8 Wired Brewing Limited

8 Wired Brewing Limited

I've always been a big traveller. And whereever I went, I was always interested in the local beer. In that sense, you could say I was always a beer geek, but obviously I wasn't: All I did was seek out the same style of bland lager with a different label. This all began to change in 2005 when my now wife, Monique, and I were living in Perth where I was finishing a master's degree in biochemistry. We were frequent visitors to the awesome Little Creatures brew pub in Fremantle and that's when we started to realise that there was a lot more to beer than the usual fizzy yellow stuff. For Christmas that year, Monique got me a small Cooper's homebrew kit: basically a plastic bucket, a can of malt extract and some yeast. The beer I made on this kit was terrible, but I was hooked. After moving to New Zealand in 2006 I became more serious and got in to advanced all-grain homebrewing. Finally, in September 2008, I decided to quit the biochemistry – I was researching Kina (sea urchins) at the University of Auckland at the time – and upscale to commercial brewing. The initial plan was to open a brewpub somewhere on the upper North Island. To get some commercial experience we shifted down to Blenheim where I had landed a job with Renaissance Brewing Company. The plan was to stay for three months but years later we are still in Marlborough. Rather quickly we realised that running your own brewery is a huge investment, both in your finances and your time. So, instead of starting our own we decided to ‘contract brew’ using Renaissance equipment. Even when I was brewing the aforementioned Cooper's kit in Perth, I actually had in the back of my mind that this could turn into something big. It wasn't until 2008 that thought really took shape though. We did a road-trip through the USA and stopped by every brewpub we passed (the US is miles ahead of most countries when it comes to craft beer). This is where I decided that I wanted to give pro brewing a shot when we got back to New Zealand. For all you Non Zealanders, No 8 Wire (it was the 8th type of wire in the catalogue) is a specific gauge of wire originally used for electric fencing. In New Zealand it's use is much more widespread than that though, Kiwi's have used it to fix just about anything, from cupboards to cars, because it was versatile and readily available. Over the years it has become a symbol of the kiwi ingenuity, their ability to fix any problem no matter how limited the resources. We think this fits our company pretty well: We don't have the resources nor the abilities to run our own brewery, so we make do with what we have. We also think that all our beers have a certain amount of ingenuity, ingenuity in flavour we like to call it. “8 Wired”, as opposed to the more traditional term “No 8 wire”, is to symbolize that our beer is not old school Kiwi draught, kiwi lager and kiwi dark, in fact it is the exact opposite. Still, we're keeping it as Kiwi as we can through the ingredients we choose to use.