New Zealand Real Ale Bar of the Month for October is The Woolston Hop.
It would seem churlish not to nominate The Woolston Hop as NZ's Real Ale Bar of the Month when its opening a few days ago marked such an agreeable and rightly acclaimed return to normality for Christchurch. The city's recent misfortune with earthquakes is well known and, even as these words are typed, a magnitude 3.6 aftershock not far from Woolston gives long-suffering residents a reminder (as if it were needed!) of what has passed. The industrial concrete of the new Hop is redolent of the old, although the building itself also has a warm homely feel to it already. It would be difficult to heap enough praise on the owners and staff who have struggled to get things up and running again over a tough year and a half, but the enthusiastic response of former regulars already indicates how pleased we are to see the Hop back up and running again. Initial beer quality is encouraging. Truth be told, the best beer available in New Zealand at the moment is tapped straight from the cask at the Twisted Hop brewery in Wigram every Friday, although it remains to be seen how fresh their firkins will remain when trade to the door drops off with Woolston's rise. Hopefully some of Christchurch's outstanding new real ale establishments will realise that handpumps are merely a step along the road towards beer nirvana, and that a foaming pint tapped fresh from the cask is an experience that cannot be bettered. There's another challenge set for this astonishingly adaptable city!
