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hey there’s the guy who made those amaz­ing donuts, there’s that beer pho­tog­ra­ph­er who also took the incred­i­bly out of date por­trait of the ‘ista that we use on our twit­ter account, there’s that ex ‘ista guy who also used to write a beer col­umn for fish­head, there’s that dude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.