CHAPTER 6

THE HOME-BREW BUG

Richard and colleagues from Cerebos Greggs.

In 1983, I had just finished high school and was at a crossroads in my life — my friends were going to university, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Mum and Dad told me to give myself a break. I’d done two years of sixth form and high school was a difficult time for me — it really beat me up because I had to work hard to lip-read the teachers. I worked even harder on the internal assessment the second time around in sixth form and got accredited, but I was worn out.

George had earned a year’s sabbatical in Edinburgh. Richard — just out of school and uncertain what direction his life would take or even what sort of career he’d like to pursue — ummed and ahhed about joining his parents and sister in Scotland.

The idea of staying in Dunedin and being fully independent from his parents, striking out on his own unencumbered, appealed to him, and in some ways it would prove to his parents that all the energy they’d put into equipping him for the world had been worth it.

But what would he do with himself for a year in Dunedin? Start studying? Burned out and exhausted from his repeat sixth-form year, that seemed a step too far.

He could stay home and find a job — not so easy for a deaf teen straight out of school. At almost 19, he considered manual labour as he was good with his hands and reckoned construction work or something similar would be okay. He’d enjoyed sciences at school but also had an artistic streak that he wanted to nurture. He could aim higher. In short, he stood in limbo, not certain what the next step should be, not knowing where his true capabilities lay.

‘WE COULDN’T LEAVE HIM STRUGGLING AT HOME,’ INGRID SAID, ‘SO WE SAID, “COME WITH US TO EDINBURGH.” AND THAT’S WHERE HE FOUND BEER.’

His eventual decision put the rest of his life in motion. ‘We couldn’t leave him struggling at home,’ Ingrid said, ‘so we said, “Come with us to Edinburgh.” And that’s where he found beer.’

Armed with a new camera and with a gap year ahead of him, Richard hit the famous streets of Edinburgh with ambition, surprising his parents with his ability to comfortably navigate the city within a couple of days of their arrival.

He approached a polytech in the city and asked about enrolling in a science course. The time frame didn’t work, but they directed him to an arts programme where he enrolled in a drawing and photography course.

He also took himself off to find the local Boys’ Brigade and asked if he could be of assistance. Boys’ Brigade had been an important element of his childhood, providing camaraderie, discipline and independence. Before long, it served the same purpose for him in Edinburgh, introducing him to the pub scene, thanks to the group’s older members, who took him to their favourite local watering holes.

I appreciated the British pubs — they were places to go and talk, socialise, play pool — and then I discovered the beers. So different to New Zealand. They had much more flavour and were not so fizzy. I said to myself, ‘Hell, what are we drinking back in New Zealand?’ It was almost devoid of flavour compared with the beer in Scotland.

The pubs were a social gathering place — you met people in the pub — it was the opposite of New Zealand with its Friday-night binge-drinking culture. The beer was better and was served in pint glasses — that was civilisation!

Some of the pubs were lovely old things, with beautiful woodwork and ceramic tiles. It was paradise. The experience stayed with me and when I started Emerson’s Brewery, I did it with a determination to cultivate our drinking here in New Zealand — drinking less but better.

The sabbatical proved important for George as well. Helen Emerson noted that while her father loved whisky, beer rarely made its way into the Emerson house unless George had to host a train society meeting and would buy a crate.

Richard’s discovery of a real ale aligned with George working at the biological sciences department at Heriot-Watt University, where brewing and distilling had been taught since 1903 and where the chemistry department gave lectures on brewing. So ingrained is the subject that, in 1988, the renowned International Centre for Brewing and Distilling opened as a stand-alone unit inside the Heriot-Watt’s biological sciences department.

In that regard, Edinburgh didn’t change George’s life as much as it did Richard’s, but the emphasis Heriot-Watt put on brewing elevated the noble science in George’s thinking.

Helen Emerson’s memory of Edinburgh as a 12-year-old captured the sense of change in the air: ‘It felt like an important time for the family.’

The fact that Richard took a course in photography strengthened the bond between him and George. Helen believed Richard had a calling for photography and other visual arts. He had an extraordinary eye for detail and an almost photographic memory; partly because sound didn’t distract him and partly because he had to rely on his visual awareness to compensate for his hearing loss.

While he had an artist’s eye for framing a photograph and had become adept at sketches and line drawings, he also brought his intense focus to the task.

‘He’s always been obsessive and methodical,’ Helen said. ‘And with photography it was no different. He carried pocket notebooks and for every photo he took he would write down the exposure, the f-stop … all the details of the particular photo. Then when he got slides processed, he could go back and check his settings to see what had given the best results.’

That methodical nature was something Richard had learned from his father. Throughout his life, George took more than 10,000 photographs — mostly of trains. Each negative and colour slide in his collection was dated and its location noted.

When I got home from Scotland in 1984, I was at another crossroads. I’d done fine arts in Edinburgh and I was trying to decide whether to become an artist or a scientist, and whether to study or find work.

I decided to go to Otago Polytechnic to study for a New Zealand Certificate of Science in order to become a laboratory technician. I felt I wasn’t cut out to go to university to become a scientist, but as a laboratory technician I could make good use of my science study at high school.

I also decided I needed a job. There was a possibility of a job in the anatomy department at Otago University, but that didn’t eventuate. I was looking at the newspaper every day, searching for jobs, and I applied for a lot of them. The only place that even offered me an interview was Cerebos Gregg’s. I got that job working in the food science lab.

Mum and Dad weren’t impressed that I wasn’t concentrating on my study, but hey, jobs like this don’t come up very often. It was quite a struggle for me to study and cope with the rigours of full-time work. But I got through and got my qualifications and I did it on my own, making Mum and Dad proud of me. Not only that, but I also moved into a flat to be truly independent.

Richard’s passion for beer quickly turned into an obsession.

If ever a career could bridge Richard’s indecision between art and science it was brewing — he just didn’t know it at that point. He took the job at Cerebos Gregg’s having learned that interviews — let alone jobs — came along rarely. It may have been his only choice, but the position perfectly suited his future need. It seems fated especially as his short time at Gregg’s coincided with the brief few years the company produced malt extract at its Forth Street factory.

The timing proved critical for Richard’s success as a brewer — the job gave him access to malt extract and, later, wort (the unfermented beer used to make the extract). Talk about serendipity!

Cerebos, the global food giant, merged with established Dunedin business Gregg’s in 1985 to form Cerebos Gregg’s. Gregg’s had long been associated with the production of Maltexo malt extract, which they made at the nearby Wilson whisky distillery. After Seagram’s bought Wilson Distillers, the malt extract production continued in a leased space at the distillery. Following the merger with Cerebos, production moved to the main Gregg’s site where Richard worked.

Despite his involvement in the production of malt extract — commonly used in home brew — brewing his own beer hadn’t yet occurred to Richard. His good friend David Stedman had taken up the role of home brewer. ‘I was making home brew with Maltexo, sugar and brewer’s yeast — it was all you could get. I kept doing it that way, all the while hoping the next brew would miraculously be better than the last.’

Richard tried to help David improve his brewing by sourcing ingredients slightly better than those off the supermarket shelf, but even then it took a twist of fate for Richard’s mind to open to brewing himself.

I was quite envious of David because he was making home brew. We were always talking about and enjoying beer. But this one day I went over and he was capping bottles with the old-style hammer capper. Just as I walked in, he hit the cap and the entire side of the bottle broke away and beer came pouring out. Something happened in my mind at that moment and I thought, ‘I can do better than that.’

‘That incident turned a light on for him,’ Stedman recalled. ‘I think it [brewing] would have happened at some stage, but he saw me making a hash of it and thought, “This looks like fun and I bet I can do it better than David.”’

Richard made his first home brew in Ingrid’s kitchen on 27 August 1985, recording the experiment in a notebook he’s kept for over 30 years.

According to his notes, the recipe came from Home Winemakers Recipes, which Richard found in the library at Gregg’s. The book was written by local man David McKechie, who was a member of the Dunedin Amateur Winemakers and Brewers Club in the 1970s.

The recipe required a can of malt extract, 250 grams of sugar and 30 grams of hops. He used a tin of malt extract, rough old hops (unlikely to be fresh) and a packet of DYC yeast (also likely to be at the rank end of the flavour spectrum). After boiling for an hour and allowing it to cool overnight, Richard added the yeast the next morning. All up, he made 4.5 litres of beer, enough for six 750ml bottles.

His tasting notes suggest the beer had a good head, but tasted too bitter. The overall flavour passed muster. As a rudimentary start, he found enough positives to keep him interested. As any home brewer will attest, if the first brew turns out to be half-decent, it’s usually enough to kick-start the obsession.

The tasting notes for a second brew were less detailed, but equally telling, with the words ‘weasel piss’ scrawled across the page of his notebook!

Undeterred by that effort, Richard pressed on. The process appealed to his meticulous, scientific approach, the tasting talked to his love of flavours and with every beer that proved drinkable he went deeper down the rabbit hole. On top of everything else, he and George bonded over the ‘quality control’.

A rare family portrait.

Richard’s attuned taste buds knew the flavour could be better. George had some knowledge of yeast, so that became the first element Richard played around with, trying different yeasts to see how they might change the flavour profile of his beer. For a wannabe home brewer, it’s hard to overstate the importance of yeast and Richard was blessed to have a father with the requisite skills in handling and cultivating it.

Richard also knew that he could get better flavour by brewing with real grain rather than malt extract, and his job at Cerebos Gregg’s offered a huge benefit in that regard thanks to their Ward Street malthouse, where they malted grain for Maltexo.

Richard loved visiting the malthouse, likening the smell of germinating barley to fresh cucumber. There, he acquired small amounts of fresh grain, which allowed him to move to the elite level of home brewing known as all-grain brewing.

With a rudimentary knowledge of the process, Richard crushed the malt in the laboratory at work. He then soaked it in warm water to extract the sweet maltose from the grain, a process known as mashing.

Without the right equipment, this is a complex task, and it’s fair to say Richard’s initial attempts at ‘running off’ the liquid that would turn into beer proved disastrous. ‘Initially I tried straining it through a tea towel, but that made a hell of a mess all over my mother’s kitchen. Eventually I used a fine sieve and, while it was still messy, I was getting clear wort and I knew I was getting somewhere.’

He likened the difference between brewing with malt extract and grain to the difference between using instant coffee versus using whole beans. The flavour changed dramatically.

It wasn’t long before Richard’s obsessive and methodical personality applied itself to the task of making better beer. Not content to make around 23 litres at a time in his mother’s kitchen, Richard ramped up production, making up to 120 litres at a time, which he would sometimes divide into five batches, fermenting each one with a different strain of yeast. Naturally, Ingrid’s kitchen couldn’t handle this level of production and Richard convinced a friend to let him brew in an empty double garage in Ravensbourne.

At this point, David — despite Richard’s help in supplying materials — stopped brewing. ‘There was no point any more because Richard was doing it too well. He’d taken it to another level.’

Instead, Stedman became Richard’s black-market agent, distributing crates of home brew for ‘donations’ of around $15 each. The money went back to Richard to reinvest in ingredients and equipment. The drinkers — or ‘appreciators’ as Richard and David called them — also had an obligation to critique the beer. Each bottle came marked with a number on the cap, which Richard cross-referenced on an index so any feedback could be recorded. Any brews not up to scratch got biffed, so the bottles could be reused in the next batch.

Stedman knew Richard had created something magical, that alchemy was unfolding before them. ‘You couldn’t buy this beer anywhere else and people knew it was good and they wanted it — slowly there was this culture shift happening; Richard was getting people to change their drinking habits.’

He also realised that the beer was destined for commercial success when a friend and budding businessman, John Devereux, offered to buy everything David could get his hands on. ‘John was pretty shrewd and I knew that if he wanted more, I was on to a good thing.’

Richard’s home-brew enterprise could easily have tipped into a professional microbrewery that wouldn’t have been out of place in the New Zealand scene as it stood in the late eighties. In fact, his system was more sophisticated than many professional outfits of the time. The work involved in what was largely a hobby back then laid the groundwork for a fledgling brewery. To bottle and cap each 120-litre batch required 15 dozen 750ml bottles and many hours of devoted focus. Once bottled, the beer had to be stored upright for three or four weeks in order for it to condition. At one stage, Richard had 120 dozen bottles of beer on the go — either conditioning or out in the world being ‘appreciated’.

HE LIKENED THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BREWING WITH MALT EXTRACT AND GRAIN TO THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN USING INSTANT COFFEE VERSUS USING WHOLE BEANS. THE FLAVOUR CHANGED DRAMATICALLY.

Besides being a malt source, Gregg’s also provided Richard with access to a large library full of books on food, wine and beer. In those pre-internet days, beer information proved elusive, so getting access to this kind of material helped Richard’s enterprise to reach a whole new level. He read anything he could get his hands on and learned not only how to make beer, but also how to make the equipment he needed.

In 1980s New Zealand — as many other beer pioneers discovered — small-scale brewing equipment didn’t exist, so many start-up microbreweries used converted dairy equipment to make their beer.

Richard learned to make his own equipment, creating approximations of what he’d seen in books. He quickly worked out how to improvise solutions when what he needed wasn’t readily available, something he’d learned from building the model railway in the family basement.

He also benefited from the connections that come with living in a small city. Avid home brewer Ken Logan worked at the Wilson distillery, and he gifted Richard a yeast culture — heritage uncertain — which became the house yeast when Emerson’s Brewery started.

There are thousands of yeast strains in the brewing world and many established breweries closely guard their yeasts because they can be such a defining character in the finished product. Logan thought his yeast had come from either Harley’s brewery in Nelson, long since defunct, or possibly from somewhere in Denmark, which given Richard’s heritage on his mother’s side seems a better story.

Regardless of where it came from, Richard kept this yeast culture going for years, and it became the workhorse that fermented most of his early beers.

I called it my KL strain after Ken. That yeast had the best flavour and it became our house strain of yeast. Ken knew my father — Dunedin being a small town you got to know people but Dad also made connections through the biochemistry department.

Dad loved beer. It was good coming home from the brewery, bringing home some beers, and we’d talk about the flavours and he’d fall asleep. He was never a big beer drinker, but he was interested in the flavours and keen to support me in what I was doing.

In the late 1980s, Richard had a good life — he was making beer, earning a nice living at Cerebos Gregg’s and piggybacking on the company’s wealth of knowledge while getting access to ingredients other home brewers could only dream about.

Looking back, he had an inkling it would be ‘quite cool to set up a brewery’, but he didn’t have the spark, the motivation, needed to launch a business while he enjoyed paid employment and easy access to everything needed for his large-scale home-brew enterprise. He needed a jolt to take him out of his comfort zone. That came in 1990 with the news that Cerebos Gregg’s had been sold to Japanese food giant Suntory.

Along with 89 others in Dunedin, Richard faced redundancy. The process took a long time to play out because of a dispute over the redundancy offer, with remaining workers at Cerebos Gregg’s in Dunedin as well as staff in Auckland going on strike over the initial offer of six weeks’ pay. The company settled the dispute by raising its offer to 12 weeks’ pay for the first year of service and two weeks’ pay for each subsequent year.

As Richard remembers it, the laid-off workers spent weeks in limbo as the dispute played out — they knew they’d be out the door one day, but they had no idea when. In the meantime they came to work with little incentive to do anything. Richard, effectively laid off and waiting for a payout, did what came naturally: he made beer.

I had to wait for a long time to get my redundancy cheque, but there was no work to do. I was being paid to make home brew in the lab. At around 3.30pm or 4pm I’d break out the home brews and everyone came to help me test them. As we got closer to being laid off the drinking started at three o’clock.

Other days at 4.30pm, I started in the factory packing spices at time-and-a-half — there was plenty of casual work because they had laid off too many people. So, I went to work all day getting paid for reading the paper, drinking coffee and brewing, and then I’d work in the evening at time-and-a-half!

The redundancy offered Richard a chance to rethink his career path. He knew how hard it had been to get a job in the first place and realised that another great job wouldn’t come so easily — especially as New Zealand’s unemployment rate pushed towards double digits.

A brewing dream took on an abstract shape, but Richard — being the scrupulous researcher, the meticulous investigator of options — decided he needed to find out a bit more about brewing and beer.

Hello Grandma,

Sorry for not keeping in contact with you since I’ve been told I was being made redundant from work. This really turned my world upside down, in fact, it gave me the chance to travel overseas. Uncle Richard was good in getting me a job in the brewery so I can see at hand what they do and what cleaning methods they use. I still want to run a brewpub one day as a family enterprise with a restaurant. But I’ll have to look into it very carefully. I want to keep it small and manageable as well as being within financial grasp. I was very sad to hear of Pop’s passing. Ingrid was most upset and rang me at work. After Perth, I’m going to Europe and the UK and the USA. At the moment I’m toying with the idea of visiting Russia now that it’s all ‘open’. It’s good to hear you are now feeling stronger and in good health as well as keeping in touch with Ingrid over the phone. Will keep you posted. Love Richard

—Postcard to Grandma Holst, 15 February 1990

Fate, eh? There might not have been an exact moment when Richard Emerson knew he wanted to be a brewer. The calling presented itself through a series of moments when the planets aligned for him in so many ways — from the trip to Edinburgh as an impressionable 18-year-old, to seeing David Stedman make a hash of home brewing, to getting a job at a place that made malt, to having a biochemist father — even being born stone deaf somehow funnelled him in that direction by closing off so many other options. Whether his acute sense of taste and love of food came naturally or whether he had to develop it in a compensatory sense is a subject for endless discussion. Either way, he had a palate that set him apart from most others.

So not one moment but a series of moments added up to a predetermined outcome — and yet at some point he had to articulate it, and that postcard to his grandmother from Perth in February 1990 carries the essence of that plan. Somehow it reinforces the whole idea that by putting something in writing, by stating the dream, you can make it all come true.

The small steps, the building blocks, continued to fall in a pattern that’s obvious when viewed in retrospect. The ‘Uncle Richard’ in the postcard is Ingrid’s brother, Richard Holst, a zoologist who’d moved to Perth. He had connections at Fremantle’s Matilda Bay Brewing Company — one of the early independent breweries in Australia’s craft beer renaissance. Richard Emerson had offered to work there for nothing just to learn the ropes, but they offered him paid work so he packed his bag, including his ‘bible’ — Michael Jackson’s Pocket Guide to Beer — and set off for an adventure.

Before he left, he had the small problem of where to store 120 crates of home brew, which would continue to find their way into the hands of the appreciators in his absence. Figuring out how to transport so many crates of beer in his tiny Mini was another IQ-stretching problem for Richard.

I had well over 120 swappa crates — it was a bit of a problem when I had to move them out of the Ravensbourne garage in the Mini. The passenger seat had only two nuts and bolts, so if I took the passenger seat out I was able to get 15 crates in there and that’s how I moved all my home brew to a basement belonging to neighbours of my parents.

When I got back from overseas, Dad gave me a glass of beer that was beautifully clear and flavoursome. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘why are you giving me Duvel [a famous Belgian beer]?’

‘It’s not Duvel,’ he said, ‘it’s your beer.’

‘No, it’s not.’

And then he showed me the crown cap number and I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s the best beer I’ve ever made and I threw most of it out.’ You see, I used to sample the beer as I brewed it and if a batch was no good I would tip it out to free up bottles for the next brew. In that brew, I’d dumped all but two dozen because I thought it wasn’t very good.

It’s a shame it took a year of storing to get that good and I said to Dad: ‘It’s great but it’s not a very economical beer to make if you have to store it so long.’

When Richard arrived in Western Australia, he found Matilda Bay to be a massive brewery, churning out 20,000-litre batches, round the clock, six days a week. It gave him invaluable knowledge of all the arcane stuff required to make beer on a large scale — cleaning systems, how pumps worked, the types of tanks required — but he left there sooner than expected after his disability was held against him for the first time in his life.

At Matilda Bay, I was a labourer doing a lot of cleaning. I didn’t learn about making beers, but how to use the pumps, move the hoses, clean the tanks. I was there for about four months. I’d had enough at Matilda Bay after an argument with my boss over being late. I’d go to work by train, and one day I was late to work because the train broke down.

Another day, my train didn’t break down, but the one in front of it did! So, I was late to work again. We didn’t have mobile phones in those days and I couldn’t have called in anyway — what could I do? My boss was ranting at me and I said, ‘I’m quitting.’ I wasn’t happy with how I was treated because I had no way of telling them I was running late — I didn’t think that was right.

From Perth, he headed to Britain. Guided by Michael Jackson’s book, his first port of call was the famous 300-year-old pub, The Lamb. ‘I had a Young’s Special bitter. I was hanging out to make my first beer in London a real ale.’

In London, Richard briefly found work as an orderly in an operating theatre, which allowed him to save up enough money to travel Europe by rail. There Jackson’s well-thumbed bible led him to famous beers and breweries in Germany and Belgium.

On this journey of discovery, Richard took careful notes and memorised flavour profiles. ‘I wanted to taste the beers in their home towns, and with Michael Jackson’s book I learned to analyse the flavours of different beer styles.’

Back in London, he’d read about a brewing course in Yorkshire. He’d tried without luck to pick up a job in a brewery, so enrolling in the course seemed the best way to gain knowledge of traditional real ale brewing methods.

Travelling there by train from London was half the fun. I took the HST [high speed train] from London to York, then a little DMU [Diesel Multiple Unit] from York to a country town, Malton, where I stayed at the pub. The brewing course was at the back of the pub. The information was relatively simple, most of the things I already knew from working at Matilda Bay, but it was good to get a feeling for the British brewing industry.

The highlight of the course was a bus trip to the famous Samuel Smith Old Brewery in Tadcaster. This is one of Yorkshire’s oldest breweries and one of the few still using huge slate Yorkshire fermentation squares.

Walking into the room full of stone squares, the walls over five centimetres thick, remains one of my highlights of the trip. It was an incredible sight to see thick, creamy yeast-head alive, in motion, with bubbles popping. I doubt if I would get to see such a spectacle again in this new era of health and safety.

Having a few pints at the pub attached to the brewery was a real enjoyment; pints of rich, creamy, fruity ales went down a real treat! I have huge respect for Samuel Smith ales, having drunk a fair few pints. This wonderful ale would have a fight for the customer’s attention nowadays as the hoppy beers have secured a strong hold on the beer drinkers’ tongue.

Richard returned to Dunedin after his year away determined to make a career in brewing. He knew how hard it had been for him to get his first job at Cerebos Gregg’s, and while he didn’t see his deafness as an obstacle, his experience in Perth made him wise to the fact that others could see it as such. On top of that, he returned to a country in an economic crisis, with unemployment soaring and only a limited range of work suitable to a profoundly deaf young man.

I knew it would be more than difficult to get a job — mainly because I can’t use a telephone. The range of work for me would have been quite narrow compared with other people. It wasn’t easy in that regard. I know one other deaf person who has managed to do well — he is not as deaf as I am and he can use a telephone. I would have been okay as a builder but not a painter — I couldn’t paint and talk to people.