Chasing the Black Dog with beer

Last night we went to the open­ing of the new Black Dog brew­ery on Cuba Street, and, spoil­er alert, it was bloody delight­ful.

All pics were sup­plied by the pub­li­cist because if you fol­low us on Twit­ter, you’ll know I can­’t pho­to­graph for shit.

A con­fes­sion: I had nev­er been to the old Black Dog brew­ery when it was up on Blair Street. To be hon­est, I do all I can to avoid the Cour­tenay Quarter on Fridays/Saturdays and I’m not the beer­i­est Wel­ling­to­ni­an of all (nor the bear­i­est, to my relief – that would prob­ably be Tom?), so W’ista Jess was sur­prised to see it was me who was tweet­ing about the open­ing on our twit­ter account. But I do like bars, and beer, even if I prefer often prefer wine. So I was keen to get along and see what was going on.

There is def­in­itely a sense of famili­ar­ity and fam­ily in a craft beer bar in Wel­ling­ton – oh hey there’s the guy who made those amaz­ing donuts, there’s that beer pho­to­graph­er who also took the incred­ibly out of date por­trait of the ‘ista that we use on our twit­ter account, there’s that ex ‘ista guy who also used to write a beer column for fish­head, there’s that dude who is the may­or of the city. But it’s import­ant to note that I think there were almost as many women there as men, and of the men there, only half of them had beards. Per­haps 2018 is the year the chin makes a comeback.

And speak­ing of fam­ily, yes, Black Dog is owned by DB, but amongst the dozen beers on tap were col­lab­or­a­tions with For­tune Favours (Dogs of For­tune, a Bel­gian IPA), Tuatara (First Respon­der Pacific Ale) and the Fork & Brew­er (Guava Ber­liner). And there were beers made to sup­port the SPCA (Stray-PA) and the Wel­ling­ton free ambu­lance (First Respon­der), along with the Dog range that you can view on their web­site which are avail­able in oth­er DB bars like the Portlander. Kris spoke to the brew­er and he said that they don’t see the many oth­er craft brew­er­ies in Wel­ling­ton as com­pet­i­tion for sales, they see them as com­pet­i­tion to do bet­ter. Awww.

There are six­teen taps on offer (though they were out of the Sais­on on the night) and you can get a tast­ing paddle of six for $20 or eight for $26, I believe, if you wanna try lots of them in a sens­ible fash­ion (obvi­ous dis­clos­ure: beers were flow­ing freely for open­ing night, we did­n’t pay).

Food for the open­ing was provided by Beat Kit­chen who matched it to the beers (for example an APA aioli on the fried chick­en). It was bloody clev­er of them to get the truck in  to provide a sol­id base to try many dif­fer­ent kinds of beers on. I checked with the pub­li­cist after­wards, and so I’m able to tell you dur­ing reg­u­lar hours of oper­a­tion:

“The food on offer at the brew­ery will be pizza via the pizza oven and bur­gers and shar­ing plates thanks to our Cuba Street neigh­bours, Grill Meats Beer, Wel­ling­ton Sea mar­ket and Heav­en Pizza.”

I really like this idea, mak­ing use of already exist­ing resources and build­ing neigh­bourly bonds (although does it res­ult in few­er employ­ment oppor­tun­it­ies? Per­haps).

But let’s talk about the space itself. Down­stairs is an indus­tri­al-look­ing space with great big vats where the beer is brewed, and beside it are a num­ber of tables & stools. I’m told in the com­ing weeks they will have tanks and grow­er fill sta­tion set up for cus­tom­ers to take away beer as they have both an on-license & and off-license. Last night the space housed “innov­at­ive acous­tic artist” Graeme James who abso­lutely delighted Kris with his cov­ers. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any­one else cov­er the White Stripes AND 5ive on the fiddle, so that was an exper­i­ence in itself.

Upstairs is a much warm­er space, with leath­er ban­quettes & tables, the walls & ceil­ing painted a cosy black and mid-cen­tury mod­ern light fix­tures.

Across one wall is a mur­al depict­ing the brand’s col­lab­or­at­ive spir­it brought to life by loc­al Wel­ling­ton artists Kelly Spen­cer, Mica Still and Sean Duffell.

They also have the usu­al spir­its behind the bar, with a decent selec­tion of whisky, and while I did­n’t see a wine list I did see people with wine in their hands so it must be on offer too. It’s a lovely space, with com­fort­able seat­ing and we spot­ted magazines and board games, so I can def­in­itely ima­gine set­tling in for an after­noon or two. We may make jokes about “phew, FINALLY someone opened a beer bar in Wel­ling­ton!” and of course often a bar exper­i­ence is only as good as the crowd it attracts, but I very much enjoyed the place. I’ll be back.

Just a couple of notes on access­ib­il­ity – the bar upstairs is up some steep con­crete steps. The down­stairs area has a wheel­chair access­ible toi­let, but I only saw high tables and back­less stools (though fur­niture could eas­ily have been put aside to make space for the open­ing night crowd). The bath­rooms both upstairs and down are single self-con­tained rooms, marked with someone in a dress and someone in pants (or per­haps com­pletely naked) (and someone in a wheel­chair down­stairs). There’s no mir­ror in the upstairs bath­room (yet?) but if you’re there at night you might be able to catch your reflec­tion in the win­dow if you need to fix your lip­stick.