Canucks → Kiwis: Dunedin also loves Speight's

Another Dunedin claim to fame is the Speight's Brewery, one of New Zealand's oldest breweries!

We went on a pretty sweet Brewery Tour here put on by an old retired fellow who once partied hard in Calgary with some oil boys in his youth... Nice little coincidental start to our experience!

It was a pretty standard, informative tour! What interested me the most (yes yes, I'm so geeky) is the actual operation of the tour. He had a standard looking remote control which he pointed at little receptacles on the ceiling to advance the tour (lights would turn on ahead, turn off behind, recordings would begin/end, etc)... Pretty advanced stuff! Sadly not much was brewing today but it was neat to see, anyways... Lots like our tours of Alley Kat, Big Rock, and Wild Rose back home. Perhaps bigger, though. :)

At the end we were unleashed on a few taps of beer and cider to fill for ourselves as we pleased. Pretty sure this was the first time I was behind a bar using a tap like a real bartender... You could, of course, buy a picture of you doing this. Like *everywhere*. :) (We did not)

One last neat thing was that Speight's replied to my tweet about going here. A nice touch!

The Brewery itself! A cool bridge connecting the buildings together over the steep road.

This water tap provides the public with free natural spring water outside the brewery (they get their own water to brew with from this same underground stream, deep below the Brewery). In 1998, one of the local newspapers ran an April Fools joke saying that the brewery would be supplying beer out of this tap for the day and apparently massive crowds and police control ensued! lol.

Everything's all huge, old, and copper!

We're in the Gyle room! These are the last remaining Kauri-made gyles in existence. No one would make them out of endangered trees anymore, you'd hope. But it was neat to see them, anyways! We love Kauris. :)