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If you’ve played for the All Blacks, you’ve pretty much got it made in New Zealand.

“Deification” doesn’t come close.

I’ve known 3: “Snow” White, who lived down the next road in Northcote, Kel Tremain, whose brother went to Northcote Primary with me, and Bill Clarke, Robin Fullmer’s Dad.

In Nelson, there’s Terry McCashin who bought the old Rochdale Cider Company in Stoke in the early 1980s and turned it into the most successful independent microbrewery in the country.

In fact, the ONLY other brewing company, apart from NZ Breweries and Dominion Breweries who’d split up the market and pumped out ice-cold (to paralyse your tastebuds) watery piss thin lager in horrendous quantities.

Terry stuck to the Bavarian purity laws of 1516 – malt, hops, yeast and water

They started off using cider bottles with a tear-tab seal and were such a massive hit that the brand got snapped up by Lion Nathan in 1999.

Usual rebranding exercise, usual closure of smaller production facilities and by the time they’d finished, Mac’s beer was nothing like what it used to be.

Fast forward to 2009.

Dean, Terry’s son, moves back into the old brewery and starts brewing under the Stoke brand.

Local hero status gives them a kickstart, they open a café with coffee from Sublime, run a Saturday market that starts just after the Nelson Saturday market finishes and take off again.

Good beer, too….

06 Mar This entry was published on 6 March, 2011 at 12:00. It’s filed under (Not) the Nelson Daily Photo, not the nelson daily photo and tagged nelson, stoke, Terry McCashin. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.