Another beery weekend Part I - Educating the masses

Another weekend where the defining factor was beer. OK, it started on Thursday night so it was an extended weekend, but there was plenty of beer involved.

On Friday evening I organised a beer tasting for my colleagues at work. This is something I'd been talking about for a while - despite there being a reasonable selection of bottled beers available in New Zealand our company's Friday Night Beer fridge was stocked with Heineken, Corona and a few examples of New Zealand enormo-brewery beers such as Tui and Export Gold.

Anyway, I persuaded them to let me run a small beer tasting. I procured six beers from the local New World supermarket (actually one of them came from Liquorland), wrote some brief tasting notes (mainly grabbed from the breweries' websites and Ratebeer) and stuck up a few amusing beer-related quotes around the office (quite a few grabbed from the excellent A Swift One blog). The beers were poured into numbered jugs and then distributed one at a time for people to taste and try and match the beer to the tasting notes.

The beers we tried were:

• Wanaka Cardrona Gold. A Vienna Lager from Wanaka, near Queenstown.
• Emersons Organic Pilsner from Dunedin.
• Limburg Witbier from the now-defunct Limburg brewery.
• Epic Pale Ale. The award-winning beer from Luke Nicholas' Auckland brewery.
• Founders Long Black. A German-style Black Lager from Nelson.
• Pink Elephant Mammoth. A strong ale from Blenheim.

It all went very well. Everyone enjoyed the beers and there were definite expressions of surprise at the quality and range of beers available. The Cardrona Gold went down very well and was probably the most-favoured beer of the evening. I thought that the Limburg Witbier was poor - a thin lemony-flavoured beer with little character.

In terms of guessing the beers, no-one got all six correct. Almost everybody (there were 20 people there) got the Founders Long Black right (which is fairly understandable) but not many got the rest.

All in all, a good evening although perhaps I shouldn't have stayed behind to tidy up all the leftovers.....