Boycott DB Brewery

May 1, 2009 Brewing, NewZealand 13 Comments

If you had seen Campbell Live last night, or followed the NZ beer and brewing forums you know about DB Brewery’s bulling tactics against Green Man Brewery, a small organic brewery in Dunedin.

Unfortunately a while ago DB successfully claimed ‘Radler’ as a Trademark with the Intellectual Property Office, IPONZ. As many will know, the term ‘radler’ (defined in Wikipedia) is actually a beer style, much like lager, pilsner, or IPA. However, having wrongly claimed the trademark (and IPONZ are to blame here), they also wrongly defended use of their trademark against Green Man’s Radler beer and forced the company, after a short fight due to the costs involved to Green Man, to re-label their product to ‘Cyclist’. DB also have tried to register other beer styles as trademarks to mixed successes.

Fortunately a renowned law firm are getting involved on a pro-bono basis to fight the case, James and Wells, as announced recently, helping the cause of both Green Man Brewery and SOBA (Society of Beer Advocates). Other local businesses likes Rumbles are getting on board.

Now you can too! Here’s how – Simply boycott all DB products – Tiger, Heineken, Amstel, Tui, Export Gold, Monteiths and Budvar. It’s that simple. Help support the NZ craft beer industry by buying NZ craft beer, a set of great brewerys brewing for the love of beer, the availability of great beer, and the choice and freedom of all recognized beer styles.

7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me

January 14, 2009 Brewing, Climbing, Family, FOSS, Friends, General, GNOME, Indiana, Ireland, NewZealand, OpenSolaris, Sun 2 Comments

Wow, it’s grown from 5 to 7, but since I’ve been tagged many moons ago by Sara and now by Patrick. Where should I start?

  1. I am indeed Tim’s little brother. You wouldn’t believe how many years I got through Sun without people figuring that one out. When I joined, I had another brother in Sun, Duncan. That made 3 of us. The 3 amigos (though fortunately we never had a dance routine). I shared a bedroom for many years with Tim, and played my fair share of Top Trumps, Action Man, StarWars and Squares (and almost getting run over on my way back from the supermarket carpark across the road).
  2. I studied at Trinity College Dublin and loved my college years. I found out relatively quickly that while maths in secondary school was quite enjoyable, taking it to the next level felt like a massive step. I got through my course with a first, but I don’t think I developed a strong aptitude for what I was studying (memory monkey = results). However, I did find a love of Unix somewhere along the way. Duncan let me use his maths account to dial up to the internet, and I soon learned a love of MH, taught as many freshman classes as I could with their computing labs and generally found the computing side of my maths course a whole lot easier and enjoyable.
  3. At secondary school I learned to climb through Mr.Blackmore and Mr.Cryan. We used to head out to Dalkey on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. It was awesome fun, and I’ve kept that going right through college and was captain of the Climbing Club for a year, along with designing their website (though it’s a bit of a mess now). You can read a bunch of the old trip reports here for much hilarity.
  4. My current passion is brewing. Tim had a strong part to play in this one having started it first in the family. I’m loving it. I have a monthly subscription to BYO, a growing collection of brewing books (including John Palmer’s “How to Brew“, and Charlie Papazian’s “Joy of Homebrewing“) and starting to put some all grain beer together. I’ve taken recently to ordering from the awesome guys at www.libertybrewing.co.nz, which conveniently means I can collect my grain just around the corner. I’m still learning the ropes, but this is definitely a career I’d change to.
  5. I’m getting married in 2 months time to Jayne. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve lived in NZ since 2003, have residency and a screwed up accent (though apparently I now have a US twang on the phone).
  6. I was rather fortunate to fall into free software, having picked up a job in the desktop group at Sun, Ireland (yay, nepotism!). Turns out they were looking at free desktop alternatives and chose GNOME. Always shared my code at college, so working on open source was a pretty easy step, and enjoyed spending my time on the IRC channels getting to know people, and them getting to know me (that’s Jeff’s influence, of which I am entirely indebted). I’m not so active in GNOME anymore, but I still lurk in the shadows observing and proud of where the project has come and my participation in it.
  7. Sara tried to hire me over to be a product manager of a new (at that time heavily secret) distribution, OpenSolaris. It took a weekend of her convincing me that I should do it and her persistence is something I’m entirely grateful for as I’ve enjoyed every minute (and worked with some really great people), despite the occasional rough times.

That’s it. And here are the rules of engagement:

  1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So, I hereby nominate: @comay, @epicbeer, @maupuia, @charliebird, @bogan, @basicbrewing and @marekkuziel as a rather eclectic bunch.

Fermentation proceeding nicely

August 26, 2007 Brewing 3 Comments

In the fine tradition of YouTube, I’ve uploaded a status report.

Unsurprisingly enough, there’s a few better examples of people explaining the process of brewing beer on YouTube.