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!