BEER WRITER CROWNED Don’t spill your pints, guys, because New Zealand has a newly crowned Beer Writer of the Year for 2017 - and it’s a woman! Auckland beer writer Alice Galletly has soundly beaten the blokes to top beer journalism’s pinnacle of success, and Brewers’ Guild’s Martin Bennett says it was the sheer force of personality in her writing that clinched the deal. “As one judge said, the winning writing was ‘entertaining, witty, open, personable and engaging. Reading it makes you feel like a friend who’s been invited in for a beer and a chat’,” Bennett says. “Another judge wrote: ‘Funny, feminist, feminine, while still being massively accessible, knowledgeable, wry, and with lashings of personality’.” Galletly, who writes a regular column in Air New Zealand magazine Kia Ora, attributes her win to those columns and her book ‘How to Have a Beer’. “It’s a very non-serious, personal guide to enjoying beer, full of silly anecdotes and jokes”, she says. Galletly’s first foray into beer writing was in 2011 with her ‘Beer for a Year’ blog, where she tasted and recorded her thoughts about a different beer each day for a year. “It was an incredibly exciting time to be writing about beer because it was all so new,” she says. “Here we’d been used to drinking these bland lagers for so many years and all of a sudden you could buy coffee porters and smoked ales and IPAs. I wanted everyone to be as excited about all this new beer as I was, and that’s pretty much what spurred me on to write the blog.” She knew very little about beer at the time. “I don’t think I even honestly knew what beer was made of! I probably wrote a lot of rubbish,” she says. “But over the course of the year I learned a lot, and got to know lots of lovely people in New Zealand’s beer community. People always ask me if I got sick of beer during that year, but I’m still drinking and writing about it six years later, so clearly not!” Her approach to beer writing is always to write for non-geeks first and foremost, and to make it as fun and accessible as possible. Galletly says she’s thrilled to be crowned top this year. “Of course I’m thrilled. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, because although we don’t have a huge pool of beer writers in New Zealand, the overall quality is high. "How to Have a Beer" is published by Awa Press. www.foodtechnology.co.nz 9 BACON SALT GETS SNORT OF APPROVAL Charlie the kune kune pig is one lucky hog. A much-loved member of the extended Prenzel Distilling Company family in Blenheim, the pampered six-year-old has spurred the creation of a special meat-free, bacon-flavoured salt so staff at the boutique distillery can enjoy their bacon cravings without guilt. Prenzel production manager Linda Johnstone says the vegan bacon salt is fat-free and gluten-free, and solves the issue of not being able to look Charlie in the eye when tucking into bacon sarnies at lunchtime. “No one who tried it can tell the difference between it and what they imagine ‘smoked Charlie’ would taste like!” she says. Bacon salt is popular overseas but is not established in the local market, much to the concern of loved pets like Charlie, who spends his days at the Riverlands distillery south of Blenheim being admired and fed. He even sits for treats, and gets rubbed in oil during hot days to protect his skin from the sun – last year he spent his summer covered in Prenzil rosemary oil and “smelt gorgeous,” Johnstone says. Charlie has lunch with the team on sunny days, after being adopted from a former employee who moved south. His friend and companion Dolly the sheep died a year ago, so Johnstone is looking for another companion or a new home with other pigs for the popular pet. Prenzel Distilling learnt its expertise in extracting and handling the flavours derived from fruits, herbs and other plants after becoming New Zealand’s first distiller of European-style fruit brandies such as Kirsch, Pear William and Marc. In 1989, French distilling expert Robert Wuest visited company founders Hugh and Chris Steadman’s cherry orchard, organising for a distillery saved from destruction in post-WWII France to be shipped to New Zealand for use in their back shed. Four years later, the distillery won a gold medal for its Pear William brandy at Destillata in Austria, and in 1995 produced a range of liqueurs produced for and autographed by the South African rugby team. Prenzel Direct – a marketing and sales arm that offered in-home tasting ‘party plans’ – was established in 1997, and infused olive oils introduced to provide a social balance between beverage and food. Since the early 1990s, Prenzel has been supplying top-end bakeries with spirit-based baking concentrates which deliver authentic alcohol-based food ingredients. The company says its flavours are the real deal. “The difference this makes in a finished product is considerable,” Johnstone says. “Synthetic rum flavour for instance, though extremely cheap, will usually consist of a single, dominant key-note. On the other hand, Prenzel’s natural rum blend contains multiple layers of subtle flavours. Our baking concentrates are what they say they are – concentrated. These alcohols typically leave the distillery at 60% alcohol and contain up to four times the flavour that would be expected of a beverage designed for retail consumption,” she says. The baker has room therefore to fine-tune the taste, texture and moisture content of the fruit mince, all the while saving time and money. www.prenzel.com
FT-Nov17-eMag
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