Winter ain't all bad

So July has been and gone in a flash, it was quite a busy month for us actually. The 1st of the month saw us head down to Christchurch to be part of A mid winter's ale festival. It was the 3rd annual beer festival hosted by Eagle brewing at the Rolleston community centre and it was a great event as always, especially for Emporium Brewing as we completely sold out of all our beer just 10 mins before the end, perfect! Packing the car up to go home was a breeze with all those empty kegs, see you next year Rolleston!

Business in Kaikoura has been as slow as expected over winter, road access has been even more intermittent than usual with heavy snow and rain playing havoc at times. The view from our window of the fresh snow is stunning though, and despite the poor weather over the school holidays we still managed to get a record 50 people playing mini golf one day! Boom.

Kaikoura's population has increased since the earthquake with the influx of road workers helping to get us re-connected with the rest of the country. We are so grateful for all the work they do as day by day we get a little bit closer to getting that all-important road open. We are especially grateful to our new neighbours, Spraymarks who are occupying the section next door - thanks to them we now have a lovely smooth driveway with not a pot hole in sight! Cheers Spraymarks!

We are finally getting there with the plans for the installation of the brewery and have all the tradies lined up to start work as soon as possible, so hopefully by the time we write our next blog post we'll have some actual progress to show you! We have also lined up an architect to get started on the escape room plans which is really exciting, all being well we'll have a least one room up and running by the end of the year.

In other good news, we have a new retailer of our beers here in Kaikoura. The Pier Hotel are now serving 500ml bottles of Obsidian, Run for the hills, and Enigmatic. It's seems to be selling really well there, no doubt credit to their awesome staff who know how to recognise a decent beer. It is well worth a visit if you are in town as they do fantastic food too.

Our new bottle labels being modelled in front of the freshly snow capped Kaikoura ranges.