A new release from Sawmill has Alice praising the haze, and Henry plans his Christmas around an excellent-value, full-flavoured pinot.

SAWMILL EAST COAST IPA

5.9%, 500ml, $9.99 from Fine Wine Delivery Co

Hazy IPAs are so hot right now. Well, to be frank with you, they’ve been pretty hot for a while, but the trend is showing no signs of abating.

I, for one, am pleased about this. Because like pizza and rosé (that’s the second week in a row I’ve got that reference in, which I’m pretty sure means it’s going to go viral any minute now), even the bad ones are still pretty good.

This here hazy IPA, however, is not a bad one. It’s a bloody good one. So good, in fact, that I can’t believe I hadn’t had it before now.

In simple terms, hazy IPAs are thus called because they’re unfiltered, giving them a hazy appearance as opposed to a clear one (there are all sorts of more complex reasons for this haziness, but let’s all agree we don’t need to go into them right now). The level of haze varies from beer to beer, and some are downright murky, but this Sawmill number is definitely on the lighter side of haze. More Urewera mist than London pea-souper, if you will.

Hazy IPAs were popularised in the area of the north-eastern United States known as New England — you know, where the people seem less brashly American than the rest of the country, and it’s all old buildings and autumn foliage and whatnot — hence, are often known as New England IPAs, or NEIPAs. Personally, I reckon that’s a clunky acronym that means sweet FA to us here in Aotearoa, so I much prefer when they’re labelled hazy IPAs or East Coast IPAs, as ol’ mate Sawmill has done here.

No, not Whale Rider/rugged coastal landscapes/Clarke Gayford’s hometown East Coast, we’re still in America here. But as the West Coast IPA (hailing, as it does, from the California-Oregon-Washington sort of area) has been adopted wholeheartedly by Kiwi brewers, our brains should be able to cope with the idea of an East Coast IPA as something same-same but different (essentially it’s like hip-hop in the 90s, but with fewer drive-by shootings).

Anyway. Sawmill’s East Coast IPA is the bottled version of the beer formerly known as Juicebox, which was initially a keg-only release. Dunno why they’ve dropped the Juicebox name – perhaps, as I sagely noted here, because so many other bloody beers have ‘juice’ in their names?

Either way, it’s now simple and to the point, which I like in a beer. And that’s not all I like about it. East Coast IPAs are supposed to be packed with juicy, tropical-fruity flavours, with a gentle bitterness rather than the knock-your-socks-off version of their West Coast brethren, and this one absolutely nails that on the head. It screams FLAVOUR and whispers bitterness, whereas some West Coast-style IPAs seem to do it the other way round. In short, it’s a helluva good beer.

It also just squeaks into my arbitrary weeknight quaffing rule* of being sub-6%, so has won a hard-earned place in my regular beer rotation. Welcome, hazy little friend.

(*A rule so illogical, I admit, that I would drink a 500ml bottle of this in a heartbeat but feel like a 330ml can of Liberty Yakima Monster, at 0.1% more alcohol, would be OTT. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don’t make the rules, my weird brain does.)

Verdict: ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

Alice Neville

RAPAURA SPRINGS RESERVE MARLBOROUGH PINOT NOIR 2017

13.5%, $14.90 from Fine Wine Delivery Co

Last night, after sharing half a bottle or so of this Rapaura Springs Reserve Marlborough Pinot Noir, I sat down and watched an episode of Netflix’s new cooking competition show The Final Table. In this particular episode, the contestants had to make a Thanksgiving dinner for a mid-00s comedian (Dax Shepard), a son of Tom Hanks (Colin Hanks) and the NYT food editor (Sam Sifton), and the single New Zealand competitor (Monique Fiso) landed in the bottom three by fucking up the brioche stuffing (OK, it was more the fault of Monique’s partner, but Monique, whose on-screen persona flips between stoic and concerned, blamed herself for letting it stay on the plate in its imperfection).

While watching the judges rip through eight or so Thanksgiving dinners, I finished the last few millilitres of wine left in my glass and mourned the absence of turkey in New Zealand Christmas culture because here, in the dregs of my glass, was its ideal accompaniment. Dark and full-flavoured – dark cherry, dark plum, dark berry (OK, and some red berry too) – this steal of a pinot noir could stand up to most meats, but turkey is what I’d like to eat with it the most on Christmas Day (you can eat lamb any time of year). It’s a cranberry sauce of a wine – tart, a little sweet, with a subtle oakiness (OK, cranberry sauce doesn’t tend to be aged in oak, but you know what I mean).

So, why not try turkey and Rapaura Springs pinot noir for Christmas? Sure, turkey’s easy to dry it out, but lamb’s often over-done and dry as well, yet it avoids a reputation as a disgustingly dry meat. Plus, on The Final Table, one pair smothered their turkey in mayonnaise before cooking it to seal in the juiciness and it looked effing delicious. And they won!

Verdict: This + turkey + mayo = a new Christmas tradition (maybe).

Henry Oliver

We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today, Duncan Greive gets amongst a new fake mince from the deep south.

As someone who loves the delicious taste and texture of animal meat, but has spent most of the past 25 years living as a vegetarian, fake meat products are extremely relevant to me. For a long time the range was small and quaint: a few bad snags, the poorly labelled mysteries of Blissful’s fakes (some of which, terrifyingly, don’t even need to be refrigerated) and the granddaddy of them all, Sanitarium’s weird canned products.

What united them all was their base: soy protein, a wondrous substance that apparently can be made into anything (I’m probably typing on it right now). It was fibrous and chewy enough to plausibly resemble meat, while also very much not being particularly meat-like. That said, I’ve eaten and will likely continue to eat a shitload of it, even though excess soy consumption is apparently bad for you, at least according to this Lance Armstrong-related website. The Blissful ham and peppersteak, the sanitarium canned mince, even the Mad Butcher’s deliberately bad half-size vegetarian sausages – I continue to love them all.

Over the past few years, the range has exploded. First, South African Fry’s and their green-packeted schnitzels and burgers came and invaded my freezer. Then the long-awaited landing of Quorn and the Linda McCartney range from the UK (the mozzarella burger patties are my favourite fake meat product of all time and Christmas is coming, Mum, if you’re reading this).

It’s an explosively growing international market, too. Beyond Meats has major investment from battery chicken behemoth Tyson Foods. The Impossible Burger generates hectic buzz thanks to its gory habit of bleeding while being cooked and made New Zealand collectively insane when Air NZ stocked it earlier this year. And Holland’s the Vegetarian Butcher tricked El Bulli magician Ferran Adrià into thinking he was eating a once-breathing creature. Then there’s the whole lab-grown meats scenario, which threatens to leave New Zealand as ‘the Detroit of agriculture’, as future of food expert Rosie Bosworth cheerily puts it.

Happily, there are some local heroes in the future proteins scene. First up was Sunfed Foods’ Shama Lee (I implore you to listen to this interview with her, she’s basically a superhero) who created ‘chicken-free chicken’ out of little more than pea protein. This instantly became my favourite veggie meat, one which is at the cutting edge of the science and the scaling side of alt proteins.

Now, Dunedin’s Craft Meats is here, with a beef mince product and the promise of more. So how does it stack up? Firstly, it looks extremely legit. Mince is, visually, a nightmare: long strands of who-knows-what all wormy and together. So it goes with the ‘no-meat mince’ – it’s visually indistinguishable from the animal version, except it has a nice artisan-style label on it. That’s basically what they were aiming for, so 10/10 for achieving that.

They sell it in the meat section at times, which makes red-blooded farmers even more angry than usual. The argument is that it’s not just targeted at vegetarians but flexitarians too, who are eating more meat-free meals around the world for health reasons, climate change, animal welfare and whatnot.

It’s expensive, at around $20 a kilo, thus around twice the price of regular mince. But consumers fretting about the above are liable to pay a little more or eat a little less for the privilege. It’s also made almost entirely from soy protein, which makes it less sci-fi than Sunfed and the other nü meats out there, and thus a bit less exciting, beyond the fancy packaging.

The big thing with food tends to be taste. I should table my bad cooking skills here, and admit that this probably wasn’t the best expression of what the no-meat mince can do. But it’s at least consistent with the bad cooking I apply to all other fake meat, so it’s a true like-for-like test.

I cooked it in a pan in oil with garlic and onion, then added a tomato passata and maybe some herbs, I forget. It looked pretty freaky going in and took longer to start browning off due to not having blood in it, but it seemed to break down functionally like a meat mince. It did smell bad, and the bad, slightly sour smell lingered. No getting around that, but also not entirely foreign to meat and/or food. I ignored that, put it on some black bean spaghetti (strongly recommend this freaky product too), added a bit of parmesan and I was ready to eat.

And it was good! At least the equal of the other fake minces I’ve had a crack at. The texture was a little finer than proper mince, and not as rich – but nothing a better chef couldn’t mask. I’m not certain how it would go being subbed into other mince contexts: I can imagine an excellent pie and a quite bad burger.

But I’m keen to give it a hoon. Even though it’s more of a throwback than it appears, more little indies making new and weird pretend meat is undeniably a good thing, in my opinion. Eventually, one might make something magical and add to the long, strange tradition of the unmeats in New Zealand.

Good or bad: Good! The taste is fine, the smell not too bad, and the fact they own a regular butchery and wanted something for their vegan daughter is also one of the sweetest origin stories a product could hope for.

Verdict: A nice packet of not-mince.