of Tip-Top white bread with some leftover shredded chicken from the night before. There can be more to it than that.”

And there’s more to it than that at Fort Greene. It takes a week to make the corned beef and the sauerkraut for their soul-soothingly good Reuben, arguably the best in Auckland. Their fish finger sandwich is made using line-caught kahawai (if they can’t get any, the sandwich is temporarily off the menu, resulting in public outrage). It’s cured and smoked before being shredded, crumbed and turned in to the most bougie fish fingers you’ve ever seen, then served between slices of rye sourdough with mashed peas, tartare and snow pea feathers for a sandwich that delights both the child and gourmand inside you.

Andrea Mulhausen and Liam Fox of Fort Greene (Photo: Malcolm Campbell)

While the cosy wee shop in St Kevin’s arcade on Karangahape Rd, with its mezzanine and petite kitchen under the stairs, where Liam’s head grazed the ceiling, was the ideal starting point for their business, after three years they felt like they had to adapt or die. The size of the shop meant that hiring staff amounted only to enough extra business to cover the staff’s wages. So the two of them worked largely alone, sometimes seven days a week. “One day we came back from a break, and we started doing the same thing we’d been doing every day for the past two and a bit years,” Mulhausen recalls. “And I said to Liam, ‘I can’t be doing this forever. I just can’t. It’s driving me crazy’.”

The couple have always been risk-averse when it comes to business, doing the best they possibly can with minimal financial input. But with their daughter Olivia now five years old, Liam says the move to a bigger shop, where having staff will allow them to have a couple of days off a week, is an investment in quality of life. Staying on K Rd was high on their list of priorities, so when a space became available only a few blocks down the street, it was time to take the risk and move. The new shop opened last weekend at 327 K Rd.

In the beginning, they’ll continue to make the breads they’ve already perfected before adding more to the repertoire. “A lot of businesses go too big too fast,” says Fox. “They go ‘this is what we want to be, so we are going to become that on launch day’. They take on too much. It’s better to have quality than quantity. When you get the quality going and the consistency, then you build on the quantity.”

With a skilled baker from Britomart’s Amano coming on board, they will also be offering some patisserie, and after so long in solitude in the kitchen under the stairs, Fox is looking forward to having somebody to bounce ideas off.

Being largely self-taught in the art of bread making, Fox recalls how in the beginning, he persevered through six months of failure until he eventually nailed it. Through social media, he connected with some big-time local and international bakers who gave him tips; his bread books are dog-eared and bookmarked from endless study; and he geeks out on analysing the crumb structure of each loaf, always striving to improve.

For something with only three ingredients – flour, water and salt – there is a complexity and sense of adventure in making sourdough that makes the quest to perfect it quite addictive, says Liam. “Until you’ve tried making sourdough, it’s very difficult to explain. There are so many variables, and when you conquer all those variables for the first time and you have your first big success, it gets under your skin. You’ll either try it a couple of times, realise it’s too hard and give up, or you’ll do it until you get it right, and when you get it right you’ll be doing it forever.”

In their new space, bread will be churned out all day, so those of us who are keen on hitting snooze can swan in any time and be treated to a hot, fresh loaf – leaving the early rising to the people, like Fox, who love it. “It’s really nice,” he says. “It’s almost meditative, in a way, because there’s no one around, there’s no traffic, no noise, the world is asleep. It’s like you own the world until everyone else comes out of the woodwork. It kind of filters out all the noise, for a couple of hours at least.”