Outlier Cartel – Craft Beer New Zealand

What’s in your Wunderkammer?

June 29, 2017

This is a short post to thank all our fans in Australia and New Zealand for supporting our latest release, Wunderkammer, for GABS! We came runner up alongside some of NZ’s best breweries (and big congrats to Behemoth for coming #1).

This was a beer that ‘took a village’ to create; we invited our biggest fans and closet family to come together and help create our beer. For inspiration we provided a curio cabinet (or wunderkammer) to hold their treasured objects and a big box of almond croissants to prepare the palates for our communal beer recipe!

We invite you to try our delicious winter warming spiced beer – and hopefully you’ll keep Outlier Cartel in your own Wunderkammer!

11,240 kilometres away, we are connecting with kindred spirits.

May 10, 2017

When I arrived in New Zealand 15 years ago, I hit the road to Milford Sound, one of the must-see wilderness areas of New Zealand. I was amazed by the frozen waterfalls, the rugged wilderness, and the truly epic panoramas. I didn’t mind that I was freezing in my little Corolla, behind 100’s of other vehicles, including a massive row of tour buses. It was so worth it and will be forever etched in my mind!

Last Thursday, I had a similar experience. I drove down an unsealed road and saw some of the most breathtaking scenery I had ever witnessed. Waterfalls were bursting down rock faces, leaving misty white streaks along the mountainside. Water seemed to poor out of every crevice, while jagged mountain peaks still held fast to last winter’s snow. Ancient trees stood their ground, wrapped in thick shrouds of lichen.

Unlike Milford Sound, I only encountered 1 vehicle (a logging truck) on the undulating, 64 kilometre road dubbed the ‘Tree to Sea Highway’. And unlike Milford, most locals don’t even know about Tahsis, let alone throngs of tourists with smartphones or backpackers with their noses permanently embedded in their copy of the Lonely Planet.

This is a place for dreamers.

How did I arrive here? Last year I connected with an old mate of mine, Troy, from Vancouver Island. He was interested in our beer projects and told me about this incredible place on the west coast. We drove out last year and I was enraptured. A new project, the Tahsis Farm Project, kicked off last October with the purchase of a seaside wilderness property.

Since then, Outlier Cartel has been working with Tahsis Farm to set up a destination brewery on this remote outpost on the Canadian Pacific coast. There’s a lot of work to be done. As I write, my entire body is aching from swinging a 12 pound sledgehammer, the most manual work I can remember doing since I was a teenager. However, I look at my thorn-pierced and blistered hands with pride, knowing we are building something special here.

Outlier Cartel and The Tahsis Farm complement each other fully: Outlier is a gypsy brewery that can move its skills anywhere around the world, Tahsis Farm is locally grounded organisation that plans to be a self sustaining community – welcoming skilled people of any nation, gender or creed to take part of their project.

If you want know about this project – tune in to TahsisFarm.com (this website is a work in progress) . If you want to more or would like to contribute, contact us.

Keep living your dreams, we are doing the best to live ours! – The Outlier Cartel Team.

Road going to Tahsis

Sign at gates of Tahsis Farm

View of Tahsis from across inlet.

View of Nootka Island and Tahsis

Tahsis – you won’t find this in the Lonely Planet

Kekulé had a dream, he had an awesome dream

March 30, 2017

According to the legend, August Kekulé had a vision while daydreaming by a hearth fire. He saw atoms dance around and form into strings. The strings transformed into snakes that consumed their own tails. From that intuition, he solved the answer to a scientific riddle.

Kekulé’s Dream is one of our proudest creations. This beer took the proverbial ‘village’ to create: We had help from Vulture’s Lane, one of Auckland’s premier Craft Beer Pubs; Adobe Photoshop sponsored our beer and believed in this little beer company; the talented designers that participated in creating our labels and most of all – you – those who drink our beer! Therefore, WE INVITE YOU to the grand launch of Kekulé’s Dream:

Friday the 7th of April, at 7:00 pm at Vultures Lane.

For those feeling a bit geeky and wanting to get into the science of Kekule’s Dream

Because of your love, we are amongst the top rated breweries in New Zealand

February 18, 2017

Top Rated Breweries New Zealand Outlier Cartel

Top Rated Breweries in New Zealand

Thank you so much for your support, it truly humbles us that we got our little brewery listed in Untappd’s top rate breweries of New Zealand. There are some truly amazing breweries listed in that group, and we feel like we are lilliputians amongst giants. After a little over a year and different 16 beers, one wine and a cider, our gypsy brewing operation has been recognised by the most important people of all – those that drink our products.

We can’t say that every creation is going to be a 4 or 5 star beer, the nature of our experimentation means that we’ll have a few that miss the mark. What we can say is that we are not going to rest on our laurels (if you can call them laurels at all) and we are going to keep whittling a way at what we love doing. We figure that if we pour our passion into our products, you taste that passion in every sip.

So once again, a heartfelt thanks to all our friends, fans, and brewers who believe in what we are doing.

The Team at Outlier Cartel

Blushing our way across the universe: Introducing Interstellar Blush

February 5, 2017

Hi Friends & Family

We have ALOT of exciting things planned for 2017 – some of it is under wraps at the moment, but we are excited to take part in the Brother’s Session Challenge the 2nd year in the row – this Saturday, February 11 at 12 PM – 10 PM at Brothers Beer 90 Wellesley St, West, CBD, Auckland, New Zealand 1010.

What do we have up our sleeves for the Challenge? We are doing a strawberry milkshake session beer with our friends at Hallertau – we are calling it Interstellar Blush. Its very different from anything that we’ve done before and we are really excited at how it’s turning out!

During the brewday at Hallertau we had about 100 kg that needed to get prepped by cutting off the green stalks – it was a bit more actually, the local West Auckland grower gave us more than we asked for!

The beer itself had to convey the Riverhead terroir from West Auckland, with a good and fruity strawberry aroma on the nose and a rather full palate, with a bit of lactose added to giveyou the unmistakable impression it is a strawberry milkshake – yet it has to be recognizable as a beer, keeping it’s thirst quenching characteristics with a slight crisp tartness behind the sweetness upfront, just like a ripe strawberry!

Sorry, but we may have ruined Christmas (we are out of Apricity!)

November 13, 2016

The Krampus who stole Apricity

Yesterday we are in Hamilton for the Beer and Wine showcase and last of our Apricity went flying out the door! Before the event closed our last bottles were gone! We think that Krampus, the infamous doppelgänger of Saint Nick, made and early appearance and made off with our remaining bottles!

In reality – we did not expect the beer to be so popular for several reasons: Its a weizen doppelbock (not well known style in NZ), its 8% ABV (that can intimidate people before even trying it) and finally its made with spices – which may sound too wierd for the casual drinker. However, we were told by our vendors that people initially bought one bottle, then came back to clear the shelf next day. We had expected our supply to last until January!

We are still a young brewery – we are still making adjustments for supply and demand. For this we are truly sorry about. This is a seasonal brew so to hold on to our sustainable ethos by only brewing when the ingredients are in season – so we will not brew this until next winter, but we promise, we’ll brew a bigger batch. In addition, because we are a contract brewers (as well as gypsy brewers) we simply couldn’t find time within the next few months to schedule another Apricity – all the slots have been taken as brewers prepare for their summer line ups.

We are truly humbled that our fans loved this beer as much as we did. Please bear with us – we are not Lion or DB, so we can’t crank out megalitres of this stuff (neither would we want to as that would affect the quality!) But we promise to do our best with our supply in the future!

header photo by DOMINIC EBENBICHLER / Reuters

Our Podcast is now live @ the Bitter End

November 11, 2016

We recently had a great chat with guys at the Bitter End! We covered all sort of topics like how Outlier Cartel began, why its awesome to be in New Zealand, new drinkies on the works, our creative process, working with artists and much more. All while imbibing our truth serum!

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebitterendpodcast/

The Podcast is below:

is this thing on?

original apricity sketch with final product

Online Republic Lounge

Mark and Carlos hangin in the Lounge

Robert Boyd’s Famous Bee Beard Portrait

are we there yeti?

Beer, Wine & Cider – be an ‘insider’!

October 22, 2016

NZ Brewers Guild Bronze

Hey Outliers, here are some exciting updates that are in store for our fans in the coming months!

1. Outlier will be releasing not 1, not 2, but 3 summer new summer beers during the next few months. Some will be very small batches, others will be on a larger scale.

2. See the world with Rosé coloured glasses: Bust out your jandals and head to the beach with our new Rosé wine – to be announced soon.

3. The so called ‘experts’ said we shouldn’t do cider – after all how could anyone with over 10 years experience in the wine industry know anything about cider? We said f*#K that sh*T! We will have a wicked new cider coming out for those don’t like the sugary options currently available on the market.

4. New artwork – we teamed up with some great local artists as well as some international artists to launch our new products in style! Stay tuned!

In case you haven’t been around there have been a series of updates to our websites as well:

We’ve one a Bronze medal for Honey Chestnut at the NZ Brewer’s guild awards (photos below)
Honey Chestnut, Apricity, and Kerikeri ’round the corner products have had their profiles updated. Find the story behind some of our most popular beers!
A special shoutout to Carita, the designer behind the Outlier Cartel Logo!
Outlier wouldn’t be complete without an update to the About page, we’d like to introduce the 3rd pillar holding up the Outlier Cartel company, Alvin Soh and read about our ‘1000 year vision‘!

Finally some pics of the humans behind Outlier, these were taken at the NZ Brewer’s Guild awards:

Showing off the medal!

Stoked - Alejandra Silva, Carlos Outlier and Stephen Craft.

Really Stoked! Alejandra Silva, Carlos and Stephen Craft.

Matt Kelly, Carlos, Albrect von Wallmoden & John Harrington

Bronze Medalist

October 9, 2016

We are pleased to announce that our Honey Chestnut was recognised by the Brewers Guild of New Zealand Awards for its packaging. We at Outlier are really stoked about this result, as we are not yet a year old! It feels honored to be named in such company as Moa, Bach Brewing, Good George, Tuatara and Behemoth. Thanks to Massey University for sponsoring this category. Read more about the story of Honey Chestnut and see the complete award list here.

Designing the Outlier Cartel Logo

October 8, 2016

As the first of an ongoing series of posts, I am going to include snippets and drafts of our creative processes working with designers to get our product out to our, market – starting with our very first design job – our Outlier Cartel logo.

Coming up with our logo was a big deal, and also took a great deal of time. I didn’t realise how long the design process was until I looked at our emails and our trello board – we started hunting for ideas in June 2015 and didn’t finish it until October 2015 – slightly over 4 months. It was the longest we ever took to design something, but since this would appear on all packaging – it was something we had to get right.

First of – just to clarify. I do not claim an particular graphic design design skills. I also have find working with Agencies odious (typical response: Hey mate, if you want to survive in the beer industry, chuck down $100,000K and we’ll make it happen. Just sign here and we’ll get started…) .We knew that would have to boot strap this, and get our concept tight and then hunt down an awesome designer that shared our vision.

Here was the first concept we discussed:

hi Carlos, I’ve just done a couple of quick ones with Barbara’s calligraphy pen. I thought it would be good to link the O with the t, to give it strength, connection and efficiently. I thought have the southern cross as the i-dot would be a nice tie-in to New Zealand, an outlier nation. Not set in stone, but would like to get your thoughts!

After some ongoing discussion, we decided against the southern cross, design-wise it was a bit too hard to get right, and perhaps we felt the it was too connected to the NZ Flag referendum going on at the time. In the end we decided to go for just text; we know that there would be a strong artwork focus on our package, so having symbols on our logo would potentially make our packaging too busy. So it was back to some crude scribbling and talking fonts. Being a baseball fan from the 1980s gave me my initial inspiration. Carlos also contributed a some new concepts which we drew on some paper. Below are some our proto sketches:

Fast forward a few months later, and we were having trouble finding the ‘right’ designer for this project. Carlos contacted a colleague in Vienna, Austria who did work for Red Bull. Her name is Carita Najewitz and she came immediately with some great work. Here’s a screenshot of an email of some of her logo concepts we reviewed.

Carita was awesome to work with and we soon had the logo that we were proud to put on all our bottles! What you see below, is on our website and bottles.

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Category: Beer