George and I recently had the pleasure of sitting down — for a record number of Beers Of The Week, amidst all the banter — with Stu McKinlay, notorious pants-wearer, and one half (give or take) of the Yeastie Boys. We crash-tested whether fresh is best, sampled some ill-fated beers from the Great Drought era, and heard the origin story for several individual beers and for the unique operation itself — before turning to industry-wide issues like collegiality in the beer business and the culture of consuming alcohol.

Requiring more We Do Not Here Represent Our Day Jobs than usual, George and I recently had a little ramble about a few potentially-controversial topics in the Beer Business: the ongoing shitfight-with-a-side-order-of-handwringing that is the Licensing Laws Debate, and the continuing evolution of the nation's most-senior beer festival, Beervana. My apologies — again!; you are an understanding lot — for the delay in posting, though there is something appropriate about getting my Afterthoughts out on the eve of the next (much littler) festival.

There are plenty of contentious little angles in both topics, and I find myself taking unusually-middle-ground-ish positions on each to which I might have to return in fuller detail some day, but here — off the cuff, in good company, and over a few beers — are some initial thoughts, at least...

And we're back. Though we're not quite as back as we intended. This happens to us, sometimes. George has been abnormally busy, post-holiday — though often with new-puppy-related duties about which he's not remotely about to complain — and I was diverted, in the actual around-Beervana-itself days, by ingloriously falling off my bike. But at last, we're back. Much (though by no means all) of the conversation was looking-ahead to events now past, but we're presenting them here mostly unvarnished and uncorrected so you can test how prescient and/or very-very-wrong we were. More generally, we ponder beer in cans (and drink one) and the burgeoning (but still finding-its-feet) world of the beer documentary.

Catching up for the first time in a while, and not long after a now-notorious kerfuffle over the 'Death From Above' beer put out by Garage Project (site of my day job, if you haven't already noticed), my fellow red-bearded beer writer Hadyn Green and I were about to have a ramble about potentially-offensive beer names when George leapt in and suggested / insisted we save it for a podcast episode. And here's the result.

George and I ventured out to the wilds of Newlands (which isn't very far at all, to be fair), and sat down with Aidan and Nikki of the freshly-launched Baylands Brewery, a fully-fledged commerical brewery on a tiny-tiny scale in their garage. We talk about the process of turning a hobby into a business, how it all nearly fell apart, and taste a couple of their beers — before moving on to the traditional round-up of news and recommendations.

Back with unusual promptness — which is hopefully a good omen — George and I sat down on Friday for a few beers and a somewhat-supersized season opener for another round of the podcast. We try a couple of new-ish releases, and one bottle that'd been sitting around waiting for the right occasion. And, unusually, one of our Beers of the Week turns out to be something of a dud, or at least a disappointment. Conversation turns variously to good and bad advice on glassware and temperature, the wealth of new developments in the local scene, and (inevitably, it seems) the origin-fudging that I complained about last time.

Determined to start a 'Year in Review' tradition, we ponder the year from our beery perspective. I give my recommendations for blog and website of the year, and George and I ponder our Beers of the Year -- and our particular Glasses of Beer of the Year. We also, without looking at year others' notes, have a stab at summing up 2012 as 'Year of the x' and wind up landing on rather-similar themes.

Catching up and determined to get back to the regular casting of pod, George and I sat down and — rather accidentally — wound up talking about the recent and surprising news of the sale of local darlings Emerson's — the craft beer gateway for both of us — to Lion; we happened not to've spoken to each other about it before hitting 'record'. Surprisingly, I found myself in the middle of the "debate", such as their was, and a little put out by nonsense on each side.

Debreifing after another -- of many -- busy periods in the local beer business, George and I sit down to drink, and talk about, the "Wellington in a Pint" series before also turning our attention to Beervana. We ponder the upsides and niggling downsides of both, while working our way through an incredibly-varied four-pack of beers.

We sit down with Steph and Jonny of Craft Beer College, a newly(ish)-formed outfit who run educational beer tastings. We talk beer-enthusiast origin stories, the joys of volunteering at beer festivals, and consumer education.

An experimental broadcast 'from the field', with reportage from Malthouse's fifth-annual West Coast IPA Challenge and from SOBA's Matariki / Winter Ales Festival.