New Zealand Moa Brewery

When the Moa Brewery was built it was plonked between the vines in the world famous winemaking region of Marlborough, New Zealand, which isn’t surprising considering the founder of Moa, Josh Scott, is a winemaker and according to him, “It takes a lot of beer to make a good wine”. Conveniently, it’s quite a nice place to live and provides the perfect environment for brewing.

The name “Moa” (New Zealand’s giant dinosaur bird) also derives from the region, as in the early days Josh hand delivered brews to archaeologists working a Moa bone dig near the brewery. Even half-drunk they found some Moa bones, so archaeology can’t be that hard.

Moa Beer itself is brewed using traditional costly, inefficient and labour intensive techniques, with a focus on local ingredients, including internationally renowned New Zealand hops. It is rounded off through the use of winemaking techniques, like barrel ageing and bottle fermentation and conditioning (like they do with Champagne).

We could go out tomorrow and buy the same robots and machines that other breweries use instead of people. Machines that make beer syrup and inject fizz, machines that pump out 1,000 bottles a minute and zoom down those cool conveyers. But instead we invite grief into our lives by brewing the way beer used to be brewed 100 years ago.

We have won awards all over the world by brewing this way and have even heard people from far away places like Singapore, Oregon, Antarctica and Auckland exclaim, “Finally, something drinkable from Marlborough”.