One of Auckland’s oldest hotels introduces five new craft beers for winter. Britomart’s newest oldest gastro pub introduces its Winter Series of craft beers this weekend with the SOBA’s ‘City of Ales’ festival. Two of The Brewery Britomart’s Winter Series beers will be served at Society of Beer Advocates City of Ales at Q Loft [...]

This content was emailed to all members – if you did not receive it, either your address is incorrect in our database, or your mailserver refuses our emails Hello members, It’s nearly that time of year again – AGM time! I can’t believe it’s come around so quickly, but time has been sneaking forward while [...]

Celebrate Matariki with great warming winter ales at the SOBA Winter Ale Festival on the 14th July at the Boatshed on Wellington’s waterfront.

Having sadly missed out on the GABS, I arrived with the family in Melbourne on the Friday of Good Beer Week, determined to make up for lost time in my search for some quality Aussie brews in and around the capital of Victoria. After refuelling in the sumptuous deli section of Queen Victoria Market and taking a [...]

This is a new section of the SOBA website, designed to let our members know what goes on behind the scenes at the national executive committee meetings. It’s a nice medium between publishing the minutes to all and providing no information. Why not just publish the minutes? Often, things are discussed in the confidence of [...]

Since last year’s AGM, the SOBA committee has been very focused on building better systems. As the society grows, we’re finding more and more challenges involved in staying on top of our membership base. We had started with a small and servicable spreadsheet when we numbered less than 50 members. Nowadays, with membership in the [...]

Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality… the system starts to fail. Watch this insightful and fascinating video [...]

Clemenger’s Wellington in a Pint is a craft beer brewing competition where local home brewers could see their recipe turned into a professional craft beer by brewing legends Tuatara, ParrotDog, Yeastie Boys or Garage Project. Round One is now over and asked the Wellington public to describe the capital as a beer. What would it [...]

We recently emailed Hancocks to ask them to drop their application for the trademark of “Growler” –   Joe Jakicevich, the owner of Hancocks responded –   We have since responded to Joe declining his kind offer to gift the trademark to SOBA –   Joe then followed up –  

Sigh. It’s happened again. We missed this one as it was lodged under ‘bottle’ not beer. Stokes Brewery has registered the term ‘Bomber’ as a trademark when used to refer to a bottle. In the States and elsewhere a 22 oz bottle has always been referred to as a Bomber and of course the term [...]