Canned heat

Apologies folks, this is probably coming to you too late – but on Saturday in the Coromandel area there’s a festival that’s too good to miss.
Rising Can is a celebration of food, music and – most importantly – beer.
But not just any beer – here, we’re talking canned beer.
Canned beer is enjoying a resurgence as craft breweries around the country reclaim this ultimate form of packaging, which for years was synonymous with cheap beer bought in bulk.
Portable, easily disposable (try crushing an empty glass bottle with one hand) and offering beer the best environment for long-term storage (devoid of light and oxygen), cans are also a bright canvas for some pretty innovative labelling and branding.
The Rising Can Festival is a celebration of canned beer made by Garage Project, Three Boys, Baylands, Leigh Sawmill and Hot Water Brewing, and is being hosted at what has to be one of the most unusual breweries in the country: a camping ground.
Located on the road between Tairua and Whitianga, not far from the turn-off to the celebrated Hot Water Beach in Coromandel, the Seabreeze Holiday Park is an old dairy farm converted to a campground that houses a great little restaurant and the wonderfully named Hot Water Brewery. Brewer Dave Kurth has forged a reputation as one of the rising stars of the Kiwi beer scene, cemented by a haul of medals at the recent Brewers Guild awards.
His Kauri Falls Pale Ale is among the best in the country, but the latest additions are what have me excited. The About Time IPA is a perfectly weighted, unctuous, bitter-sweet gem but the beer I’m head over heels about is Kurth’s barley wine.
Not many Kiwi breweries produce this traditional English style, which is not really a wine, though the term perfectly suits its sleek, high-alcohol richness. Hot Water Brewing’s Barley Wine (9.5 per cent) offers hints of honey, poached plums and chocolate-coated raisins and is as sleek as cat’s fur. Barley wine, like wine made from grapes, is designed to age, changing character over the years to take on notes of sherry or morph towards dessert wine styles like muscat. While this toddler drinks absolutely stunningly now, I look forward to seeing how it ages – and because it is produced in a can, it should be able to sit in the cellar for many years to come.
So, while I apologise for the late notice about the Rising Can Festival, I’m giving you plenty of notice about this beer: get it early and get a lot – and enjoy drinking it in years to come.

This article will appear in Your Weekend magazine on November 8