Long Weekend Beerly Reading

The Southern Cross Tavern is a striking example of the change in attitudes to drinking and beer in New Zealand. This article - reprinted with the kind permission of the Wellingtonian newspaper - charts the evolution from booze barn to beer bar:

In my first year of university, the Southern Cross Tavern was a drinking establishment of near mythical stature. Virtually every day, a line of hopeful, nervous students would queue up to the door hoping to partake of $2 jugs of Lion Brown, complete the epic ‘Round the World’ beer challenge or even endure the exquisite horror of the ‘bladder buster’ – cheap drinks until some unlucky person went to the bathroom.

The Salient Beer Column returns for 2008 and the first column can be read here:

“Beer” and “university” go together as naturally as “essay” and “leaving it to the last minute.”

The second column details the various beers and bars which continue to vex me - My Beer Nemeses if you will:

My first real Beer Nemesis was the lamentable range of Fruit Hopper beers. Many gentle readers will be too young to recall these beers (at least legally), but they were generic lagers mixed with what tasted very much like different flavours of Raro and then over-carbonated in a Soda Stream machine. Shortly after a press release went out extolling their strong sales, they were quietly taken off the market and possibly re-released as Lift Plus.