CHAPTER 11

A NEW MENTOR AND A BIGGER BREWERY

Richard has been a great ambassador for New Zealand hops, trialling different varietals as they were developed.

‘Richard’s dad was everything to him for many years. George was a strong character in his life and he was really emotional when George passed away. That was the loss of a major foundation for him as a person and in business. George was obstinate and tough, but if it wasn’t for his firmness, Richard wouldn’t be where he is now.

I think he felt it was his role to get Richard to perform or stay on target — “Come on, where’s the beer? Get it brewed!” He had such a large influence on Richard’s life. He was gruff, funny, intelligent and he was very firm,’ said Richard’s friend and future colleague Chris O’Leary.

‘George directed everything — including Richard — so when George died, Richard had this massive hole. His life coach was gone, his best friend was gone, the person he was afraid of was gone, the person he was proving himself to was gone.’

When George died, the board of directors — led by Graeme Berry — stepped up and took over managing the brewery. George’s role of de facto CEO fell to Graeme, who continued to run the business as his friend had done for the preceding decade.

Richard’s wife at the time, Marian, noted the undercurrents in the family and business changed at that time. ‘Richard did change after George died — the dynamics were different. He respected his father, and the relationship with Graeme Berry, who had stepped into George’s role as managing director, wasn’t the same — it was more stressful and things were out of balance in his life at that stage. He didn’t go off the rails as such, but the dynamics in his friendships changed. It was a difficult time after George passed away. Something wasn’t gelling. He might have done things differently if George had still been around.’

Richard continued to run the brewery operation — managing the small but growing number of staff — while Berry looked after the financial side and kept Richard’s enthusiasm in check. A meticulous bookkeeper, Berry kept the business on the same steady course George had set up, with growth continuing at around 25 per cent per annum. But he couldn’t fulfil the other roles George had provided — father, friend, mentor, go-between.

Dealings between Graeme and Richard nevertheless took on some of the characteristics of the George–Richard relationship, but the battles over money created tension mainly because of Richard’s difficulty in ‘reading’ Graeme.

‘As I’ve said, some people have what I call a radio face. There’s little expression. I find those people very hard to read with their straight faces. Graeme Berry has a very deadpan face and I could never quite work him out.’

On bigger-ticket items, instead of dealing with his father, where the underlying current of love and life history provided some cushioning, Richard now had to convince the board when he wanted to do something substantial.

‘He didn’t like having to present things to the board for approval,’ O’Leary said. ‘If he wanted new tanks he’d say, “I want them now, I need them.” He was probably correct, but he didn’t like being questioned over the sums. Graeme was a lot like George, old-school, blunt, but also very hard for Richard to read — and Graeme would get Richard cranked up. With no disrespect to Richard, no one can manage him — there’s no way. You have to work off his passions and interests to get him to go in a certain direction. He doesn’t like the word no and he doesn’t like conflict.’

Richard’s creativity sparked a raft of new ideas — new recipes — but the brewery had no capacity to make them. To introduce a new beer would cut down production time for the core range, and then the new beer needed marketing and distribution, which the directors deemed fiscally irresponsible given how tight the operation ran.

Board member Mike Hormann found himself siding with Berry. ‘If you’re making a whole lot of little beers that might not sell that well, you’re doing that at the expense of the core range. At that stage, anything that cut into Pilsner was costing money because that was the best seller. As a board we had to keep saying, “Sorry, Richard.” He would come in and say, “I’ve got this new beer I want to make,” and we’d say, “Sorry, Richard. We don’t have capacity for it.”’

As a compromise, they introduced the Brewer’s Reserve range — occasional releases where Richard could express his artistic side.

Richard and the directors also argued over putting up the price of the beer. Emerson’s popularity meant Richard’s original pricing — pitched in the sweet spot between mainstream beers and imported Guinness — ceased to be relevant when measured against demand.

Richard’s reluctance to bump up the price went against Hormann’s and Berry’s business sense: they knew the brewery could afford a price hike — that it wouldn’t put off customers — and Berry wanted to ensure the shareholders got a decent dividend. He could achieve that by putting up the price per bottle by five cents.

When Richard dug in his heels, Hormann said the message was clear: ‘You make lots of beer, but there’s not a big pile of it sitting around here. What that tells you is that as soon you make it, people buy it … it gets sold.’

It was a simple supply–demand formula and the price increased.

Looking back, Hormann said the brewery owed a great debt to Berry for maintaining the tight grip on the reins after George died. ‘He put a lot of work into the brewery. He was a bit too pedantic at times — literally looking for that last cent — but the brewery wouldn’t be where it is now without Graeme.’

Not that Richard was always stymied, mind, he often got what he wanted, but only after he’d proved the benefits justified the expense. As the business grew, the hand-writing of invoices became a greater burden on Richard and he argued successfully for the business’s first computer — although the budget extended only as far as a second-hand, refurbished PC.

Another source of tension for Richard stemmed from the fact he owned just 1000 shares in a business bearing his name. He held all the intellectual property and was the face of the business, yet it didn’t belong to him in the legal sense. As one of the directors and the creative force, he had a strong say in how the business ran, but at other times he fulfilled a different role — an employee of Emerson’s Brewing Company Ltd, and a lowly paid employee at that. In 2004, he earned $50,000 — well above the national median at the time, but not a fair reflection of the hours he worked and the fact the business carrying his name had become increasingly profitable.

To recognise Richard’s long, often lowly paid service to the business, the directors decided to reward him via a share restructure. The company had accrued a reasonable level of imputation tax credits over the years — money slated for dividends to shareholders. The company agreed to use those credits to give Richard 21,223 shares valued at $59,000. At the same time, other shareholders got bonus shares in proportion with what they already owned. This restructure left Richard with about 12 per cent of the company. Only Ingrid had more shares than he did, holding about 24 per cent.

‘He worked incredibly hard for little reward, which was something Graeme and I were conscious about all the way through,’ said Mike Hormann. ‘We wanted to get him more of the business. We decided at board level to give Richard some shares in recognition for years of low pay. That had the effect of watering down other people’s shares — not that they were worth a great deal of money at the time, but they had some value.’

Running parallel with the decision to increase Richard’s share allocation, the business had another share issue in mind — this time to raise capital for the brewery’s second move. After just five years, 9 Grange Street was already too small. The brewery was running at full speed just to stand still. The demand for Pilsner and Bookbinder meant dedicating the bulk of production to those two beers.

The second iteration of Emerson’s brewing at 9 Grange Street, Dunedin. Photo by Geoff Griggs.

9 Grange Street was a beautiful brewery to work with — if I had stayed small it would have been perfect. But it was terrible for the cellar-door sales because there were only three carparks. When we moved to Wickliffe Street we had queues coming out the door — it shows what a difference it makes when you make room for the customer.

The question was whether we doubled in size to a 2500-litre plant or 5000-litre plant. We made a decision to go to 5000 litres and again Farra built that. It was one of the few times we borrowed money — previous moves had been done with cash and extending our overdraft. But Wickliffe Street was a different one — we did a shareholder issue to put more money into the business as well as borrowing money from the National Bank.

While Richard thought 9 Grange Street was close to the perfect brewery — the perfection lasted only as long as the concept of ‘micro’ applied. By the middle of the first decade of the new century Emerson’s had been at the forefront of a revolution, along with the likes of Tuatara and Epic, where the word ‘micro’ ceased to be applicable.

These breweries built market momentum, creating a rising wave of ‘craft’ beer that meant staying small — while an option — wouldn’t satisfy the growing army of customers demanding more and more great-tasting beer.

‘We kept running out of space,’ Hormann said. His SetPoint offices had already moved from Grange Street to nearby Frederick St and again — as had been the story at Grange Street — Emerson’s encroached on SetPoint space. ‘At one stage, we had a storage area that Richard was using to store barrels of his whisky porter. It was an amazing experience to walk in on Monday morning after it had been shut up for a couple of days over the weekend — it smelled divine.’

But it was also symbolic of the fact Emerson’s needed to move — again. To get the ideal brewery space, Graeme Berry’s partner Ruth Houghton and Mike Hormann put together a company to buy a commercial property at 14 Wickliffe Street, a whole 700 metres away from 9 Grange Street. ‘We did it, so we could be a friendly landlord,’ Hormann said, providing another example of friends paving the way for Richard to make great beer.

‘When the need to move became obvious, Michael and I thought we could buy a building and at least we’d know how it would be used,’ Houghton added. ‘The spirit of buying the building was so the brewery could continue — we knew we probably wouldn’t lose money on it, but we certainly didn’t buy it as a commercial proposition.’

Having learned the lessons from the first two breweries, Hormann and Houghton made sure they bought a big building — one capable of handling continued growth — and the brewery system quadrupled from a 1200-litre brewhouse to 5000 litres. When Emerson’s moved into the building in January 2005, Hormann noted, ‘Richard and I stood there when it was empty and said to each other, “We’ll never fill this up.”’

The Wickliffe Street brewery was opened in real style, so much so that it’s still talked about in admiring if somewhat hazy tones in Dunedin to this day.

We had two different kinds of openings … the first was a more proper, official one with Peter Chin, the Dunedin mayor. He spoke about how he knew my father and how well the brewery was doing. It was all pretty formal, so the next night was party time.

There were many bands playing, most significantly, In A Circle with David Stedman, Phil Hurring and Darren Stedman as the drummer.

The main act was The Chills and, oh boy, it was good! Another band was Operation Rolling Thunder featuring two of Jim Falconer’s brothers, Adam and Rob.

The number of people that turned up was incredible — friends of staff, bar staff from around Dunedin and friends of the brewery. After all, who could resist a piss-up in a brewery!

The last band played until about 3am and I was still hanging around trying to keep an eye on things. Eventually, I felt the only way to move people out of the brewery was to literally hose them out. As the water sprayed and people slowly stumbled out of the way, I could see their minds slowly clicking that I wanted them out and the party was over.

Incredibly, we went through nearly 700 litres of beer over the two days!

Jim Falconer, who’d come on board as a labourer towards the end of the brewery’s time at 9 Grange Street, said the transition to Wickliffe Street was almost overwhelming. ‘At 9 Grange Street, the business felt tiny. I remember the first time we filled eight kegs of Bookbinder to send to Regional Wines & Spirits in Wellington and standing proudly by the pallet thinking we’d made it. It didn’t feel like we were on the cusp of something massive. Moving into Wickliffe Street — the building felt huge, a massive amount of space — and I wondered how we’d fill it, but it just went gangbusters.’

I had a fuck-up when we first moved into Wickliffe Street. I’d brewed for three months non-stop, seven days a week at Grange Street to fill up all the tanks in Wickliffe Street, so we had enough beer to see us through the move over the summer. When we got into Wickliffe Street, I got a new auger for malt — I put malt into the hopper and nothing happened. No malt was coming out.

I rang up the engineers and said no malt is coming out, they said put more in. I told them it was full. It turned out the auger blade was too small for the tube, so the malt was falling back into the hopper.

We needed to start making beer as all the stock was running down over Christmas. And the engineers said, ‘We can’t do anything about it until we come back from our holiday at the end of January.’ And I was saying I’ve got a brewery to run, I have to make bloody beer. What was I going to do?

Suddenly I realised I had a little hand-mill from home-brewing days. We’d spend five hours in the morning crushing a tonne of grain, which we had to carry a sack at a time up the stairs to get it in the mash tun. We had to do a number of brews like that, but we had to do it to stay in business. When we got the auger fixed it took 45 minutes to crush the grist for Bookbinder.

Richard might have been on to his third brewery in 13 years when he moved into 14 Wickliffe Street, but the incident with the auger proved he was just one broken piece of equipment away from seeing his business stumble. Once the broken auger was fixed and brewing returned to schedule, the increased space at Wickliffe Street saw production ramp up considerably.

The benefits of Wickliffe Street became immediately apparent — cellar-door sales went through the roof. The reason for that had nothing to do with the brewery itself, but more its location. Wickliffe Sreet had all-day free parking, but was close enough to the city for workers to park and walk to work. Grabbing a flagon of Emerson’s on the way home became a natural part of their day. At peak times in the summer, the demand for flagon-filling literally meant all hands on deck to deal with queues snaking out the door, while at Christmas time the brewery hired a specialist flagon-runner.

WHAT HAD STARTED AS A ONE-MAN BAND HAD BECOME AN ENSEMBLE AND RICHARD BEGAN TO STRUGGLE WITH THE ROLE OF BAND LEADER, SONG-WRITER, LEAD GUITARIST, PUBLICIST AND PRODUCER.

To pay for the new brewhouse, new fermenters to handle the extra production and other equipment, the company went to the shareholders to raise $400,000.

The shareholders had the option to purchase new shares in proportion to their current holding, paying $2.25 per share.

Ingrid Emerson was unhappy at her allotment of around 40,000 shares valued at just over $90,000. She had more money — from George’s life insurance — and wanted to invest it, but the company regulations prevented it. Her handwritten letter to the board shows she was prepared to invest another $45,000 and she felt stymied at being unable to give the Emerson family more ownership. She also loaned money to Richard so he could maintain his shareholding, by buying up his full allotment. ‘I was furious. I thought, “It’s our brewery, I’ve got the money, why can I not put it into the brewery? Why can’t we own more of it?”’

Another fermenter goes into Wickliffe Street.

But the simple fact remained: an array of people owned Emerson’s and that diverse shareholding reflected an unassailable fact: the day-to-day running of the business had slowly become too big for Richard. What had started as a one-man band had become an ensemble and Richard began to struggle with the role of band leader, song-writer, lead guitarist, publicist and producer.

Chris O’Leary’s arrival at Emerson’s in 2006 was timely. With his Irish surname, O’Leary earned the nickname Paddy when he worked at Roosters Brewhouse in Hastings. The moniker provided an easy way to separate him from Chris Harrison, who owned the brewpub.

Richard preferred to call him Father O’Leary. The appellation has stayed with O’Leary for around 20 years and says much about his relationship with Richard — they are tight friends and co-workers. While O’Leary is around the same age as Richard, he is also something of a father figure. He’s a minder, a colleague, a friend and a set of ears tuned to the hearing world to fill in the gaps that come with Richard’s deafness. In some ways, he’s stepped into the boots George left behind.

As well as bringing all of this to the table, Chris provided a much-needed gap between Richard and the brewery’s growing number of staff. When the brewery consisted of Richard and a handful of colleagues, managing them proved simple enough, but larger staff numbers put an increasing demand on Richard’s communication skills. Conversations that should be straightforward became complex and time-consuming, and Richard struggled with the demands of a modern workplace.

As production manager — or head brewer — O’Leary took over the day-to-day running of the operation, taking a load off Richard. More importantly, he provided Richard with the father-figure role he missed. Chris understood that, despite his ability to read lips and understand body language, Richard still needed, or wanted, someone to interact with the world on his behalf, more so when tiredness got the better of him or he had to deal with hard-to-read faces.

O’Leary didn’t start life in beer — he studied forestry at the University of Canterbury. ‘I was on the chainsaw for a number of years and then got into management. What I loved about forestry was the physical labour. I didn’t like managing forestry workers, shoving their rates down, making them produce lots of timber for less money — it didn’t feel right.’

O’Leary saw the danger in forestry, from the back-breaking nature of the labour to the life-threatening incidents that plague the industry. He figured things could be done better and became New Zealand’s first forestry ergonomist. He got his Master’s degree in ergonomics at Loughborough University, in Leicestershire, England, before returning home to work for Carter Holt in Hawke’s Bay.

He brought home not only a Master’s degree, but also a new-found appreciation for beer — notably European styles such as German Hefeweizen and Belgian Witbier. Unable to find such beers back home in New Zealand and turned off by the ‘brown lagers’ on tap in New Zealand, he started brewing his own.

The home-brew journey took him to Roosters Brewhouse where he happily did unpaid brewing work in order to learn more about his new passion.

Chris O’Leary became a father figure for Richard.

His life changed when Carter Holt decided to send him to Auckland, where a position had opened up. Within a day of being offered the job he quit. He and his wife Aggie had just bought a house and were expecting their first child; they didn’t want to move to Auckland, so O’Leary moved out of forestry altogether.

That night he walked into Roosters and told Harrison he’d quit his job. ‘He said, “You’re mad but … do you want to work for me?” I thought I’d be there for six months, but it became five years and Chris taught me the whole technical and business side of running a brewery. At a brewpub you learn everything from raw materials right through to the tap. I brewed three times a week and learned fast how to put out quality beer in big volume.’

O’Leary became well enough ensconced in the industry to have heard about a small brewery in Dunedin making the kind of beer he’d fallen in love with — classic European styles largely unavailable elsewhere in New Zealand.

On a holiday to Oamaru to visit Aggie’s family in 1997, O’Leary took the opportunity to call in on Richard Emerson. ‘Richard was a legend among home brewers and those who were starting out — it wasn’t because he was deaf, but because the beers were stunning and quite edgy back in those days. While we were in Oamaru with the in-laws I told Aggie I wanted to meet this guy, so I said, “I’m going down to Dunedin for the day to visit Richard.”’

The first time Chris came to the brewery in Dunedin, the phone rang. I said, ‘Chris, can you answer the phone? I don’t usually get people to do this, but you’re here.’

It was an unusual phone call from Australia. They wanted to know if I was prepared to come over to Australia to pick up a significant prize from their beer awards. Chris was quite shocked to be part of that process, telling me that I’d won a trophy for the Weissbier.

The organisers of the Australian International Beer Awards wanted Richard to come to Melbourne to receive his first major trophy. Richard had no spare cash to pay for airfares and accommodation, and his parents were overseas on holiday so he couldn’t ask them for money. Alistair Smillie, a director of Emerson’s, stepped up and brokered a deal with the National Bank to sponsor one of their customers. The sponsorship for the trip totalled a princely $778. That such a slender sum couldn’t be found for such a momentous occasion illustrates the tight nature of the brewery’s finances. The three-piece suit Richard wore to the awards came from the Salvation Army store. ‘Someone had died in it but that was okay — it looked brand new.’

When Richard’s parents arrived home from their overseas holiday soon afterwards, Richard went to the airport to pick them up and told them they had to divert past the brewery to pick up batteries for a hearing aid that he’d left there. ‘We said it was okay, but really we wanted to get home,’ Ingrid remembered. ‘And when we got to the brewery everybody was there. In our absence, Richard had won a trophy for Weissbier in Australia and this was the celebration — we couldn’t believe it.’

After that phone call, the friendship between Chris and Richard grew, built on beer, sausages … and faxes.

Chris would come down every few months and we’d brew a beer together and we became very good friends. On another visit, we arranged to get some Weissbier sausages to eat with the Weissbier, but we started drinking a bit too early and got hungry. We decided the best way to cook the sausages was in the electric jug — to boil the sausages in there. It seems like a crazy thing to do, but I can only explain it by saying we are both very passionate and we wanted to get on with it and it was the only way to cook them. The kettle would boil over and switch itself off, and we’d turn it on again until they were done. The coffee in the brewery tasted like sausages for a long time. It took weeks to get the smell out of the jug and remove all the fat.

The pair communicated by sending hand-scrawled faxes back and forth between Hastings and Dunedin. They routinely sat in front of their respective televisions — Richard’s with closed captions — a beer at hand, watching Planes and Automobiles with Robbie Coltrane, and sending faxed sheets of commentary to and fro.

The pair became early adopters of ICQ, one of the first internet-based instant message services that paved the way for Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other similar tools. ‘When we got ICQ, we’d communicate daily for many years from the late nineties to the early 2000s,’ O’Leary said. ‘Then Nokia put out a special phone that they offered at a discount to deaf people — the Nokia Communicator — and you could call and fax from the phone. For Richard it was a game-changer.’

After learning the ropes at Roosters, O’Leary thought he had enough knowledge to go out on his own, so he set up Limburg Brewery. He brewed his beer at Roosters on his days off, making a signature Belgian Witbier (a wheat beer with coriander and orange peel) sold through Regional Wines & Spirits in Wellington.

‘Chris Harrison had capped my salary as he couldn’t afford to pay me any more — that’s why he let me brew on the weekends, but it got to the point where he said, “You might have to go out on your own.”’

Using his house as leverage and drawing on an investment from his parents, O’Leary gambled on making a success of his small regional brewery the way Richard had with Emerson’s. While aficionados still talk about Limburg beers in reverential tones, for various reasons unrelated to the beer, the business model didn’t work.

‘We started running out of money and the house was on the line. I had a shareholder who owned pubs — he kept saying, “Don’t worry about making a profit, focus on building a brand and one day Lion will buy you.” We borrowed more money from the bank to further invest in the brand. Richard was supportive and encouraging me, saying work with what you’ve got, don’t get ahead of yourself.’

Unlike Emerson’s — with George’s tight fiscal control ensuring growth came from cash flow — Limburg’s became heavily indebted. The business took on another shareholder, Craig Cooper, who today owns Bach Brewing. A restructure followed, but the money didn’t flow as freely as the beer and, at the bank’s suggestion, the business went into liquidation.

‘ANZ bank was brilliant and said the best thing we can do is call in the loan and see if your business partners will back it. If the partners come up with the money you’ll be fine; if they don’t you’ll lose your house, but you can untangle yourself from this situation and get out of the mess you have got into. We went into liquidation. We lost the house.’

Chris and Aggie had $5000 to their name after selling their Morris Minor van to a collector — at the time it was the oldest running vehicle of its type in the world. Chris had job offers from Mac’s waterfront brewery in Wellington and from Emerson’s. Richard’s pay offer was a lot less and Dunedin was further away, but Chris didn’t hesitate.

Before George had died, he and Richard had often talked about Chris coming to Emerson’s, but George always nixed the idea, saying the two couldn’t work together because they would clash.

‘George was right — our two egos would have clashed,’ Chris said. ‘But after the humbling time I’d been through, I wanted to focus on my family. In negotiating my contract with Emerson’s, I said, “I don’t want to front the business or go to trade shows — Richard is the front of the business, I just want to brew.”

‘I was stressed because of the business failing and I was drinking heavily at the time — it wasn’t good for our family. We decided to come to Dunedin because it felt like a much better place to bring up a family and we’ve never regretted it — Dunedin was the best thing to have happened to us. The city has been good to me; it’s the best place in the world to raise a family and the kids, and my family life, just blossomed. And working with Richard has created a sense of family too — being part of something and being included. I’d been through a rough time, but I came here to a sense of belonging with Emerson’s and Dunedin, which was such a nice place to be, compared with where we’d come from. And I got to work with my best friend — you couldn’t have asked for anything more — everything lined up to make us happy.’

While Chris insisted that he didn’t want to be out the front of the business or going to trade shows, his closeness to and understanding of Richard meant that he often found himself helping out at these events.

One of the pitfalls in lip-reading is discovering that someone is already talking to me and I swing my head around to read their lips, but the critical first few words have been missed. That makes working out the context of the sentence even harder: was it a directive or a question? Many times I would have to ask the person to repeat the sentence to harvest the information, so I could ensure I got the context right.

Lip-reading a group is even more challenging, as it’s even harder to grasp the subject of the conversation before letting my mind go forth with information to add to the conversation. I’ll never forgot the look on my mates’ faces at an Indian restaurant when I had been trying hard to follow the dialogue going on with a group of half-a-dozen of them, picking up key words here and there. I swore they were talking about poppadums, given we were sitting in an Indian restaurant that made sense, so I piped up that ‘I liked the flavoured ones and the ones they have here have a good texture …’

My friends stopped talking, mouths open, silent for a moment then burst out laughing. I couldn’t figure out why my comment was that funny until someone commented that they had changed conversation topic and were talking about condoms! Aaaargh!

My mates could see the lighter side of things and this does show how difficult it is to follow a conversation and the danger of the topic changing just when you think you have it sussed.

As a result of misunderstandings like the poppadum–condom mix-up, Richard often compensates for the risk of losing the thread by taking charge of the conversation and steering it to safe ground. This habit annoyed George who would admonish his son, saying, ‘Richard! You need to listen! You’re not listening.’

BOOKBINDER

While London Porter launched Emerson’s, the beer that helped the growth of the business came in the form of a 3.7 per cent English-style bitter, distinguished by the use of New Zealand hops, all created from a recipe scribbled on the back of an envelope. Bookbinder, or Bookie as it’s affectionately known, was launched at the annual Victoria Fete in Oamaru, where Richard wanted a lower-alcohol ‘session’ beer to go alongside London Porter and 1812. He wanted to make what he called ‘a four-pinter beer, low in alcohol compared with London Porter and 1812’. He wrote the recipe on the back of an envelope the night before he made it, aiming to create a beer that was juicy and refreshing. ‘I used a touch of black malt to change the pH and the colour. I used some New Zealand hops and it was just what I was looking for.’ The name Bookbinder comes from the fact Richard has two friends who are both bookbinders by trade — high school friend David Stedman and Michael O’Brien from Oamaru, who now brews his own beer under the Craftwork label alongside partner Lee-Anne Scotti.

And some days, that’s exactly what he prefers to do. When tired, or surrounded by too much background noise, Richard finds communication difficult and has become adept at pretending not to understand or even avoiding eye contact altogether to avoid being dragged into conversation destined to go in circles.

Chris remembers one beer festival where Richard stood at the Emerson’s stand with Jim Falconer. When a punter walked up to them and said, ‘I understand Richard Emerson’s here, I’d love to meet him,’ Richard pointed to Jim and said, ‘That’s him!’ and promptly wandered off.

On the flipside, Richard often understands far more than he ‘hears’. At an event at The Malthouse bar in Wellington, a variety of brewers — including Chris — played host to a debate on various issues in the industry. At the end of it, members of the audience had a chance to ask questions.

From his spot on the podium, Chris could see Richard seated in the front row of the audience facing the panel, so he could read the conversation. Part of the debate had been about the difference between kegged beer and bottled beer. In those days Bookbinder came as a keg-only beer and hadn’t yet been put into bottles — despite growing demand for it.

Someone at the back of the room asked a question about bottled Bookbinder. Before anyone could answer, Richard stood, turned to face the audience and said, ‘The reason Bookbinder is not in the bottle is …’

‘People were absolutely astounded,’ O’Leary said. ‘And I said, “There it is, people, Richard has been having you on all these years — he’s not deaf at all!”’

It stands as an example of Richard’s skill in judging the course of the conversation — he’d followed the panellists and figured where it might head. He’d heard the question about Bookbinder in bottles so many times in the past, he’d braced himself for the question and as soon as he thought he heard the word ‘Bookbinder’ he jumped to his feet to answer.

Lip-reading is not always so straightforward, however, and often comes with hazards attached. For most people, walking and talking at the same time provides little difficulty. Not so for Richard, with friends losing count of the number of times he’s walked into lamp-posts, parking meters, signs or other obstructions because his head is turned to watch the faces of those walking beside him.