CHAPTER 12

A WEDDING, A DEATH AND PLENTY OF DRAMA

Richard and Norma on their wedding day at Bannockburn, Central Otago, with Norma’s daughter, Frances, and Richard’s mother, Ingrid.

One day, I broke my foot by kicking a keg because I was so frustrated at one of the staff. They were swearing at me; I felt I was being attacked and my integrity was being undermined. I had to leave the room because I was so frustrated and I went out and whack! I kicked the keg.

I went into the office and was complaining about how much it hurt. Chris told me, ‘It’s not broken. Don’t be so stupid.’ But I went down to accident and emergency, and it turned out it was broken.

Soon afterwards, I had to fly up to Wellington, and I said to Chris I’m a bit worried about getting deep vein thrombosis. Chris again said, ‘Don’t be so stupid. You won’t get deep vein thrombosis. Just get on the plane, and stop being a dick.’

The next thing, Chris gets a text from me: ‘You won’t guess where I am, I’m in hospital with a blood clot. On warfarin.’ The doctor said, ‘You can’t drink when you’re on warfarin.’ And I said, ‘But I’ve got a brewery! I have to do quality control.’

I did some more research online and discovered that I could have one pint a day. Chris was livid. He said that’s seven pints a week and not even he has that much.

Everyone who knows Richard knows that drama follows him like a loyal dog. He seems to pull chaos out of the air. Even if it’s not a major drama, a conversation with Richard Emerson will be filled with table thumping, waving hands, shouts of joy or frustration — he’s a physical, animated, robust character.

The high energy and sense of boundless adventure that defined his boyhood and carried him through the first 15 years of Emerson’s remained, but as the brewery continued to grow and staff numbers increased, the burden on Richard started to stretch him.

Jim Falconer, who’d progressed from being a labourer doing ‘donkey work’ to a brewing role, described Richard in the early days of Wickliffe Street as ‘manic, a whirlwind — he just did everything and he had so much energy’.

All that energy coupled with his sense of responsibility meant Richard tried to do too much. He’d always been a person prone to frustration — at not being understood, at being unable to understand some people, at not knowing how to pronounce a word he’d never seen before, at missing out on things that others took for granted. Add to that the frustration of being deaf and trying to run a large business — it was just exhausting.

‘Richard gets very tired,’ Chris O’Leary said. ‘That comes from late nights championing the brand, and constantly having to work to understand people really tires him out. He’s like an Energizer Bunny — he goes and goes and then crashes.’

With Chris on board and looking after the brewing side of the operation, Richard could retreat from that aspect of the business, but the reduction in brewing work was more than overtaken by other roles. As the face of an increasingly well-known brand, Richard often travelled to events around the country such as tastings and festivals as part of the company’s marketing strategy.

He also began to play less of a management role. By his own admission, Richard struggled with people management. He’d gone from working on his own, with family and friends helping, to having one, two and then a handful of staff. But at Wickliffe Street the staff numbers — and the associated issues — had grown to a point where his usual practice of talking to people one-on-one became too time-consuming and increasingly fraught. When it came to discussing personal matters, for instance, Richard’s disability made it difficult for both him and his staff to deal with issues as a normal business might.

EVERYONE WHO KNOWS RICHARD KNOWS THAT DRAMA FOLLOWS HIM LIKE A LOYAL DOG. HE SEEMS TO PULL CHAOS OUT OF THE AIR.

Graeme Berry could see all this and decided the time had come for him to step aside from his de facto management role and hire a professional manager. After years of loyal service to George and the brewery, he retired and Bob King came in as manager.

Bob became integral to the business, but not without the teething problems associated with the unusual dynamic at Emerson’s, which required him to do what many others had found impossible: manage Richard. ‘People were reverential towards him — they were evangelical in their devotion and commitment to the beers. It was like a cult for some people who had followed the brand from the early days. And Richard was the brand. But he wasn’t the majority shareholder — many people didn’t realise that. As general manager, you’re there with a founder who’s also an employee — it was a difficult balancing act and led to reasonably robust discussions about things.’

The other area of dramatic change came with Chris O’Leary providing technical expertise to the operation that complemented Richard’s passion and understanding of flavours. For all his science background, Richard had succeeded to that point because he knew what worked flavour-wise, but as Chris soon discovered, technical issues occasionally impacted on the consistency of the beer.

O’Leary noted the Pilsner, for instance, had a signature fruity flavour note that came from the yeast being under stress and throwing off a fruit ester that, while complementary to the flavour profile of the hops, should not have been there.

The issue didn’t cause any problems because the beer had plenty of time to condition — that is, to sit in tanks for a few weeks before it was sold. ‘Beers clean up over time when they are brewed by people who understand the process, but as the Pilsner became more popular, we had to turn it around more quickly. We no longer had the luxury of that time. So we had to make sure everything about the brew was right — we needed a more healthy ferment, which meant putting in enough yeast, giving it enough oxygen — so it lost some of those stressed esters that gave the Pilsner its signature aroma people loved. The flavours changed but it was better brewed.’

Chris O’Leary, left, became Richard’s right-hand man at Emerson’s.

Since day one, Richard had used whole hops in his brewing rather than the dehydrated pellets widely used in most big breweries. There’s a shedload of extra work that comes from using whole hops as they soak up so much water, making it an unenviable and quite physical task to dig them out of a kettle after a brew. The brewery could handle the extra labour required for that when it was small. The brewers had developed a habit of leaving the hops in the kettle overnight to let them dry out as much as possible to make the digging easier, but increased production meant brewing every day instead of every second day, and that in turn meant the hops needed digging out the same day to have the kettle ready for the following morning’s brew. That forced a pragmatic switch to pelletised hops, which are much easier to dig out.

Around the same time, the Pilsner went from organic to non-organic. ‘We couldn’t get enough organic Riwaka hops, so we chose to maintain the flavour by using as much organic as we could and supplementing it with non-organic,’ O’Leary said. ‘The passion was for maintaining the flavour rather than trying to stay organic.’

Richard also used to brew Bookbinder in an open fermenter in the traditional English style, but that open fermenter could no longer handle all the Bookbinder they needed to brew. O’Leary moved the fermentation to a modern conical tank and the ‘geography’ of that tank had the effect of cleaning up the beer as it no longer sat on a large surface area of yeast, picking up some of the yeast’s flavour characteristics along the way. Instead of a volatile, fast fermentation in the open fermenter, the beer moved to a temperature-controlled environment. The process took longer, but resulted in a cleaner-tasting beer with a longer shelf life and fewer volatile aromas.

These moves represented big changes from the brewery’s perspective and while the integrity of Richard’s beers hadn’t changed — if anything they improved dramatically — some people started to notice that the products tasted different. That didn’t impact on sales though, as the market continued to drink every batch of Emerson’s as fast as it could be produced. Even when the odd problem surfaced and a query or complaint found its way back to the brewery, it was a moot point — the beer had gone.

One serious issue did have the potential to derail the business, however. At the end of one summer, a batch of Old 95 — an aged ale — had started to gush on opening, a sure sign a bug had crept into the system somewhere. The Old 95 had been stored high up in the warehouse where it was exposed to heat over the course of the summer allowing whatever had infected the beer to make itself known.

Chris raised the issue with Richard, saying, ‘Something’s not right.’

‘I was shitting myself — I’d only been there six months and was worried I’d wrecked a key beer. I sent the samples off for testing at the food science department at Otago University. A week later they came back with a plastic bag of agar plates they’d grown. They took out these plates, which had all these cultures growing on them. “What’s growing?” I asked. “Everything.” “Everything?” “Everything you can think of is growing.” Holy shit.

‘They suggested I go back through the process to find the source of this bacteria. I started with the bottling line, pulling it apart, and it didn’t take long to find this long piece of pink snot connected to the internal mechanism. The entire bottle-filling machine was filled with gunk. Everything was going through that machine — all our beers — but what saved us was the fact that back in those days the beer was drunk so fast there was not enough time for anything to grow. But the Old 95 had been aged and had gotten warm, so that had given the bugs time to grow.’

Once the machine had been cleaned, Chris had to find out how the bugs had burrowed their way into the system. He asked Richard if he had any clues. ‘Hmmm,’ said Richard, ‘I think I know.’

It turns out Richard — for all his great brewing nous — had made a fundamental error when bottling a porter that had been aged in whisky barrels. He’d pumped directly from the barrels into the bottling machine. Wooden barrels are notorious for being full of bacteria — it’s a quality that helps create sour beers — but it’s not something any brewery wants in its bottling line.

It was another sign that Richard had too much on his plate and it proved how critical it was to have the technical skills O’Leary brought to the business.

The biggest force for Richard’s success had always been his palate and his understanding of flavour and where it comes from — these combined with Chris’s technical ability were critical to Emerson’s evolution from a boutique brewery to a true powerhouse of the industry. ‘Chris is like a brother to me and having him come along helped me with running the business. Between the two of us — it was a good partnership.’

Like any ‘brother’, Chris looked out for Richard’s best interests. His arrival at Emerson’s in Dunedin coincided with Richard’s slow break-up with Marian, and it didn’t take long for Chris to play an instrumental role in setting up his friend on a blind date.

Chris was visiting his sister-in-law Josie in Christchurch, and she was saying a lot of Christchurch women she knew were lamenting the lack of good-quality men in the city. Chris being Chris said, ‘Who do you know who is looking?’ and asked Josie to list the qualities of women who were looking for men. One of them was a former broadcaster from South Africa and Chris thought I’d be interested, so he got her number.

A little while later, I was in Christchurch doing a beer dinner and I was just finishing, so I texted this woman, saying, ‘Hi, this is Richard Emerson — a friend of Josie’s — would you like to join me for a drink?’

She replied saying she had a daughter and couldn’t go out at such short notice. So I said, ‘You name a place for coffee tomorrow and I’ll be there.’

She was able to choose her own comfort ground and I met her at a café near the Christchurch Casino the next day. It was only meant to be a quick coffee, but it turned into more than an hour-and-a-half-long chat. I was quite taken by her. There was something that attracted me to her right away — there was a personal chemistry that I could smell. I kept thinking, ‘I love that smell; there’s something about her I like.’

We communicated by text a lot. At one point, my accountant Robyn drew my attention to the fact that my phone bill was getting high because there were 6000 texts one month … I didn’t worry about the cost, brushed it under the carpet.

We’d visit each other every weekend. It started being the case that on Fridays, I would say to Chris, ‘Well, Father, there’s not much to do around the brewery on a Friday afternoon. I suppose I could head up to Christchurch.’ So around one o’clock, I’d jump in the car and zoom up to Christchurch in time for dinner. I’d leave Christchurch at 4.30am on Monday morning to be back at the brewery to start work by 9.30.

Norma Odendaal had been through a pretty rough time when Richard Emerson contacted her with that out-of-the-blue text message.

She had worked as a journalist and TV presenter in South Africa. In the mid-to-late 1990s as South Africa transitioned from years of apartheid she and her husband Frans van Rensburg — who worked as a radio broadcaster — felt a rise in violent crime wasn’t conducive to raising children in the republic.

Norma had a son from a previous relationship, Julian, and she and Frans had a daughter, Frances. ‘As a journalist, I was seeing all the stories coming through from police on crime — the situation felt really bad — and we could only report a fraction of it. We couldn’t see how we could raise our children in that environment. We started looking at places to move to.’

The couple settled on New Zealand after considering Canada and Australia. They emigrated in 1997 and, after starting in Auckland, they settled in Christchurch when Norma got a job at Newstalk ZB. While they had escaped one life in South Africa, further personal trauma awaited them in their new home with both Norma and Frans diagnosed with cancer in 2001.

Norma had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy while Frans was diagnosed with bladder cancer — untreatable with chemotherapy. He died in 2005 and Norma was left to raise two children on her own. Julian was 16 and Frances was 10.

In 2007, Norma had found work for Environment Canterbury where she met Chris O’Leary’s sister-in-law. ‘Josie got a visit from Chris, who asked, “Do you have someone you can introduce to Richard?” Josie gave my number to Chris and then said to me, “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve given your number to someone.”

‘At that stage, I was starting to feel okay with being on my own — I certainly wasn’t in the market for blind dates. Then Josie explained to me this person was deaf … and I thought, “Okay, I really don’t have the energy to go through a blind date, let alone a blind date with a deaf person. It wasn’t about the disability — I just wasn’t interested.

‘Then I got a text from Richard asking to meet up for a drink — it was quite late and I said, “No, I can’t leave my daughter alone.” Besides, I was in my pyjamas, watching TV. So Richard said how about coffee next day. Okay.

‘We met at a café near Environment Canterbury and, lo and behold, we could talk! We communicated well in fact, and we had a lot in common. We started texting and emailing and then started seeing each other — not long after that Richard came up to Christchurch again and we went to Akaroa for the weekend.’

While they communicated well, Norma did have doubts about this new man in her life. ‘He’s got no tact, no filter, which upset me quite a lot when we first met. And he’s quite a paradox — on one hand he’s very self-focused, he can get accused of being selfish, but he has this amazingly generous streak too. I was thinking he’s both generous and selfish — what the hell is going on?’

When Norma said they had a lot in common, the coincidences make their relationship somehow seem predestined. Her late husband Frans had — like Richard — been a steam-train enthusiast, while she and Frans both loved good beer.

NORMA DID HAVE DOUBTS ABOUT THIS NEW MAN IN HER LIFE. ‘HE’S GOT NO TACT, NO FILTER, WHICH UPSET ME QUITE A LOT WHEN WE FIRST MET. AND HE’S QUITE A PARADOX — ON ONE HAND HE’S VERY SELF-FOCUSED, HE CAN GET ACCUSED OF BEING SELFISH, BUT HE HAS THIS AMAZINGLY GENEROUS STREAK TOO. I WAS THINKING HE’S BOTH GENEROUS AND SELFISH — WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’

In the days of sanctions in South Africa, the local brew, Castle Lager, ruled the roost and finding alternative beer proved difficult. Norma and Frans did find one bottle store that sold imported beer. ‘It was outrageously expensive, but every weekend we would go and buy a bottle of something, one each for a treat. I loved all of them — I realised beer can actually taste like something.’

When Norma and Frans moved to New Zealand, Frans struggled to find work and they had to be more frugal — and they found New Zealand craft beer too expensive — so their weekly treat became an imported beer of some description. Norma had fallen in love with Belgian beers. And when she fell in love with Richard, well, he came with his own supply of Belgian-style beers.

About the time Norma came into Richard’s life, another important person left it —Professor Jean-Pierre Dufour.

Belgian-born Jean-Pierre had arrived at the University of Otago in 1995, heading up the food science faculty. He had a strong interest in brewing — particularly in yeast cell metabolism and hop characteristics — and a passion for aroma.

One of his former students, Fork & Brewer’s Kelly Ryan, remembered ‘JP’ being so sensitive to garlic, he once stopped a lecture, saying he couldn’t concentrate because someone in the room had eaten garlic for lunch. The culprits — a group who’d had a curry for lunch — admitted as much and were ejected from the lecture theatre.

Dufour authored or co-authored papers on a range of subjects from how yeast can give beer a fruity character; identifying odour compounds in coriander; the assessment of different storage conditions on fresh salmon; how different essential oils affect hop aroma; and the characteristics of fresh bread aromas and how they affect consumers.

Richard’s love of aroma and flavour drew him to JP’s work and they built a strong relationship around Emerson’s beer. So much so that when JP was giving a lecture entitled ‘You, Louis Pasteur: 120 years of brewing science’, he asked Richard if he would be happy to supply the beer for it.

When Dad was still around, we heard there was going to be a new professor at the food science department at the university and that he was from Belgium. He’d heard about my brewery — I don’t know how — and he asked for our beer to be poured for his inaugural lecture, which was all about yeast.

It was a great lecture — he had an image of an animal representing the yeast. It was sucking in the liquid sugar, the wort, and it was farting C0₂ and pissing ethanol. He tried to explain that just as each animal had its own personal odour, that was what the yeast contributed to the flavour of the beer — its personal odour.

After that I got to know him more — he was invited along as a judge for the New Zealand Beer Awards and I always tried to spend time with him. I love Belgian beers and I wanted to learn about Belgian yeast strains.

Working with JP after that lecture, Richard made a 1200-litre brew of a Belgian Tripel, fermented in 120-litre batches with 10 different yeasts to see how each would react. It took Richard back to the way he’d tested different yeasts when home brewing, and together the two men rated all the beers. ‘I remember one of them smelt like PVA glue, which wasn’t very good. We tried them again as they got older and it was quite clear some were better than others — JP was keen to use all those beers to teach students about the flavour and aroma of different yeasts.’

After Otago, JP went to Ghana to try to improve the quality and techniques used in the production of sorghum beer in Africa. He died suddenly while attending a conference in Nigeria in 2007, at the age of just 54, leaving both Richard and many others in the New Zealand beer scene devastated. To this day, Emerson’s makes a JP beer, which is released on 2 June each year to mark the professor’s birthday.

JP was only in my life for a short time, but he had a big impact on me — I loved being able to talk to a professor about flavour. I was devastated, so I thought, as a way to honour JP, we’d take the best Belgian Tripel from those trial batches I’d done and make a beer in his honour. I also took fifty cents from the sale of each bottle and put it into a fund for the JP Scholarship.

After seven years of making JP, we built up quite a fund, but the university didn’t want anything to do with alcohol sponsorship. I was frustrated at this namby-pamby political correctness, so we worked outside the university by sponsoring the students directly. We’ve sponsored five students. The latest one was a carry-over of the previous project working on the relationship between yeast and hops.

I’m a firm believer that yeast affects hop-flavour outcome. Some breweries say they don’t like using a particular hop, but I think it could be that their house yeast doesn’t bring out the flavour attribute they are looking for in the hops. We are seeing some evidence that fermentation has influence on hops flavours, but we need more research to make it clear. You can brew the same beer with two different yeasts and it changes the hop profile completely.

In 2009, Norma became a New Zealand citizen and, with her daughter, she moved to Dunedin to take up a role with AgResearch at Invermay.

In September that year, Richard and Norma had planned a trip to South Africa, so he could meet her parents. In May, they decided to get married first and make the South Africa trip their honeymoon — but that meant some rushing around before the nuptials on 22 August.

First, Richard had to get divorced from Marian with all the legalities and paperwork that entailed. Only then could they plan the wedding day.

‘We thought it was too late to formally invite people to our wedding, so we decided to just send a notice out to our friends and family saying that we were getting married,’ Norma said. ‘In the letter, we acknowledged that it was late notice and that we did not expect them to be there, but that we would welcome them if they decide to come.’ Unfortunately, Norma’s son Julian couldn’t attend as he was doing his army training.

Around 20 people crammed into a ‘tiny but lovely’ church in the Central Otago wine-making town of Bannockburn for the ceremony. There, Richard had everyone in stitches with his typical impatience. ‘I remember being in the church and the minister just kept talking and talking, and eventually I interrupted to say, “Look, can I kiss my wife?’

A lunch at the Mt Difficulty winery ran well into the evening, as did a later party at the Wickliffe Street brewery put on for all those who couldn’t attend the Bannockburn celebration.

Just days after the wedding, and before they flew to South Africa, Richard claimed the most coveted prize in the New Zealand beer scene, with Emerson’s named Champion Brewery at the annual beer awards.

The occasion became more memorable — and immortalised — when friends spotted that Richard had turned up for the awards in Wellington wearing two different shoes.

On the morning of the awards, he’d woken in the dark in Dunedin, got dressed and travelled to Wellington wearing one brown shoe and one green shoe. Perhaps because he spends so much time looking at people’s faces, he didn’t notice the error during the day, and his travelling companion, Chris O’Leary, resisted the urge to set him straight — there was too much fun to be had from watching the comedy unfold.

When Richard found out during the awards dinner, he responded in a typically relaxed and self-effacing manner: ‘Oh well, at least I’m wearing one shoe from each of my favourite pairs.’

Not long after Richard and Norma had married, Richard’s tendency to sometimes get the wrong end of the conversational stick came back to bite him. Over a few drinks with Chris and Aggie, someone asked the question: if you could leave your partner for one night only, to have an affair, who would you pick? Richard misheard the question and blurted out ‘Percy Montgomery’ — the South African rugby fullback of the time.

Richard and Norma were married in 2009 – the same year Emerson’s was crowned New Zealand’s champion brewery.

Naturally, this didn’t fall under the old adage of ‘what happens on tour stays on tour’ as Richard later found out when he was stopped by a traffic cop near Palmerston.

I saw the flashing blue lights and pulled over. When the cop came up, I said, ‘Is there a problem, sir?’ I was pretty sure I hadn’t been speeding. I couldn’t understand what he was saying — he was a grumpy old cop and it was just ‘blah, blah, blah’ but he was pointing to the front of my car. I thought, ‘Have I hit something and not noticed?’ I got out and walked around the front where he was pointing and there was a cardboard sign taped to the front bumper that said: ‘I Love Percy’. My fucking workmates …

While settling into married life, Richard began to hatch another life-changing plan. All his life he’d been consumed by Central Otago Railway — those train-photographing trips with his father had built it into his DNA and now the time felt right to live a dream of moving to the country. With the brewery humming along with Bob King as manager and Chris O’Leary overseeing production, Richard no longer needed to be there for hours on end as he had in the past when he was brewer, manager, marketer and quality controller.

He had an eye for Middlemarch, which had become a busy country town in summer thanks to its destination as the start — or end — of the increasingly popular Otago Central Rail Trail. Richard had no qualms about making the one-hour commute to and from Dunedin.

‘Richard pulled us towards Middlemarch,’ Norma said. ‘He’s a sentimental person and feels really connected to the railway line because of his dad. I liked the idea of moving away from the city to the countryside.’

They bought the Middlemarch house in October 2010, but didn’t move there permanently until 2011. Norma’s daughter Frances, now 14, continued to go to school in Dunedin and would travel into the city with Richard each morning and home again after he finished work. Frances later started working at the brewery in the afternoons, filling bottles and running errands.

Apart from convincing Norma to move to a small rural town when she’d already downsized cities from Christchurch to Dunedin, he also needed to borrow money from his business for a deposit on a home. He presented his case to the board of directors, telling them he wanted to buy a house. The directors were happy to advance the money, but Richard, rather cheekily, omitted to tell them the location of his dream home.

Once the sale went through, it raised a few eyebrows among the directors for two reasons: Richard’s distance from the brewery and the cost of the commute — given he now planned to drive roughly 800 kilometres a week in his company vehicle. The petrol costs alone would put a large dent in the ledger.

Norma quickly built a life in Middlemarch. She’s on the local community board and has opened a café called Tap & Dough, serving pizza and beer to hungry and thirsty rail-trail riders.

‘In 2017, we did the rail-trail trip and every town had great pubs, great food. We met up with other rail trailers and the feeling was that Middlemarch didn’t have that to the same degree. There was a café-bar, but it wasn’t open many nights a week and then it closed.’

Norma and Richard decided to take over the lease at what used to be Quench. ‘It’s not going to be a great money-maker. It sounds altruistic but it’s not a lie — we thought we can’t let this happen to Middlemarch. The town wasn’t getting people stopping because it lacked venues for having a meal and a drink outside the pub. For rail-trail providers, there wasn’t an incentive to book people in Middlemarch.’

After the shift to Middlemarch, Richard had to start contemplating another move. The Wickliffe Street brewery he thought would be his last proved too small almost from the day it opened. Staff numbers had grown, production had increased and, by 2009, it became clear production would outpace capacity in the near, rather than distant, future.

As Jim Falconer noted, almost from day one, ‘the HIAB trucks kept coming, dropping off more tanks, and they didn’t stop’.

Some of this is captured in a SWOT — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats — analysis exercise Richard did in 2008. His handwritten notes record the weaknesses the brewery faced, including ‘Richard’s management skills’.

Threats came from the global financial crisis of the time, and a number of emerging rival ‘microbreweries’.

His strategy remained continuing to build the business a ‘pint at a time’ through customer loyalty and targeting ‘small, funky, local bars’.

The brand promised ‘A reliable sensory experience’.

Richard created what he called his big, hairy, audacious goal: ‘to be the best regional brewery in New Zealand with the most respected, reliable brand, and to be known for innovative beers and ideas’. Later, he appended that goal with another note: ‘To be the most sought-after craft beer in Australasia.’

In many ways, he’d already gone a long way to achieving that goal because Emerson’s had arguably become the best regional brewery in the country and it definitely produced some of the most respected and innovative beers on the shelves. And at that stage, whether Richard knew it or not, he had something that others coveted — his beer (and more so the brewery) had already become one of the most ‘sought-after’ in Australasia.