dive bar photo
Pic­ture pinched from their Face­book site

Open­ing this Fri­day is anoth­er craft beer bar called Gold­ing’s Free Dive, at 14 Leeds Street. That’s right by Piz­za Pomodoro, for those of you play­ing along at home, and they’ll be mak­ing full use of their loca­tion.

Golding’s Free Dive con­ve­nient­ly shares the court­yard with Pomodoro Piz­za, which is just as well as Pomodoro will deliv­er a piz­za to your table to accom­pa­ny your tasty craft beer or you can choose an item from the in-house menu.

We’re excit­ed about this, and it sounds like it’s going to be a good casu­al bar with a great range of drinks, but this quote from the press release had the Welling­ton­ista email list abuzz (or as abuzz as it gets these days now we do most of our exclaim­ing on Twit­ter).

“What we real­ly want­ed to do is get away from the cook­ie-cut­ter bars which seem to be infest­ing the city these days where big brew­eries throw mon­ey at bar own­ers, in return for stock­ing their prod­uct and fol­low­ing their rules. There’s a cer­tain type of crowd these bars attract, but they can dri­ve away every­one else who just wants to sit and enjoy a drink.”

Now, per­haps we are trapped in our own wanky bub­ble, but are there actu­al­ly many cook­ie cut­ter bars open­ing up these days? Every­thing seems to be try­ing to be inde­pen­dent and quirky. Even Bin44 which has the most bland inte­ri­or ever this side of the Tap Haus (and could des­per­ate­ly use some mag­a­zines or news­pa­pers for its lunchtime din­ers) has a big range of craft beers on tap and has played host to Garage Project tap takeovers and the like.

One ‘ista said “When does Peak Craft Beer hap­pen?” and anoth­er replied “I have this the­o­ry that craft beer now is about where cof­fee was 3–5 years ago. We’ve even got the *hausen play­ing Mojo. So in a cou­ple of years it should frag­ment into uber-hip­ster and gener­ic-and-very-slight­ly-bet­ter-than-the-Estab­lish­ment.”

Like I said, we are look­ing for­ward to going to Gold­ing’s Free Dive (though should­n’t “dive” be a term some­one else calls you, not some­thing you can call your­self?), but I wan­na know what the next big trend will be. Your thoughts in the com­ments, thanks!